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Undoing Slavery

 | 
Michaël Roy
, 
Marie-Jeanne Rossignol
, 
Claire Parfait

Abolition and Women’s Rights Before and After the Civil War

Continuities and Discontinuities

Hélène Quanquin

Texte intégral

  • 1 The “wave” terminology to refer to the different periods of American abolitionism has been commonly (...)
  • 2 The US Senate and the US House of Representatives adopted the Thirteenth Amendment respectively on (...)
  • 3 On the rift caused by the 1864 presidential election, see W. C. McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy (...)

1At first reading, the premise of this essay might seem counterintuitive, as it invites to think counter-historically, i.e. backwards instead of forwards. Its starting point is neither the American Revolution and the beginning of what is now referred to as the “first wave” of American abolitionism, nor the immediatist “turn” of the late 1820s-early 1830s.1 It is rather the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the period that goes from 1865 and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the USConstitution, which abolished slavery, to 1870, the year of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and the dissolution of the American Anti-Slavery Society.2 Despite the great victory represented by the abolition of slavery, the years that followed the Civil War witnessed the division of the antebellum abolitionist movement, a process which had already started during the war. During the 1864 presidential elections, abolitionists disagreed over their support for incumbent Abraham Lincoln, who some believed was too conservative on the questions of the abolition of slavery and blacks’ voting rights. Some activists such as Wendell Phillips and Stephen S. Foster endorsed his opponent within the Republican Party, John C. Frémont.3

  • 4 “The Anti-Slavery Society,” New York Times, May 11, 1865.

2The rift between abolitionists continued during the thirty-second annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1865. In light of the impending ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, William Lloyd Garrison argued in favor of the termination of the organization which he had helped found in December 1833. “Slavery is practically dead, and our work is done,” he claimed. Most participants, however, disagreed with this position. Stephen S. Foster declared that the goal of the organization had been twofold from the start— “first the abolition of slavery; and second, the elevation of the negro to an equality with the white”—and that part of this agenda remained to be reached. For Wendell Phillips, the decision to dissolve the American Anti-Slavery Society was evidence of “a false humility,” at a time when abolitionist influence was at its peak and should have been harnessed for greater purposes.4 After tense debates, Garrison’s resolutions were defeated. He left the American Anti-Slavery Society, and, in December 1865, he discontinued the publication of the Liberator, which he had created in 1831. Phillips became the new president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which carried out its activities until 1870.

  • 5 W. C. McDaniel, Problem of Democracy, p. 16. Aileen Kraditor notes that, in 1840, the abolitionist (...)

3The debates over the dissolution of the American Anti-Slavery Society, however, did not end tensions. Over the next five years, abolitionists continued to split over several issues, including support for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and, more generally, the terms of the inclusion of the question of woman suffrage in their platform. Because they either excluded women or did not include them explicitly, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were the source of major disagreements among Garrisonian abolitionists, the group of activists who had sided with Garrison and chosen to stay in the American Anti-Slavery Society after the split of 1840 over several issues such as women’s participation in the same organizations as men and involvement in the democratic process.5

  • 6 Historians usually consider that Reconstruction started in 1865 and ended in 1877, with the comprom (...)

4Garrisonians had been very active in the women’s rights movement that emerged in the 1840s and had come to believe that blacks’ rights and women’s rights were interwoven. Between 1865 and 1870, this reform coalition, which had gathered activists around a great variety of causes, was thus tested by the new challenges presented by the political issues and debates that arose from the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves during the period known as Reconstruction.6 In this essay I argue that those postbellum divisions were anything but a rupture. Rather, they testify to tensions that were already present in reform discourses before the Civil War and to the complexities of the interaction between abolitionism and the women’s rights movement.

Blacks’ rights v. women’s rights: the “rupturing of Garrisonian abolitionism” after the Civil War

  • 7 J. Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Conventio (...)
  • 8 The first National Woman’s Rights Convention took place in Worcester, Massachusetts in October 1850

5Agitation for women’s rights began in the 1840s. It was during that decade that the question of woman suffrage started to be raised within reform circles and that women’s rights emerged as an independent movement. The convention that took place at Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848 was a local event, but it was also the first of its kind, devoted exclusively to the question of women’s rights. Situated in upstate New York, Seneca Falls was “at a fulcrum point” at the time, as it was at the center of major economic and political transformations affecting the country. It was also the meeting point of different groups of reformers, including political abolitionists and Quaker activists.7 Other conventions organized at the local, state, and national levels followed, consistently asking for women’s enfranchisement and equal rights.8

  • 9 M. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), p. 587.
  • 10 Susan B. Anthony to Wendell Phillips, April 29, 1861, Wendell Phillips Papers, Houghton Library (MS (...)
  • 11 E. C. Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1815-1897): Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898), p (...)

6During the Civil War, activists suspended their action in favor of women’s rights. The organization of conventions was thus put on hold. The Women’s National Loyal League was founded in May 1863 but it did not explicitly fight for women’s rights; its main goal was to collect signatures for a petition asking for the adoption of a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.9 In April 1861, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls convention, suggested that the interruption of women’s rights activities was due to the greater significance of the Civil War, as she found it “impossible for her to think or speak on anything but the War.”10 More than thirty years later, however, she gave a different interpretation, implying that women had sacrificed their time and energy to serve the slave’s cause during the Civil War. “When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement,” she argued in her autobiography.11

  • 12 The first campaign led by the American Equal Rights Association was the campaign for universal suff (...)
  • 13 E. C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, eds, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (1887), p. 174
  • 14 Mott also helped write another sentence in the Declaration. Lucretia Mott and the other women prese (...)
  • 15 Ibid., p. 67.
  • 16 E. C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, p. 174.

7After the abolition of slavery, discussions over the rights of freedmen and freedwomen gained traction, and there were attempts at joining efforts in order to obtain rights, including voting rights, for all. It was in May 1866 that women’s rights activists organized the first National Woman’s Rights Convention to take place since 1860, leading to the creation of the American Equal Rights Association, the goal of which was to fight for both blacks’ and women’s enfranchisement.12 The Quaker Lucretia Mott was elected president of the new organization but had to be “escorted to the Chair by Stephen S. Foster” because of her old age.13 Born in 1793, she was a veteran of both the abolitionist and the women’s rights movements. She was one of the co-organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention. She had also been present at the founding meeting the American Anti-Slavery Society of December 1833, where she suggested that the Declaration of Sentiments adopted on the occasion include a joint reference to the Declaration of Independence and “the truths of Divine Revelation.”14 A few days after the meeting, she had co-founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, “a breakthrough for women’s activism” at the time due in part to its interracial membership.15 At the 1866 meeting, she expressed her optimism about what she called “the inauguration of a movement broad enough to cover class, color, and sex.” She was “happy,” she claimed, “to give her name and influence, if thus she might encourage the young and strong to carry on the good work.”16

  • 17 Ibid.

8Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been elected vice-president, immediately followed and argued that “the two questions” of abolition and women’s rights “were now one,” which made it necessary “to bury the black man and the woman in the citizen, and our two organizations in the broader work of reconstruction.” In her speech, she appealed to the unity of “all who have worked together thus far,” i.e. the people who had fought for blacks’ and women’s rights before the Civil War.17 She thus referred to the antebellum reform coalition which had brought together different movements and activists, whom she presented as models to follow for the years to come:

  • 18 Ibid.

They who have been trained in the school of anti-slavery; they who, for the last thirty years, have discussed the whole question of human rights, which involves every other question of trade, commerce, finance, political economy, jurisprudence, morals and religion, are the true statesmen for the new republic—the best enunciators of our future policy of justice and equality.18

  • 19 Ibid., p. 174-175.

9Her remarks were echoed by Lucretia Mott’s husband, James Mott, who “rejoiced that the women had seen fit to re-organize their movement into one for equal rights to all,” and “felt the time had come to broaden our work.”19

  • 20 “‘Reject the Amendment—Depose the President.’ Address by Wendell Phillips, at the Cooper Institute, (...)
  • 21 W. Phillips, “The Fifteenth Amendment,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 3, 1869.

10Stanton’s call was made in the context of the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, which was voted in the Senate and the House of Representatives in June 1866 and ratified in July 1868. It granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” and guaranteed equal protection of the law and equal rights to them. While it was considered as a landmark for equality of rights, it also set a precedent by defining “citizens” as “male,” which led some abolitionists and women’s rights activists to denounce it. In a speech delivered in October 1866, the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Wendell Phillips, condemned such a “limitation.”20 In July 1869, he described the word “male” as “odious to us all, in laws and constitutions.”21

  • 22 “34th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 25, (...)
  • 23 “New-England Anti-Slavery Convention (Afternoon Session),” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 15, (...)

11Despite his commitment to women’s rights, however, Phillips had opposed the inclusion of women’s rights in the platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1866 and 1867. At the twenty-fourth annual meeting of the organization in May 1867, Stephen S. Foster offered a resolution according to which “this Society will acquiesce in no theory or plan of national reconstruction which fails to secure to the humblest citizen of either sex, the full enjoyment of this essential safeguard of personal freedom,” a text which would have forced the American Anti-Slavery Society to fight for woman suffrage. Phillips, who was followed by the majority of participants, argued that the platform of the organization was not “broad enough” to include demands other than equality of rights between blacks and whites.22 A few days later, at the thirty-seventh meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, he repeated the claim that the organization was “not a universal reform society,” and that it had “a definite, distinct, and limited purpose, announced in our original Declaration of Sentiments and in the constitution of our Society, which was to put the black race where the white race were.” “That was all,” he added, hoping to cut the debate short.23

  • 24 In its 1776 constitution, New Jersey had originally omitted “gender barriers” in its definition of (...)

12Tensions, which were most visible at the meetings of the American Equal Rights Association, continued to rise at the time of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. Ratified a year and a half after the Fourteenth Amendment, it specified that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” For some activists, it fell short of expectations, as it did not ban the restrictions based on gender that were the norm in the United States at the time. With the exception of the territories of Wyoming and Utah, which enfranchised women in 1869 and 1870 respectively, voters were defined as men throughout the country.24 The Fifteenth Amendment thus effectively enfranchised black men without explicitly enfranchising women, maintaining the status quo on woman suffrage.

  • 25 On the events that led to the creation of the two associations, see E. C. DuBois, Feminism and Suff (...)

13Support for the amendment was considered as a betrayal by some women’s rights activists, leading to the creation of two competing woman suffrage associations in 1869. The National Woman Suffrage Association was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony on a platform that rejected the Fifteenth Amendment, while the American Woman Suffrage Association was founded by some Garrisonians, who believed that black suffrage had to be ensured as a matter of emergency but still wished to work for woman suffrage. The lessons drawn from the defeat of both black and woman suffrage in Kansas in 1867 had led some activists to believe that fighting for universal suffrage would endanger both causes and that, given a choice, black suffrage had to be the priority. It was the “negro’s hour,” some argued, while their opponents sometimes resorted to racist rhetoric.25

  • 26 W. C. McDaniel, Problem of Democracy, p. 232.

14The divisions ran across gender and racial lines. While some black and white men such as Parker Pillsbury and Philadelphia activist Robert Purvis opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, many women, including black women, eventually endorsed it. The “rupturing of Garrisonian abolitionism,” however, was not only the result of the choices imposed by Reconstruction politics. It also has to be interpreted in the light of tensions that, despite Stanton’s and others’ idealized description of antebellum reform work, already existed before the Civil War.26

“The midwife of women’s activism”: abolitionism and the women’s rights movement before the Civil War

  • 27 T. W. Higginson, “William Lloyd Garrison,” Woman’s Journal, May 31, 1879.
  • 28 The Anti-Sabbath movement fought against Sabbath laws that regulated activities on Sundays. For a d (...)

15When, in her speech at the meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in May 1866, Stanton used the phrase “trained in the school of anti-slavery” to describe the reform advocates who had been active before the Civil War, she suggested the precedence of abolitionism over other reform movements. This remark was echoed by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: in his eulogy of William Lloyd Garrison published in May 1879, he described the “Garrisonian anti-slavery movement” as “a moral college, a perpetual institution for the study and practice of duty.”27 As evidenced by both Stanton’s and Higginson’s comments, activists in the nineteenth century believed in the central place occupied by abolitionism in antebellum reform, which included women’s rights, as well as the temperance, peace and anti-Sabbath movements.28

  • 29 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 1840, p. 5.
  • 30 H. Martineau, The Martyr Age of the United States (1839), p. 3-4.

16Not all abolitionists felt that American society needed to be reformed completely, or that their fight should be part of a more general effort to change it. When in 1840 some members of the American Anti-Slavery Society left the organization because of disagreements over the contents of its platform, they called the issue of woman’s participation an “innovation,” which would only “divert the minds of abolitionists from the cause of the slave,” which shows that, for some at least, the abolition of slavery was part of a narrower agenda.29 The more radical, however, claimed that the “peculiar institution” was the symptom of a society that required purification at both the collective and individual levels. As English writer Harriet Martineau argued in her description of American abolitionism, “it is a totally different thing to be an abolitionist on a soil actually trodden by slaves, and in a far-off country, where opinion is already on the side of emancipation, or ready to be converted.” Adding that “[s]lavery is as thoroughly interwoven with American institutions—ramifies as extensively through American society, as the aristocratic spirit pervades Great Britain,” she suggested that it was impossible for the American struggle against slavery in the United States to be anything else than a fight against a corrupt society.30

  • 31 C. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, p. 127-138.
  • 32 Lucretia Mott to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, July 16, 1848, in Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott(...)

17For some, then, abolitionism naturally led to other causes and was part of a larger reform impulse that permeated their lives. A case in point can be found in Lucretia and James Mott’s activities from March to July 1848. In March, they attended an Anti-Sabbath Convention in Boston. In May, they appeared at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. In June, they participated in the Genesee Quaker Yearly Meeting in Farmington, New York, and visited the Cattaraugus Seneca Indian reservation near Buffalo before going on to meet with fugitive slaves in Ontario, Canada. In July, they attended the Seneca Falls convention.31 Three days before the women’s rights meeting, Lucretia Mott even asked Elizabeth Cady Stanton if she was going “to have any reform or other Meeting during the sittings of the Convention,” which shows that she understood reform activism in the widest possible terms.32

  • 33 On the role of the “woman question” in the split of the American Anti-Slavery Society, see M. Sinha (...)
  • 34 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 1840, p. 5.

18Among the many reform movements abolitionism was connected to, women’s rights occupied a special place. The joint fate of both movements was sealed in the late 1830s, when the question of women’s place in the same organizations as men became one of the main bones of contention that split the American Anti-Slavery Society.33 Foreshadowing the debates that took place over the possible inclusion of woman suffrage in the demands of the American Anti-Slavery Society after the Civil War, the men who left the organization in 1840 also opposed the widening of its platform, which, they believed, would “divert the minds of abolitionists from the cause of the slave.”34 However, the example of Wendell Phillips, who supported women’s equal participation in 1840, shows that women’s rights could be seen by the same people as either an unproblematic addition to the cause of reform or an obstacle to abolition, depending on the political context.

  • 35 L. Stone, “The Funeral of Mr. Garrison,” Woman’s Journal, May 31, 1879.
  • 36 E. C. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, p. 22. Ellen Carol DuBois however notes the existence of an “i (...)
  • 37 M. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, p. 298.

19Some abolitionists’ prioritization of blacks’ rights over women’s rights after the Civil War might have been influenced by the precedence of abolitionism over the women’s rights movement. In 1879, Lucy Stone thus wrote about antislavery activism as “the inevitable forerunner” of “Woman Suffrage,” an allusion to the women’s rights activism that emerged from the abolitionist movement.35 Since then, historians have illuminated the initial dependence of women’s rights activism on abolitionist “ideology” and “method.”36 This link has led Manisha Sinha to call abolitionism “the midwife of women’s activism.”37

20Another way of looking at the divisions that occurred after the Civil War is to study them as the more visible manifestations of disagreements that predated the Civil War. Those tensions were drowned, or “buried” to use Stanton’s word, in both the universal principles of the dominant antebellum abolitionist and women’s rights discourses. They also tended to be smoothed out in the retrospective descriptions of the antebellum period as the golden age of reform by activists themselves.

  • 38 M. S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-190 (...)
  • 39 F. Douglass, “Mr. Barry’s Letter,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 17, 1854, in Frederick Douglass (...)
  • 40 See H. Quanquin, “‘There Are Two Great Oceans’: The Slavery Metaphor in the Antebellum Women’s Righ (...)

21The antebellum period, however, was never exempt from tensions and the ways activists articulated issues pertaining to race- and gender-based discriminations were never fixed. Examples of disagreements among women’s rights and abolitionist activists abound. In 1850, at the First National Woman’s Rights Convention, Wendell Phillips suggested a resolution about enslaved women’s specific situation be included in the platform of the movement. The proposal was approved unanimously but it was criticized in the weeks that followed by Jane Swisshelm, a white activist and editor, who claimed that “in a Woman’s Rights Convention, the question of color has no right to a hearing.” According to Martha Jones, this is evidence that “sex and color were emerging as the roots of two mutually exclusive political movements.”38 In 1854, Frederick Douglass criticized white abolitionist and women’s rights activist Lucy Stone’s decision to speak in front of a segregated audience in Philadelphia. When one of his readers reminded him that he might not have hesitated to speak in front of male-only audiences, he answered that there were important differences between women and blacks: “Woman is not excluded with a view to her degradation, or out of a spirit of hate,” as opposed to “the black man’s exclusion from public halls,” he claimed.39 Such discourse is consistent with Douglass’s and others’ arguments in favor of the Fifteenth Amendment after the Civil War. The study of the antebellum period thus shows that activists often had very different ways of considering the relations between the abolitionist and the women’s rights movements, divergences that the specific context of Reconstruction made more visible and more complex.40

  • 41 K. Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860” (1993), p. 574.
  • 42 M. D. Pierson, “‘Slavery Cannot Be Covered Up with Broadcloth or a Bandanna’: The Evolution of Whit (...)
  • 43 Ibid., p. 386-387.

22In her essay on the “gender rhetoric” of Garrisonian abolitionists, Kristin Hoganson maintains that the use of “conventional gender roles” by abolitionists to attack slavery contradicted in part their “feminist message” and their general support of “unconventional gender roles” in society, thus suggesting that their advocacy of women’s rights did not permeate their abolitionist discourse.41 The relationship between the two movements, however, was not always a one-way street, but, as Michael Pierson argues, “the flow of influence ran in both directions” throughout the antebellum period.42 Giving the example of the description of slavery as a “patriarchal institution,” Pierson thus argues that abolitionists’ rhetoric did experience some transformation under the influence of women’s rights activism. While, in the 1830s, slaveholders were accused of destroying enslaved families and preventing slaves from performing traditional gender roles, in the 1850s, patriarchy was criticized more extensively as a regime of dependence.43

  • 44 Report of the International Council of Women, Assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association, (...)
  • 45 Theodore Weld to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, December 15, 1837, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, (...)

23Finally, the close relationships between abolitionism and women’s rights in the lives of some activists never meant that those fights held the same significance. When, in 1888, Frederick Douglass claimed that, “When I ran away from slavery, it was for my people; […] but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act,” he suggested that some causes might have felt more personal than others.44 But they sometimes did so in more unexpected ways. In 1837, Theodore D. Weld thus described the intense emotion that submerged him when seeing the well-known image of the kneeling enslaved woman asking “Am I not a woman and a sister?” on a letterhead (fig. 5). “The sudden sight drove home a deeper lesson than my heart has learned these many days,” he wrote Angelina Grimké.45

24The divisions that tore abolitionists and women’s rights activists apart right after the Civil War cannot be understood by only taking the context of Reconstruction into consideration. To some extent, they are evidence of the complexities of the social justice coalition that emerged from abolitionism during the antebellum period. The specific example of the relationships between antislavery and women’s rights activism shows that, despite the central role played by the former, there was constant interaction between the two movements.

“Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?,” in George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Woman and Domestic Society (1837). Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University (Atlanta, GA).

“Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?,” in George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Woman and Domestic Society (1837). Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University (Atlanta, GA).

Notes

1 The “wave” terminology to refer to the different periods of American abolitionism has been commonly used to describe the evolution of feminism in the United States and other countries. While this metaphor has proved helpful to emphasize the continuities between the different feminist mobilizations throughout history, it has also been criticized by historians for several reasons: it contributes to the creation of a teleological narrative in which each wave supposedly improves on the previous one; it tends to underestimate the mobilizations that take place between the “waves”; finally, it may smooth out the diversity of positions that exist within a movement at a given period. For a reassessment of the use of the “wave” metaphor to describe the history of feminism, see N. A. Hewitt, ed., No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (2010).

2 The US Senate and the US House of Representatives adopted the Thirteenth Amendment respectively on April 8, 1864 and January 31, 1865. It was ratified in December of the same year. The Fifteenth Amendment passed the US House of Representatives on February 25, 1869, and the US Senate on February 26, 1869. It was ratified on February 3, 1870.

3 On the rift caused by the 1864 presidential election, see W. C. McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (2013), p. 232. John C. Frémont had been the first presidential candidate of the Republican Party in 1856. He served as major general in Northern troops during the Civil War. In August 1861, he issued a proclamation that emancipated slaves in Missouri, a text which was revoked by Lincoln. In 1864, he ran with the support of radical Republicans but withdrew from the race in September 1864. On Phillips’s endorsement of Frémont, see D. Yacovone, introduction to Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past, ed. A. J. Aiséirithe and D. Yacovone (2016), p. 12-13.

4 “The Anti-Slavery Society,” New York Times, May 11, 1865.

5 W. C. McDaniel, Problem of Democracy, p. 16. Aileen Kraditor notes that, in 1840, the abolitionist movement was divided along two lines that “overlapped to a considerable degree”: on the one hand, the Garrisonians v. the anti-Garrisonians, who disagreed over whether the American Anti-Slavery Society should be inclusive of different “religious, social, and political views”; on the other hand, “conservative” v. “radical” abolitionists, who clashed over the extent of their action to change American society, and held “different conception [s] of the proper mode of agitating for emancipation.” A. S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (1969), p. 8-9.

6 Historians usually consider that Reconstruction started in 1865 and ended in 1877, with the compromise which settled the dispute over the contested 1876 presidential election and led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. On the historiography and periodization of Reconstruction, see E. Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1989), p. xvii-xxv.

7 J. Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (2004), p. 12-13. Although the Seneca Falls convention was the first women’s rights convention to take place in the United States, it was not celebrated as a landmark until after the Civil War, when women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony undertook to write a history of the women’s rights movement and give it a central place. On the “origins myth” of Seneca Falls, see L. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (2014). The “origins myth” of Seneca Falls is also contradicted by the fact that demands for woman suffrage were made before 1848. For instance a petition asking for women’s enfranchisement was presented at the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846. See L. D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (2005).

8 The first National Woman’s Rights Convention took place in Worcester, Massachusetts in October 1850.

9 M. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), p. 587.

10 Susan B. Anthony to Wendell Phillips, April 29, 1861, Wendell Phillips Papers, Houghton Library (MS Am 1953), Harvard University.

11 E. C. Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1815-1897): Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898), p. 254.

12 The first campaign led by the American Equal Rights Association was the campaign for universal suffrage on the occasion of New York State constitutional convention of 1867. See L. E. Free, “‘To Bury the Black Man and the Woman in the Citizen’: The American Equal Rights Association and the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1867,” in Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, ed. C. L. Ridarsky and M. M. Huth (2012).

13 E. C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, eds, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (1887), p. 174.

14 Mott also helped write another sentence in the Declaration. Lucretia Mott and the other women present, however, did not sign the final declaration because of gender conventions at the time. C. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (2011), p. 64-65.

15 Ibid., p. 67.

16 E. C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, p. 174.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 174-175.

20 “‘Reject the Amendment—Depose the President.’ Address by Wendell Phillips, at the Cooper Institute, New York, Oct. 25, 1866,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, November 3, 1866.

21 W. Phillips, “The Fifteenth Amendment,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 3, 1869.

22 “34th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 25, 1867.

23 “New-England Anti-Slavery Convention (Afternoon Session),” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 15, 1867.

24 In its 1776 constitution, New Jersey had originally omitted “gender barriers” in its definition of voters but in 1807 voters were redefined as male. See J. A. Klinghoffer and L. Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807” (1992).

25 On the events that led to the creation of the two associations, see E. C. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (1978). On Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s racism, see M. Mitchell, “‘Lower Orders, ’Racial Hierarchies, and Rights Rhetoric: Evolutionary Echoes in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Thought during the Late 1860s,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: AReader in Documents and Essays, ed. E. C. DuBois and R. C. Smith (2007).

26 W. C. McDaniel, Problem of Democracy, p. 232.

27 T. W. Higginson, “William Lloyd Garrison,” Woman’s Journal, May 31, 1879.

28 The Anti-Sabbath movement fought against Sabbath laws that regulated activities on Sundays. For a discussion of the relations between the anti-Sabbath movement and women’s rights, see N. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998), p. 75-77.

29 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 1840, p. 5.

30 H. Martineau, The Martyr Age of the United States (1839), p. 3-4.

31 C. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, p. 127-138.

32 Lucretia Mott to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, July 16, 1848, in Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, ed. B. W. Palmer (2002), p. 163.

33 On the role of the “woman question” in the split of the American Anti-Slavery Society, see M. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, p. 266-298; H. Quanquin, “The Rights of Others: Wendell Phillips and Women’s Rights,” in A. J. Aiséirithe and D. Yacovone, Wendell Phillips, p. 210-219. The involvement of some activists in both abolitionism and women’s rights has led some historians such as Blanche Glassman Hersh to refer to them as “feminist-abolitionists.” B. G. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (1978).

34 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 1840, p. 5.

35 L. Stone, “The Funeral of Mr. Garrison,” Woman’s Journal, May 31, 1879.

36 E. C. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, p. 22. Ellen Carol DuBois however notes the existence of an “incipient feminism in a wide range of other early nineteenth-century female activities.” E. C. DuBois, “Women’s Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, ed. L. Perry and M. Fellman (1979), p. 238.

37 M. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, p. 298.

38 M. S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (2007), p. 87.

39 F. Douglass, “Mr. Barry’s Letter,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 17, 1854, in Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, ed. P. S. Foner (1976), p. 72.

40 See H. Quanquin, “‘There Are Two Great Oceans’: The Slavery Metaphor in the Antebellum Women’s Rights Discourse as Redescription of Race and Gender,” in Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, ed. C. Faulkner and A. M. Parker (2012).

41 K. Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860” (1993), p. 574.

42 M. D. Pierson, “‘Slavery Cannot Be Covered Up with Broadcloth or a Bandanna’: The Evolution of White Abolitionist Attacks on the ‘Patriarchal Institution’” (2005), p. 387.

43 Ibid., p. 386-387.

44 Report of the International Council of Women, Assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association, Washington, D.C., U.S. of America, March 25 to April 1, 1888 (1888), p. 329.

45 Theodore Weld to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, December 15, 1837, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844, ed. G. H. Barnes and D. L. Dumont, vol. 1 (1965), p. 490. On Weld’s reaction, see J. F. Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (1989), p. 17. On the significance of the image of the female supplicant for women abolitionists, Jean Fagan Yellin notes: “Enacting these complex patterns of address and avoidance, they recoded and re-coded the emblem of the female supplicant, picturing themselves as chain-breaking liberators and as enchained slaves pleading for their own liberty, then asserting it and freeing themselves” (p. 25).

Table des illustrations

Titre “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?,” in George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Woman and Domestic Society (1837). Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University (Atlanta, GA).
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Auteur

Associate Professor of American History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research focuses on American feminisms and nineteenth-century reform movements. She has contributed essays to Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History (University of Rochester Press, 2012), the Revue française d’études américaines, and Wendell Phillips: Social Justice and the Power of the Past (Louisiana State University Press, 2016). She is completing a book on men active in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement, for which she has earned fellowships from the Schlesinger Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Sophia Smith Collection, and the American Antiquarian Society. She was visiting professor at Brown University in 2008 and at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.

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