NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

The international focus of women’s rights movements faded after 1860, and activists concentrated on legal and political struggles at the national level. The British movement enjoyed the greatest degree of continuity, as the expansion of women’s rights activism of the 1850s merged with the growth of political liberalism to create a broader base of support for women’s suffrage in the 1860s and 1870s. The ability to campaign openly for the franchise was a privilege limited to women who lived in politically stable nations where they enjoyed relative freedom of speech. In France, developments in the 1860s paralleled those in Britain, but the Franco-Prussian war and its aftermath, including the Paris Commune and the subsequent establishment of the Third Republic, led to concerns about the stability of the state that overshadowed the movement for women’s rights. In Germany, women’s political activity was forbidden by law, and, in the USA, civil war interrupted the campaign for women’s rights between 1861 and 1865. After the Civil War, many black women in the USA faced the threat of racial violence if they tried to speak out for their own rights or for those of the men of their communities.

In Britain, several distinct sets of political activists addressed the question of women’s rights in the 1860s and 1870s. The Langham Place group, connected to Barbara Smith Bodichon and the Women’s Journal, carried on the work that they had begun in London in the 1850s. The circle of intellectuals and politicians associated with JOHN STUART MILL constituted another London group. This group, which included Henry and Millicent Fawcett as well as Mill’s stepdaughter Helen Taylor, advocated women’s suffrage as a component of their progressive liberalism. Finally, provincial groups in major cities—Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Bristol—also advocated women’s rights. These groups included such well-known figures as Lydia Becker, leader of the Manchester group, and such lesser-known but influential women as members of MP John Bright’s family circle, including the women of the Priestman family of Newcastle. The latter linked these provincial groups to a radical Quaker tradition that dated to the Anti-Corn Law League and anti-slavery activism. All of these groups participated in developments that brought the issue of women’s suffrage to national attention in the 1860s. The first London and Manchester suffrage societies were formed in 1866.

In Britain, taxpayers’ rights made the most compelling argument for the franchise, since both the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 had expanded the franchise to various groups of property holders. Thus, British suffragists chose the strategy of gaining the franchise for single women ratepayers even though their approach left out the important question of suffrage for married women. They supported their claims in a variety of ways. Single-women ratepayers should be granted the franchise, Lydia Becker argued, because women had voted in earlier periods in English history. Becker also claimed that the 1867 Reform Bill had used the word ‘man’ rather than ‘male person’ in expanding the franchise and therefore included women as part of the generic group ‘man’. Neither claim brought success.

John Stuart Mill was an important but less than fully reliable ally in the British struggle for women’s rights. He presented the first women’s suffrage petition to Parliament in 1866, and he tried unsuccessfully to amend the 1867 Reform Bill to extend

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the franchise to women. In his Subjection of Women (1869) he pointed out the legal disadvantages of married women under English Common Law, comparing women’s status under coverture to slavery. He argued in favour of equality between women and men within marriage and for women’s freedom to choose their occupations and to control their property. Justice, he urged, required the extension of basic human rights to women. But Mill himself did not work well with strong-minded women and preferred to be in control of political alliances. When Manchester activists organized the first central, national suffrage committee in 1871, Mill and Helen Taylor blocked their London society from participation and split London suffragists in the process.

In the USA, suffragists split over the question of black rights. Links between the women’s rights and anti-slavery movements had initially created a powerful group of allies for women’s suffrage. Women’s rights advocates demonstrated the strong bonds between the two movements when they suspended activism for their own cause during the Civil War in order to focus on supporting the Union. In 1863, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.Anthony organized the National Women’s Loyal League to conduct a petition drive in support of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which banned slavery.

When the war ended, Stanton and Anthony expected women to receive the franchise as a reward for their loyalty to the Union, but they were disappointed when their former political allies placed women’s voting rights in false opposition to those of black men. For Stanton and Anthony, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution represented the ultimate betrayal on this score. Guaranteeing the right to vote in federal elections for all male citizens over 21 years of age, the Fourteenth Amendment associated voting with sex for the first time and created the necessity for a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. The Fifteenth Amendment failed to meet this need. It guaranteed the right of US citizens to vote regardless of ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude’, but it failed to mention sex. Stanton and Anthony’s opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment dominated the 1868 convention of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), a universal suffrage organization that included former anti-slavery activists and women’s rights advocates.

Making a decision that followed the logic of many previous women’s rights advocates, Stanton and Anthony concluded that the only hope of success for women’s suffrage lay in an independent movement devoted to that cause. In 1869, they used the AERA convention to recruit women to a separate meeting aimed at creating such a movement. They established an independent organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), to work for a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. The rival American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) worked for women’s voting rights at the local and state levels. Stanton and Anthony’s actions and those of their former allies split the women’s rights movement in the USA for the next 20 years.

The split did not deter women’s rights activists. Several tried to claim the right to vote in the presidential election of 1872. Sojourner Truth in Michigan, Virginia Minor in Missouri and Susan B. Anthony in New York sought to test the premise that they had been granted the franchise under the ‘privileges and immunities’ clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Anthony was arrested, tried and convicted for illegal voting. Since she refused to pay her fine, she could not take her case to the US Supreme Court and Minor sued the registrar of voters in St Louis for denying her one of the privileges and

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immunities of citizenship when he refused to allow her register to vote. In Minor v.Happersett (1875), the US Supreme Court affirmed women’s citizenship but denied Minor’s claim that voting was one of the privileges and immunities guaranteed to citizens in the Fourteenth Amendment. In fact, the Court found no connection between citizenship and voting for women.

Even in the wake of Minor v.Happersett, Susan B. Anthony continued to claim the franchise as a right of citizenship for women. In her ‘Declaration of Rights for Women’ (1876), Anthony called for impeachment of the federal government of the USA, claiming multiple violations of women’s rights, including denial of the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers, unequal laws for women and men, and taxation without representation. Among the many offences for which Anthony indicted the US government were laws and practices that disadvantaged women and violated their rights to personal and economic autonomy. Such autonomy lay beyond the grasp of married women who sought divorce and custody of their children, of respectable working women who sought living wages and even of prostitutes, according to Anthony. These examples echoed her own experiences in defence of women’s rights. She had hidden a runaway wife and her daughter from an adulterous husband in the 1850s, comparing her action to those of abolitionists who aided fugitive slaves. In the 1860s, she had formed a Workingwomen’s Association in New York City and tried to establish a training programme for women printers. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she had defended Hester Vaughan, a British immigrant abandoned by her lover and accused of infanticide. And during an 1871 lecture tour in the western USA, Anthony had made explicit the connections she saw between women’s subordinate status and the murder trial of Laura Fair, a prostitute accused of killing her lover. If men really protected women in the ways they claimed, Anthony had declared, such cases would never occur. Women’s economic and personal autonomy were a matter of simple justice for Anthony. And only the franchise could guarantee that autonomy.