Debby Woodroofe American Feminism 1848-1920 International Socialist Review, March 1971, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 21-42.
Woman's suffrage was won through a difficult seventy year struggle. The ruling class has hidden and falsified that history. They do not want us to know that through united struggle, we have won important victories for our sex and can do it again.
[p. 21] In spite of the important victories of the woman's rights movement, it is one of the most ignored and maligned chapters in American history. We grow up mocking our sisters who went before us, taught us to think of them as sexually-frustrated, hawk-faced spinsters who carried hatchets. We learn about Lincoln's self-sacrificing mother, but never about Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Our history has become an anecdote, thrown in for amusement between the lengthy descriptions of men's accomplishments. Morison's Oxford History of the American People, for example. gives the women's suffrage movement a scant few sentences under a section onBootlegging and other sports."
The very name history has given our sisters-suffragettes-is itself a slander. Suffragettes was what the opponent of women's rights called them. It was an epithet, a diminutive of their historical significance. The women called themselves suffragists, except in England where women in the most militant wings of the movement, the Women's Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, called themselves suffragettes so they would not be confused with more moderate groups.
Our history is a weapon of our liberation. Dependent on the oppression of women, the rulers of this country do not want us to know that we have a history. They do not want us to know that through united struggle, we have won important victories for our sex and can do it again.
We must recover our history ourselves. No one else will do it for us. The sources we have been given are full of falsifications which we must correct. And many we learn from, such as the writings of the early suffragists themselves, have been relegated to obscurity. For example, when several Michigan feminists went to the library in Kalamazoo, where Lucy Stone, once lived, to see if it had any of her papers, they found forty-three boxes of her writings in the library basement, long forgotten. It is up to us to bring our history out of mothballs, up from the dusty cellars and learn from it so we can most effectively continue our struggle our sisters began.
Throughout history, the struggle of women for their liberation, has waxed and waned according to the extent of general political radicalization in the society. the women's rights movement of the past century emerged at the height of the abolitionist struggle and ended in the 1920s-a period of deep reaction and conservation during which most radical movements declined. It was not until another period of radicalization, the late 1960s, when young people were propelled into action by the Vietnam war, the oppression of Third World people, the reactionary role of the universities, that the women's movement regained the momentum it had lost fifty years earlier.
The founding members of the women's rights movement were active in the antislavery struggle. In fact, it was at an abolitionist conference in 1840 that the women's movement was given the initial impetus to move into action. A world Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London that year. Several American women, among them Lucretia Mott, had been elected as delegates by their chapters. The convention, however, flatly refused to seat female delegates and relegated all the women to a remote gallery, sealed off from public view by a curtain, where they had to sit as silent spectators.
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in the gallery and spent many afternoons walking through the streets of London, discussing their treatment at the conference. It was not the first time women had run into male chauvinism in the antislavery movement. Many chapters refused to accept female members, forcing women to form [p. 22] their own societies. Mott and Stanton decided that women needed a convention of their own to demand equality and vowed to call one when they returned to the United States.
1848: Seneca Falls Conference
It was not until eight years later, however, when Lucretius Mott visited the Stantons at their home in Seneca Falls, New York, that the two finally began to put into practice what they had discussed in London. They placed an ad in the Seneca Falls Courier calling for a Woman's Rights Convention July 19-20, 1848. Over three hundred men and women from a fifty mile radius traveled in wagons and on foot to this conference which Stanton described as "the first organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for ages over the character and destiny of half the race." A Declaration of Sentiments, which has become the most famous document in the history of American feminism, was passed. It stated in part: "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her."
The Declaration was modeled after the Declaration of Independence, and expressed the same demand for certain basic and inalienable rights. It asserted that the democratic freedoms won by the French and the American revolutions should be applied to women also. A list of demands, including equal access to education and the professions, legal rights in marriage, the rights to own property, to control one's own wages, to initiate court suits and to speak in public, were passed unanimously. In fact, the only disagreement was over a demand raised by Stanton-women's right to vote. Suffrage was considered "excessive," "premature." and an issue that would subject the movement to ridicule. This demand was very narrowly approved.
The Seneca Falls Conference did not come about simply as a result of the chance meeting of Mott and Stanton in that London gallery. To understand why that conference took place, we have to look at its historical context. This was a period of extraordinary social ferment. In 1848 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote theCommunist Manifesto. In the United States, there emerged a plethora of reform movement. Utopian communities, religious experiments, and a general attack on the laws inherited from England. Freedom for the slaves was the key social issue. In this general upsurge women played a major part. There were some thousands of women's clubs-church auxiliaries, missionary societies and cultural discussion groups. The most socially conscious women worked in the abolition movement where they learned to conduct petition campaigns and organize public meetings-skills they would later use in their own interests. In speaking out against slavery, women won the right to speak in public.
It was also a period of expansion of educational opportunity for women. Oberlin College, the first to admit women, graduated the first female in 1843. Lucy Stone entered Oberlin in 1843. A few years before, she had sat at a sewing circle in Massachusetts, painstakingly making shirts to finance male students through theological seminary. She suddenly decided it was foolish for her to spend her energies dutifully earning money for a man who would raise more money for his own education by working a week than she could in a month. One day she left unfinished the shirt she was working on and decided to go to college herself, even if she had to go to Brazil, at that time the only place women could study. When she left Oberlin, she vowed, "Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex." Gradually other colleges opened their doors to women, and many of the "Seven Sisters" women's colleges originated in this period.
Women were also entering industry in growing numbers. The textile mills of New England were among the first factories in the United States. With the invention of the power loom, the clothing industry shifted from the home to the factory, bringing many women with it. "Factory girl life" was packaged and sold to New England farm girls as a glamorous existence where one would live with other girls in a factory-run boarding house and participate in self-improvement, educational and literary pursuits. Some justified the relegation of such menial tedious factory work to women by assuming they would work for just a few years, experience economic independence and then marry and return to the home. In this way, they felt American industry could avoid the permanent class of wretched wage workers that were developing in England.
Women workers of this period often worked from 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., averaging 37.5 cents a day, most of which they paid back to the factory for their room and board. Histories of women in the labor movement, however, record a not always docile response to these conditions. Dozens of strikes and walkouts protesting the frequent speedups and wage cuts occurred during the 1830s and 1840s.
As a result of expanding educational opportunity, the entrance of women into industry, and involvement in the ferment for social reform, many women developed a life outside the domestic circle. Expectations of equality were heightened. Women began to see themselves as having an existence independent of their husbands. The Seneca Falls Convention reflected this new consciousness.
In general, however, the Victorian concept of women's role-as a wife and mother-remained unchallenged. Women were looked upon as females who incidentally happened to be human. It was taught that God Himself had ordained that men and women have different roles, with men's realm being the world and women's the home. As is still true today, all the attributes of a slave-domesticity, submissiveness, incompetence-were assigned to women and then elevated into virtues. As one man of the day said, "It is her province to adorn social life, to throw a charm over the intercourse of the world by making it lovely and attractive." Man's power over women was taken for granted in much the same way as the divine right of kings once was.
This conception of women as mere ornaments in man's lives was reflected in the law, where women had absolutely no civil status. They were pronounced "civilly dead" when they married, and remained legal minors if they did not marry. When divorced, they were not given child custody.
[p. 23] Their property legally belonged to their husbands and they did not even own the clothes on their backs. Likewise, wages they earned belonged legally to their husbands. Even if a husband was a drunkard who was not providing for the children, he could take his wife's wages.
This was the context in which the Seneca Falls Convention was held. Considering the ideological and legal barriers against women being autonomous persons, the demands raised there for equality in education, in marriages, in the professions, and under the law were extremely radical. For the first time women saw that the source of their oppression was outside themselves and demanded of men, as Angeline Grimke said, "that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy."
It is indicative of the disdain this society has for the history of women that the church in Seneca Falls that housed this first organizational emergence of the woman's rights movement has been torn down. This society, which makes monuments out of homes in which George Washington slept, let a gas station be built on the site, leaving only a marker on the sidewalk as a memorial!
Seneca Falls was the first of a series of regional and national conferences which took place yearly between 1848 and 1860. In 1860 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the first National Women's Rights Convention convened. "The time is opportune. Come!" And over one thousand women and men did-Quakers, abolitionists, temperance workers and housewives. Suffrage was rarely discussed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton remained one of its few advocates. Instead, the conventions focussed on questions of poverty, education, employment and abolition of slavery. However, no new national organization came out of the gatherings.
One of the differences between the early women's rights movement and the women's liberation movement of today, which is insisting on the right to all-female meetings where women make all their own decisions about their own movement, is that men were always welcome at these conferences of the 1850s. In fact, male abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison were regarded as leading spokesmen during this early phase of the women's rights movement. The one exception to this practice of welcoming the participation of men was an 1850 conference in Salem, Ohio, where men were admitted, but not allowed to speak.
One participant reported: "Never did men so suffer. They implored just to say one word-but no-the President was inflexible-no man should be heard. If one meekly arose to make a suggestion, he was at once ruled out of order. For the first time in the world's history, men learned how it felt to sit in silence when questions in which they were interested were under discussion."
The second American revolution-the Civil War-broke out in 1861, putting an end to the steady growth of the women's rights movement. All conventions were suspended. Its activists were drawn into war work, setting up relief camps and hospital services. The few women we do read about in history-Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott-were part of this service work. Other women were spies and some disguised as men, actually fought in the Union Army. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony took another course. They distrusted Lincoln, fearing he might settle for a compromise with the southern slave states. Under their leadership, the Women's Loyalty League was formed to fight for an unconditional end to slavery as the only way to end the war. The League collected over 400,000 signatures on petitions demanding of Lincoln that the slaves be freed immediately.
At the close of the war, women such as Stanton, Anthony and Lucy Stone decided it was the time to fight for women's suffrage. Suffrage was no longer considered an inopportune demand. The war raised women's confidence in themselves, and they felt that their war services gave them a claim on the nation. They fully expected the young and "enlightened" Republican Party to reward women with the vote simultaneously with extending it to Black men. But that did not happen.
The Republican Party advised female suffragists that it was now "the Negro's hour;" the vote should be granted to Black men first. It threw itself behind the 14th and 15th amendments which freed the slaves and gave Black men the vote, instituting male suffrage as part of the Constitution. The Republicans insisted that to add women's suffrage to the 15th amendment would lead to its defeat, and accused women such as Elizabeth Stanton of selfishly jeopardizing the Black man's claim to citizenship.
Stanton's incisive reply to the implication that somehow the Black's claim to equality was more immediate than that of women was: "May I ask just one question, based on the apparent opposition in which you place the Negro and the woman? Do you believe the African race is so composed entirely of males?" She cited the fact that Black women, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, had been just as involved in the antislavery movement as their brothers.
Even male abolitionists, who were the suffragist's oldest allies and were certainly conscious of their contributions, joined ranks with the Republican Party in asking women to defer their demand for equality to a later time. In many cases, they went so far as to tell women they [p. 24] did not need the vote; they could rule the world with the glance of an eye.
The controversy over the 15th amendment created much bitterness and confusion in the women's suffrage movement. Stanton, who had paternalistically said in 1864, "For the highest virtues of heroism, let us worship the black man at his feet," made the racist comment one year later, "Are we to stand aside and see Sambo walk into the Kingdom first?"
Susan B. Anthony proclaimed: "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I would ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman." The bitterness caused by being told to step aside exacerbated the racist attitudes ingrained in white women by the society of that period.
The tension between male abolitionists and woman's suffrage leaders precipitated a split in the women's movement. At an 1869 convention of the American Equal Rights Association, organized after the Civil War to fight for both Black and female freedom, Stanton proposed that her group focus on getting a woman's suffrage amendment added to the Constitution, no matter what its effect on the 15th amendment. Her proposal forced the other women present to clarify their their position on Black male suffrage and on whether or not woman's suffrage should be deferred to it. The result of this debate was the formation of two opposing groups-the National Women's Suffrage Association and the American Woman's Suffrage Association-destined to remain separate for twenty years.
The AWSA, hereafter referred to as the American, was centered in Boston. It made Henry Ward Beecher its president and was led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The American deferred to the Republican and abolitionist plea to delay demanding a woman's suffrage amendment until Black suffrage was passed. Instead, the organization did propaganda work for women's suffrage on a state level. Its attitude toward Black suffrage was summed up by Lucy Stone who said, "I shall be thankful in my soul if anybody can get out of the terrible pit."
The NWSA, or the National, based in New York, was led by Anthony and Stanton. It excluded men from its membership, convinced that it was the misleadership of men who were responsible for the American group postponing its fight for a women's suffrage amendment. The National was not willing to wait any longer for women's rights, and focused its energies on getting a 16th amendment enfranchising women. As Stanton said: "Wendell Phillips says, one idea for a generation, to come up in the order of their importance. First Negro suffrage, then temperance, then the eight-hour movement, then woman's suffrage. So in 1958, three generations hence, thirty years to a generation, Phillips and Providence permitting, women's suffrage will be in order."
A debate has been carried on in historical literature for many years over which group-the American or the National-took the correct p;position on the dispute over the 15th amendment. It is impossible to choose sides. Each was partially right; both made some mistakes. The National was absolutely correct to reject the concept of "one idea per generation" and to see no reasons why both Blacks and women should not have been given the vote after the Civil War, a war whose ostensible principle had been that all people should be equal under the law. Furthermore, the National rightly understood what we have learned today: women have to depend on themselves and continue to organize against our oppression on a day-to-day basis, even when our allies drop away. This was where the American went wrong. By deferring their demands they gave credence to the notion that woman's suffrage was a secondary issue.
It was wrong, however, for the National to refuse to support suffrage for Black men. The strength of the American position was its understanding that a victory for any oppressed group-the fact that at least someone has been lifted "out of the terrible pit," as Lucy Stone put it-should be welcomed and regarded as laying the basis for other oppressed groups to continue the struggle. as historical developments subsequently proved, the victory of Black male suffrage strengthened women's demands to equal citizenship.
But to dwell on which group was right or wrong in this dispute is, in a sense, to make criminals out of victims. The real reason that the two wings of the woman's suffrage movement became set against each other over Black male suffrage lies neither with the National nor the American but with the emissaries of capitalism in the two political parties.
The Republicans were ready to grant the vote to Black men after the Civil War to help clinch their hold on the country. They later acquiesced in taking it away in their post-Reconstruction South. But both the Republicans and the Democrats were opposed to the right of women to vote, and counterposed the questions of Black and women's suffrage. Thus the Republicans falsely claimed that to fight for women's suffrage would mean the defeat of Black suffrage. When Stanton once confronted a Republican politician with the fact that all the arguments he was using to gain support for Black male suffrage applied equally to women's suffrage, he replied that he was "not the puppet of logic, but the slave of practical politics."
The Democrats responded no less opportunistically. Some of them spoke in favor of a woman's suffrage amendment, but their motives for doing so was that they thought they could defeat the 15th amendment by linking it with women's suffrage. Thus, the capitalist parties did everything they could to divide the Black and women's struggle, and to play the one off against the other.
Women today must still depend upon themselves to win their liberation, and not on the Democrats and Republicans. These parties betrayed us too many times during our seventy year struggle for the elementary right to vote-granting it only when suffrage demonstrations became so massive and public opinion so outraged that to continue to deny it became more costly to them than to grant it-for us not to learn from our history the necessity of political independence from the capitalist parties.
Most suffragists felt it was best to avoid discussion of the split in the movement and gave the breach little [p. 25] comment in their writings. Most historians explain the split as the result of tactical disagreements over Black suffrage and the Republican Party. Although this was certainly the issue around which the differences were precipitated, there were indications that the split also involved other very major disagreements, which had been brewing for a long time, over the source of female oppression. That is, those who joined the American wing tended to view women's subordinate status as based mainly on the fact that she was disenfranchised, while supporters of the National held the institution of marriage responsible for female oppression.
[p. 25] The National saw women's rights as a broad question involving, as Susan B. Anthony said, "the emancipation from all political, industrial, social and religious subjection." Suffrage was supported, not as the magic wand that would erase women's inequality, but as a basic democratic right they should have as citizens. Nevertheless, they were conscious that as long as woman remained tied to the home, she would remain a second-class citizen. As the National's stated:
"The ballot is not even half the loaf; it is only a crust, a crumb. The ballot touches only those interests, either of women or men, which take their root in political questions. But women's chief discontent is not with her political, but with her social and particularly her marital bondage. The solemn and profound question of marriage . . . is of more vital consequence to women's welfare and reaches down to a deeper depth in woman's heart and more thoroughly constitutes the core of the women's movement, than any such superficial and fragmentary questions as women's suffrage."
The strengths of the National-that is, their understanding of the necessity for women to struggle day by day for control over their lives-laid the basis for its development into the most consistently radical, vocal suffrage group in history. Under the leadership of Anthony and Stanton, the National was the first (and only) group of the period to challenge the family institution. Feeling strongly that her place was with her sisters, and that her energies belonged to them and should not be exhausted through marriage, Anthony chose to remain single. In a letter to Lydia Mott in 1859, Anthony bemoaned the fact that:
"There is not one woman left who may be relied on; all have "first to please their husbands," after which there is but little time left to spend in any other direction . . . The twain become one flesh, the woman "we"; henceforth she has no separate work . . . In the depths of my soul, there is a continual denial of the self-annihilating spiritual or legal union of two human beings. Such union, in the very nature of things, must bring an end to the free action of one or the other."
And she realized that this one was always the woman. She wrote later: "Marriage has always been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally on the sexes. By it man gains all; women loses all; tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him; meek submission and ready obedience alone benefit her . . . Woman has never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man."
In addition to the women of the National, several individual women challenged the family institution. Charlotte Perkins Gilman carried the challenge further than did the National. Although she identified with the women's rights movement, and often spoke for it, Gilman was more a theoretician than an activist. Writing during a period of ever increasing employment of women, she protested that they had to put in another day's work in the home after the day's work at the factories. She favored putting private housekeeping "into the archives of past history," and advocated communal kitchens, public housekeeping services, and child care centers. she attacked "a family unity which is bound together with a tablecloth" as being of questionable value. And of motherhood, still considered sacred by her society, Gilman said, "Anybody can be a mother. An oyster can be a mother. The difficult thing is to be a person."
Gilman saw that the cult of the home oppressed all its members. stunted women "with the aspirations of an affectionate guinea pig," and was a phenomenon which would be utterly unnecessary in a society where the family was no longer a productive unit. She wrote:
"Among the splendid activities of our age [the home] lingers on, inert and blind, like a clam in a horse race. . . it hinders, by keeping women a social idiot, by keeping the modern child under a tutelage of the primeval mother, by keeping the social conscience of man crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of the domesticity of the women. It hinders by making the physical details of daily life a heavy burden to mankind. Whereas in our stage of civilization, they should have been long since reduced to a minor incident."
Gilman's articles appeared in The Revolution, the newspaper of the National, as did similarly iconoclastic ideas. The Revolution claimed to speak in the interests of the most wretched of all women, and focused extensively on the double degradation of working women.
It also had the policy of taking the woman's side in controversial issues of the time-something no one else was doing. The Victoria Woodhull case was an example of this. Woodhull was a stockbroker on Wall Street, as [p. 26] well as an advocate of sexual freedom, faith healing and woman's suffrage, who tended to operate as an individualists. When she announced her intention to run for President in the 1872 elections, she was ridiculed from all sides as a "free-love candidate," (and attacked for living in the same house with both her current and former husbands.) Only the National defended her right to run for office. Concerning the scandal men tried to make of Woodhull's ideas on sexual freedoms, Stanton wrote in The Revolution:
"We have had enough women sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity . . . This is one of man's most effective engines for our division and subjugation. He creates the public sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangmen for our sex. We have crucified his Mary Wollstonecraft, the Fanny Wrights, the George Sands, the Fanny Kermbles of all ages . . . Let us end this ignoble record . . . If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns."
The Revolution, based on the motto "Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less," was one of the most important contributions of the National. Like many of the feminist journals of today, it provided a forum for debate, gave the movement direction, and was key to reaching out and winning over new allies. Otherwise sympathetic supporters of the National repeatedly urged Stanton to give the paper a more moderate name, but she stood firm, saying: "The establishing of woman on her rightful throne is the greatest of revolutions . . . A journal called The Rose-bud might answer for those who came with kid gloves and perfumes to lay immortelle wreaths on the monuments which in sweat and tears we have hewn and built; but for us, and that great blacksmith of ours who forges such red-hot thunderbolts for Pharisees, hypocrites and sinners, there is not name but The Revolution."
After the Civil War, the situation of women workers changed dramatically. Production of the equipment required to wage the war had stimulated industrial development in the North. Many women, whose husbands had been killed or crippled in the war, were forced to go to work, and, out of desperation, accepted low wages and sweatshop conditions. The range of jobs available to women as a source of cheap labor expanded far beyond employment in textile industry. The typewriter, originally considered too mechanically complex for women to operate, began to be demonstrated by women in store windows in the 1870s and gradually became our domain. The invention of the telephone opened up jobs as switchboard operators.
Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, countless attempts to form their own unions were made by female laundresses, sales workers, tailors, textile workers, printers and many others. By 1886, the Knights of Labor had chartered 113 Women's assemblies.
All these attempts to raise women's wages and upgrade their working conditions, however, proved short-lived and sporadic. Women were not sure of how to organize against their economic oppression, did not have money for strike funds and publicity, and were not supported by male workers.
The National was actively involved in the struggle of working women. Anthony organized many Working Women's Associations and was an invited speaker at some trade-union conventions. The trade-union movement's appreciation of the National's role came to an end, however, when Anthony began encouraging women to break strikes. She claimed scabbing was the only way women would ever learn skilled trades. Anthony was pushed to this decision by the AFL, which had a formal position against sexual discrimination in employment, yet systematically denied women access to skilled jobs or to training programs, viewing them as "temporary" workers in the labor force between pregnancies. Anthony's stand, combined with the disclosure that The Revolution was being printed in a "rat" office paying below union-scale wages, brought the wrath of the trade-union movement down on the suffragists.
One cause of this controversy was that neither the feminists nor the trade unionists fully understood the double nature of woman's oppression-that is, both as a female and as an exploited worker. The feminists did not grasp the necessity for the working class to assert its power through weapons such as strikes, and labor ignored the fact that women are a specially oppressed sector of the working class.
Between 1870 and 1910, 480 campaigns in 33 states were undertaken for woman's suffrage. Both the American and the National focussed on the frontier states, feeling that equality would be more readily grasped by pioneers who, by necessity, did not consider women helpless creatures with weak nervous systems. Few of us today can imagine the tortuous journeys the suffragists made through the frontier, traveling on sleighs, stage coaches, open wagons and on foot, and speaking from both stages and tree stumps to countless backwoods meetings that were often mobbed by antisuffragists.
Women such as Susan B. Anthony traveled door to door, trying to rouse women to a sense of their political rights as citizens and to get them to sign suffrage petitions. In many cases, housewives slammed doors in the faces of the suffrage workers, informing them they had all the rights they needed, or that their husbands would provide for them. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, the campaigning suffragist was often treated "with as much contempt as if she was asking for alms for herself." Other women were more responsive, and it was the pennies and the dimes from these women that kept the women's rights movement alive. Petitions, the only way the disenfranchised could be heard, were especially important, but more often than not, the petitions were merely laughed out of state assemblies.
1890: Suffrage won in Wyoming
It was on the frontier that the first victories for women's suffrage were won. Both Wyoming and Utah gave women the vote while they were still territories. There was a severe shortage of women on the frontier, and it has been speculated that Wyoming passed women's [p. 27] suffrage to encourage a migration of women. There is evidence that the Mormons passed suffrage in Utah to increase the voting weight of their religion. Wyoming became a state in 1890, vowing, "We will stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come without women's suffrage." Colorado and Idaho were the next two victories, in 1893 and 1896, but between 1896 and 1910, no further states were won over.
[p. 27] Anthony and Stanton were behind those victories. As Stanton wrote in her memoirs, "Night after night by an old-fashioned fireplace we plotted and planned the coming agitation, how, when and where each entering wedge could be driven. Every right achieved . . . was contended for inch by inch." Stanton continues with a description of her working relationship with Anthony:
"In thought and in sympathy we were one, and in the division of labor, we exactly complemented each other. In writing, we did better work than either could alone. While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics. I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together, we have made arguments that have stood unshaken through the storms of long years; arguments that no one has answered."
During the day, each would take her turn watching Stanton's five children, while the other wrote. Their relationship was one of deep sisterhood. Unsympathetic historians have been unable to understand the sisterly feelings of suffragists such as Stanton and Anthony and cannot refrain from speculating that this pro-woman impulse must have passed over into lesbianism. They refer to Stanton as a "spouse surrogate" to the unmarried Anthony. Despite the arrogance of the male historian, feminists today are rediscovering sisterhood with other women-something that has been denied to us by the warped ideology such historians reflect that attempts to isolate women from each other and makes closeness into scandal.
The growing strength of the woman's movement, and its steady steps toward suffrage, forced its opponents (referred to simply as "antis") to make explicit the era's notion of woman's place. At the root of their arguments was the belief that women are by nature infantile and irrational. A minister of the day expressed this: "The excessive development of the emotional in her nervous system ingrafts on the female organization a neurotic or hysterical condition which is the source of much of the female charm when it is kept within due restraint. In movements of excitement, it is liable to explode in violent paroxysms. Every woman therefore carries this power of irregular, illogical and incongruous action and no one can foretell when the explosion will come."
Suffragist Anna Howard Shaw responded to this attack:
"Women are supposed to be unfit to vote because they are hysterical and emotional . . . I had heard so much about our emotionalism that I went to the last Democratic National Convention to observe the calm response of the male politicians . . . I saw men jump upon the seat and throw their hats in the air and shout "What's the matter with Champ Clark?" Then, when these hats came down, other men would kick them back in the air, shouting at the top of their voices, "He's all right." Then I heard others howling for "Underwood, first, last and all the time." No hysteria about it-just patriotic loyalty, splendid manly devotion to principle. And so they went on until 5 in the morning-the whole night long,"
The family was seen as a miniature political unit. the man supposedly cast his vote as a political representative of his family, expressing his wife's opinion for her, and acting as her link to the outside world. It was felt that woman was too delicate for the turbulence of the mire of politics, and that she should be above it, not in it. As a rationalization for her inequality, woman was told that she was the higher form of life, more refined and sensitive than man. For her to invade man's sphere of politics would be retrogressive.
As men came to realize that woman's suffrage would have repercussions beyond women simply dropping the ballot in the box once a year-that it would involve a reassessment of woman's role-they launched a slanderous campaign predicting the dire results of suffrage. They projected women buttonholing strange men on the streets, urging the to vote for "the handsome candidate." They predicted that if women became politically informed in order to cast their vote, political disagreements between husbands and wives would result, and the divorce rate would skyrocket. They predicted that suffrage would [p. 27] lead to child neglect as a woman became politically involved and this in turn would create juvenile delinquency.
[p. 28] The pioneering days of the woman's rights movement ended around 1890. A new generation of women emerged who were already benefitting from the gains in status that their older sisters had won. By 1890, there were 2,500 women with college degrees. Although they still earned only half of what men earned, women reached 17.5 per cent of the labor force, and constituted 36 per cent of all professional workers. this figure had only gone up to 40 per cent sixty years later.
Rapid industrialization in the United States crowded more and more people, including a huge number of immigrants, into urban centers and created widespread poverty. Many women, alarmed by this trend, became active in combatting such problems as sanitation and disease in the urban slums, child labor, and in support of labor's right to organize, of prison reform and of women's legal rights.
The women's Christian Temperance Union, the largest group of the period, had been grossly misrepresented . Rather than being a vehicle for wild-eyed, hatchet-wielding fanatics as it is depicted, the WCTU tackled a problem especially crucial to working-class women. Alcoholism was one of the many social problems generated by slum life. An alcoholic husband could take a woman's wages away from her, leaving her with no means of feeding the family, since in many states a woman's wages were legally her husband's property. Since with the ballot women could vote the saloons out of business, the WCTU worked closely with suffrage forces.
In 1890, the National and the American healed their twenty year breach and reunited as the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA), marking a new stage in the women's rights movement. The demand for suffrage became its focus. To both groups it was clear that the contradiction between the Victorian morality which insisted that women were happy slaves and the increased expectations of women because of their deepening social and economic independence, had reached a point where masses of women were convinced they deserved the right to vote.
The period following 1890 was one of great contradictions. United States imperialism was on the rise and began to spread throughout Latin America and the Far East. In order to justify the brutal exploitation of both the working class at home and of the colonial peoples, the ruling class whipped up a campaign of racism that permeated all aspects of American life. The right to vote was forcibly taken from many of the recently franchised Black men. JimCrow policies were savagely instituted throughout the South and racist policies intensified in the North.
The growing number of strikes made labor a target for governmental attack. Union organizing attempts during this period were branded as "anarchist plots"and strikers were brutally attacked.
The depth and all-pervasive character of the racist campaign had a conservatizing effect on all the radical and labor organizations of this period. Progressivism was in vogue, posing legislative reform as the means of curing all ills. The task of the time was to patch up capitalism to weed out corruption, but not to challenge capitalism in any basic way. The women's suffrage movement was an integral part of this reformist movement, sharing its strengths and its weaknesses.
During this period the Comstock Act was passed. Anthony Comstock was president of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and his act allowed the post office to refuse to mail "morally offensive literature." This was construed to mean all literature that attacked marriage and the family. The birth control pioneer, Margaret Sanger, was one of the many feminist victims of that strictly enforced law.
The Beecher-Tilden affair was an indication of the temper of the times. In her paper, Virginia Woodhull exposed the fact that preacher Henry Beecher, first president of the AWSA, was apparently having an affair with one of his parishioners, Elizabeth Tilden, also involved in women's rights. Close friends with both of them, Woodhull claimed she disclosed the affair because Beecher was not being open, as Woodhull was, about his rejection of monogamy. Before the day was over, copies of Woodhull's paper were selling for $40 each. Again, Woodhull became the center of a national scandal. The Beecher-Tilden trial was one of the most sensational in history and everyone involved, including Woodhull, was forced to flee the country to escape widespread public outrage.
Around this time, Stanton and Anthony's public attacks on marriage and the family came to a halt.
The NAWSA began to propagandize around the moral impact women could have on government. One suffragist went so far as to say, "The stake is but the larger family, the nation, the homestead, and . . . in this national home there is a room and a corner and a duty for "mother." Statistics were gathered on the moral superiority of women, proving she was the majority of churchgoers and the minority of prisoners. Suffragists promised that a female electorate would vote for higher penalties for rapists and would end wars forever. They said to the men in power: the government needs women's virtues. Let us have the vote and we will be housekeepers in politics, and sweep away the corruption of the world."
Thus the NAWSA was no longer demanding the vote as a democratic right in itself, but as a means by which women could help uphold the morality of bourgeois society. No longer stressing the inherent equality between men and women, suffragists dwelt on the ways women were different and accommodated their outlook to the maternal mystique of the Victorian period.
Once departing from the original argument, the suffragists' adaptation went one step farther. The imperialist need for a large, easily exploited working class made Social Darwinism, constructed to indicate that the Anglo-Saxon was the highest form of human beings, a popular philosophy. As a result, the suffrage movement began to viciously slander the new immigrants, saying it was an indignity for the daughters of 1776 to be ruled by foreign and Black men. Ann Howard Shaw, one time president of the NAWSA, said, "Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political superiors of their former mistresses."
Another NAWSA president Carrie Catt, wrote: "The government is menaced with great danger. That danger lies in the votes possessed by the males in the slums of the cities and the ignorant foreign vote. There is but one way to avert the danger-cut off the vote of the slums and give to women the ballot."
Northern suffragists produced statistics showing there were more native born women than immigrant men, indicating women's suffrage could counteract this "menace." In the South, they pointed out that there were more white women than Black men and women combined, which would insure the continuation of white supremacy. Delegates from Black women's clubs were excluded from conventions. Black women were segregated in suffrage parades, and in certain years, Black women suffrage groups were asked not to apply for membership in the NAWSA since it would taint the Association's image.
The fact that suffragists would appeal to the most racist chauvinistic instincts was disgraceful for a group having its origins in the abolitionist movement. This is one of the most ignoble episodes in the history of the struggle. Fortunately, suffragists retreated from this position around the turn of the century, when they realized the need to win support from immigrant voters. In fact, New York state was won to women's suffrage in 1917 largely because of the large immigrant vote in New York City.
One of the many myths perpetuated about the women's suffrage movement is that the fight for the vote was strictly a middle-class movement-irrelevant to working women. This was far from true. It was clearly in the interests of working women to win suffrage. Mainly they wanted the vote as women whose equal claims to citizenship were being denied. They also saw the vote as one other way they could improve their working conditions. As Susan B. Anthony said: "The disenfranchised must always do the work, accept the wages, and occupy the position the enfranchised assign them." Lacking the power of the vote, working women's demands were not taken seriously by muckraking politicians of the period. This was demonstrated in 1910 when women workers attempted to get the mayor of New York to appropriate funds for factory inspections. He said to them: "Ladies, why do you waste your time year after year in coming before us for this appropriation? You have not a vote in your constituency and you know it, and we know it, and you know we know it."
One of the holidays the women's liberation movement has recently reclaimed had its origins in working women's demand for the vote. On March 8, 1908 (a day German socialist Clara Zetkin was later to declare International Women's Day), women garment workers marched through New York City's) Lower East Side), protesting sweatshop conditions and demanding the vote. Working women later testified in Albany, New York, at annual meetings for suffragists, marched at suffrage parades, and organized suffrage rallies outside their plant gates.
During this same period (1890-1910), the number of women workers doubled to eight million and their plight became the focus of much social reform. At a mass meeting in 1890 of female retail shop workers, a Consumer's League was formed to publicize their low pay and hazardous working conditions. Aided by socialists and suffragists, a "White List" was devised , consisting of the names of those few employing factories who met the shop women's demands for protective legislation, no child labor, a minimum wage and a shorter work week. Consumers were asked to buy only from manufacturers on the list.
The early 1900s saw the growth of many unions which were largely female, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union being the best example. At the 1903 American Federation of Labor convention, a National Women's Trade Union League was formed for women in unions. For many years the WTUL functioned as the women's movement within organized labor and labor's voice within the suffragist struggle. Although it worked closely with the AFL, it existed because of the AFL's indifference to women workers. It was thought that women's wages were too low for them to pay full union dues and that they did not remain in the labor force long enough to be worth organizing. The NWTUL played a crucial role in the many labor strikes of the time, publicizing strike demands and raising strike funds.
The period from 1896 to 1910 is known as the "doldrums period" in women's rights. Not a single state referendum was won between these years, despite ceaseless campaigns. Susan B. Anthony's death in 1906 seemed to create a void in leadership no one else was able to fill. Her life had spanned almost sixty years of struggle for women's rights and the fact that she died without seeing women win one of the most basic of rights-the vote-must have demoralized the second generation of suffragists, many of whom had already fought twenty-five years. But this slump soon ended and a third stage in the movement began-ushered in by two events in 1910: the victory of suffrage in Washington state and Alice Paul's return from England.
The militant wing of the British suffrage movement, led by the Parkhursts, had abandoned trying to win the vote through gentle persuasion. British women burned down several buildings, including churches and castles, mutilated valued museum art objects, "stormed" the House of Commons and blew up mail boxes in their attempt to win the vote.
They felt that attacks on property would force the British government to take notice of their demand. Not even [p. 30] high society and diplomatic social occasions were immune from their attack. A common tactic was to infiltrate these tightly-guarded receptions, either by using an invitation a wealthy supporter had turned over to them or by posing as a servant. In the middle of the gathering, the secret suffragist would jump up on the table, unfurl a "Vote for Women" banner, and launch into a speech. After one such occasion the headlines read "Suffragette disguised as lady penetrates foreign office reception."
So deep was the commitment of the suffragettes to the struggle that one deliberately gave her life to it. On Derby Day in 1913, Emily Davison, wearing the purple, white and green colors of the suffragettes, threw herself under the King's horse and was trampled to death. For their actions , hundreds of suffragettes were thrown into prison, where they organized hunger strikes. Alice Paul, an American studying in England, had been among them.
Inspired by her experiences in England, she was determined to revitalize the American movement. Until this point, suffrage forces had been working on a state-to-state basis, feeling they had a better chance to win the states one by one than to get a federal amendment passed. Paul criticized this approach, claiming that by confining themselves to a few strikes at a time, women were not feeling their full force as a national movement, and the powers in Washington, D.C., were escaping attack. She proposed that energies be concentrated on getting a federal amendment passed, followed by state-by-state ratification,
The first step Alice Paul took was to organize a demonstration of 10,000 in Washington, the day before President Wilson's inauguration, to dramatize the large number of women expecting the vote from his administration. The demonstrators were attacked by patriotic on-lookers, had their cloths torn off, were pelted by burning cigars, and knocked to the ground. Troops were sent in to restore order, only to create more of a riot by themselves beating the women.
[p. 30] Finding the NAWSA hesitant to turn toward the national amendment, Paul set up the Congressional Union in 1913 as an auxiliary to the NAWSA. Her strategy was to hold the party in power, with President Wilson, as its symbol, responsible for women being denied the right to vote and to harass, the Democrats until they found it was politically inexpediant to oppose women's suffrage. Paul's chief contribution to the once-again rising women's suffrage movement was that she persuaded women to stop begging and begin demanding.
In 1914, the Congressional Union was expelled from the NAWSA, charged with refusing to participate in state campaigns and using confrontational tactics that were alienating potential supporters.
In 1916, the Congressional Union held its own convention and formed an independent Women's Party. Not a political party in the usual sense, the Women's Party had no intention of vying to take power. It had just one plank -winning the vote. Recent victories had given women the vote in twelve states, which composed one-fourth of the electorate [electoral] college. The tactic of the Women's Party was to convince the women in these twelve states to vote against, and defeat, Wilson. As the party explained:
"One thing we have to teach Mr. Wilson and his party-and all on-looking parties-in that the group which opposes national suffrage for a woman will lose women's support in twelve great commonwealths controlling nearly a hundred electoral votes; too large a fraction to risk, or to risk twice, even if once risked successfully. If that is made clear, it is a matter of total indifference to the Women's Party-so far as suffrage is concerned-why is the next president of the United States."
Peace was the major issue of the 1916 Wilson-Hughes presidential election: the slogan was "Vote for Wilson. He kept us out of war." To which the Women's Party retorted, "Vote against Wilson. He kept us out of suffrage." The WP, with a membership of over fifty thousand (as compared to two million in the NAWSA) conducted such a vigorous campaign against Wilson in the suffrage states that it was hazardous of him to travel there. One Woman's Party campaigner, Inez Milholland, toured California, speaking night and day and sleeping only on trains. At a rally in San Francisco, she asked "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?" and with these words, collapsed dead from exhaustion. Mass memorial meetings were held across the country to protest the unnecessary death of this young woman who died with liberty on her lips.
Wilson was re-elected, carrying ten of the twelve suffrage states. In Illinois, however, the only state where votes were tallied by sex, women voted against him two to one. The important thing was that the suffrage movement forced the Democratic leaders onto the defensive. They felt compelled to put out as much literature on suffrage as they did on peace.
Then the slaughter of the first imperialistic war began. As in the Civil War, women were asked to defer their own demands to the war effort. Although the NAWSA insisted there was no contradiction between waging the war and giving women the vote, they did enough war work to avoid any questioning of their patriotism.
The Woman's Party, however, continued to fight for the vote. They picketed the White House with slogans such as "Democracy should begin at home." Noting that women in Russia were given the vote after the czar was overthrown, they contrasted "free Russia" to "Kaiser Wilson." When envoys representing Kerensky came to the White House and suffragists unfurled banners telling the Russians that the U.S. was a democracy in name only, the Wilson regime began to crack down. Shots were fired into the Woman's Party headquarters. All picketing in front of the White House was made illegal, and mass arrests were made of those who continued.
Nonetheless, on Bastille Day, pickets were there with a banner, "Liberté, Egalite, Fraternite," When its bearers were arrested, two more women stepped forward to take their place; they were arrested, and so it continued with over five hundred women arrested in all. Those found guilty were sent to prison workhouses where they went on hunger strikes, demanding to be treated as political prisoners, and were force-fed. The arrests never curtailed the movement. There was always another woman who stepped forward and took the place of her arrested sister. The brutal treatment the women received in the prison workhouses became a national scandal. Finally public pressure became so great that all the suffragists were unconditionally released and their sentences nullified.
[p. 31] The NAWSA played no part in the White House demonstrations. Its president, Carrie Catt, visited Wilson quite frequently, and felt she was slowly moving him toward active support of woman's suffrage. She considered this approach more effective than working to defeat him. The NAWSA was winning growing numbers of state victories, most importantly New York in 1917. While their sisters were being so brutally treated in jail, the NAWSA never issued a single word of protest or defense of their right to picket. In fact, they went so far as to carry signs in demonstrations denouncing the left wing of the movement and declaring that they were in no way affiliated with the Women's Party.
As during the Civil War, the first world war brought large numbers of women out of the home and into either war relier work or industry. Women worked in many fields-from steel mills to explosive factories and on the railroads. It would seem that this performance combined with the large number of states where women were already voting with no disastrous effects on the home, would have put an end to the anti suffrage hysteria. The last ten years of the struggle for suffrage, brought forth the most organized opposition.
1920: anti suffrage forces defeated, Women vote in Federal elections
The opponents represented the growing interests of an expanding capitalist class which based itself on the permanent existence of an oppressed class of wage-earners. Since women were the most underpaid and least organized sector of the working class, American capitalism was not eager to give them the vote. The ruling class feared that the equality of the sexes implied by granting women the right to vote might rouse them from their docility and cause them to start asserting their right to equal wages and job opportunities. They anticipated women would support protective laws for workers.
This was especially true in the East where industrial and business interests actively campaigned against women's suffrage. The oligarchy of wealth began a red-baiting campaign, linking women's suffrage to struggles to improve working class conditions, and linking both to creeping socialism. In the South, the racist ruling class were flagrantly defying the 15th amendment by disenfranchising Black men and were not eager to have to deal with Black women as citizens.
In the West, the liquor industry feared women would vote in prohibition and claimed the women's suffrage movement was the same organization as the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The mobilization of the Oregon liquor industry to defeat a state referendum on woman's suffrage was typical. They calculated that 50,000 votes were necessary to defeat the referendum. Each of the 2,000 liquor retailers in Oregon were notified, and instructed to get twenty-five votes against suffrage-from employees, butchers, landlords-or else they might be put out of business.
The anti-woman's suffrage alliance of the South, East and West was joined by the political machines controlling the government. Women had promised they would clean up politics, going so far as to say that if they had been allowed to vote, Tammany Hall would never have come to power. So women's suffrage poses a threat to the pillars of the government, based on corruption and bribery.
These forces were careful to disguise the real reasons for their opposition. While behind the scenes they whipped up hysteria in their own ranks and bribed politicians to vote against women's suffrage, publicly they put out propaganda that was an outrageous insult to a mass woman's suffrage movement. One such leaflet read: "Housewives! You do not need the vote to clean out you sink spout. A handful of potash and some boiling water is quicker and cheaper. Good cooking lessens alcoholic craving quicker than a vote on a local option. Why vote for pure food laws when you can purify your ice box with slateratus water?"
In 1911 the antis set up the National Women's Organization to Oppose Suffrage. Its members claimed to speak for the majority of their sex when they insisted they did not want to be burdened with the vote.
They produced "Spiderweb charts" tracing the suffrage movement straight to Moscow and implying it was a Bolshevik plot aimed at the nationalization of women. The NAWSA quickly exposed this group as simply a female front for big money interests, especially in the liquor industry.
The urgency with which these interests geared into blocking women's suffrage indicated that victory was an imminent one. It was. The contradiction between the role women were playing in the country and the fact that they were denied the vote became an international scandal which those who claimed the United States was a model democracy were having a hard time explaining. Although the 65th Congress had been barred from taking up anything but war measures, it set January 10, 1918, to vote on the woman's suffrage amendment.
The vote itself contained much drama. A New York representative left the death bed of his wife, an ardent suffragist, to cast his "aye" vote and returned home to attend her funeral. The amendment carried, 274 to 136, exactly the two-thirds majority required.
It took until May 20, 1919, to win the Senate vote. Ahead lay ratification in thirty-six states-the most tedious task of all. The antis made their last desperate attempts to block victory and managed to gain control of all the deep-southern states, meaning suffrage had to carry in almost all the rest. Finally, on August 26, 1920, the 36th state, Tennessee, ratified. Women everywhere voted in elections that year, making the United States the 27th country to extend the right to vote to women. Despite the fact that women's voting had become so accepted, it was not until 1969 that the last state, Georgia, ratified the 19th amendment.
An issue which had united women for seventy years was won. The struggle had involved three generations, with none of the founding leaders living to see the 1920 victory. The two wings of the woman's movement continued to work separately, and since many women felt the vote was the only change in status women needed, both groups entered the 1920s with their membership severely reduced. The NAWSA changed its name to the League of Women Voters and began encouraging women to register to vote and educating them about the candidates.
The Woman's Party campaigned for further legal rights for women, especially their right to guardianship of their children, and this was won in sixteen states. Soon tiring, [p. 41] of working to pass hundreds of individual bills countering sexual discrimination in each individual state, the Woman's Party drafted the Equal Rights Amendment which would make any form of sexual discrimination unconstitutional. The ERA was first introduced to Congress in 1923 (where it was promptly voted down), and for a time it appeared that the women's movement would unite around this issue. But it did not.
. . .
Was the victory worth seventy years of struggle?
. . .
Waltraud Ireland (1970) " . . . the feminists failed to produce an integrated, radical analysis either of the nature of women's oppression or tis relationship to the basic social and economic structures of capitalist society . . . success killed the women's movement."
. . .
The first place to look for a partial answer is in the general social and political conditions under which the suffrage movement declined. It has been pointed out that the struggle of women for their liberation has ebbed and flowed according to the extend of general radicalism in the society. It began in the era before the Civil War (a revolutionary period when an entire system-the southern plantation system based on slavery-was challenged and overthrown) and dies out in the years of reaction after the first World War. During the 1920s, the liberalism of the Progressive era was replaced by the hysteria of the Red Scare. Strikers were brutally smashed. . . . there were exceptions to the general trend of conservatism . . . It was clearly not a good period for any movement for social change.
Under these conditions, rebellion and discontent took a personal, rather than organized political form. During the 1920s many feminists who had fought for the vote shifted their rebellion to the realm of individual sexual freedom and dress reforms as embodied by "flapperism." And in a certain sense, the fight against female oppression did continue in this area.
[Note the recurring theme of Paris, tourism and cultural change as havens, cultural melting pots, and personal control of a realized life, even zones for out of culture experiences. KR]
For just as the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s contributed to the liberation of women [disassociating] sex and reproduction, the flapper era gave women the right to drink and smoke in public, shed their bodies of restrictive clothing and enjoy pursuits beyond the parlor . . .
The suffragists had focused on the vote not out of fear of other issues. In fact the woman's rights movement had raised and won other demands: the right to control their own wages, an end to child labor, protective legislation. But our sisters chose suffragette as the focus of struggle because they correctly felt that so long as such a blatant assertion of their inferiority under the law existed, their basic dignity and humanity were denied . . .
. . . One weakness of the woman's rights movement which contributed to its decline was its illusions about the vote and what women would be able to do with it. This reflected deeper illusions about the nature of society itself and the possibility of winning complete liberation under capitalism . . .
. . . and early socialists in the United States did not understand feminism.
. . . [p. 42] Most of the socialists thought Feminism was middle class, non-worker related, and potentially divisive along sex line. And race issues were similarly suspect for the socialists.
. . . The great victory of the suffrage movement was that it demonstrated, for the first time, that women can organize as women to raise demands that meet our needs, and that through struggle we can win these demands.
Unlike during the 1920s, the conditions for an all-out attack on women's traditional roles are now overripe. The tremendous technological expansion and immense social wealth we see in the United States today, make demands for birth control, child-care centers, and equal pay for women seem much more reasonable and attainable than ever before. It is only by being conscious of these changes in the objective conditions laying the basis for the feminist movement that we can understand the reasons why the women's rights movement died out, and why the movement today has so much more potential.
. . .
Unlike the movement of the 1920s, the new women's rights movement has arisen in a period of growing and deepening radicalization. An entire generation of young women is becoming convinced of the fact that capitalism is historically and forever incapable of ending our oppression. The capitalist verbiage of freedom rings hypocritical when this is systematically denied to 53 per cent of the population because of sex. Rather than organizing around a single issue such as the vote, the conditions now exist that make it possible for the women's liberation movement to take on the oppression of an entire sex, and to raise a whole series of demands.
Granting women the vote was something capitalism could begrudgingly do, but the demands that the movement is raising today-for free, twenty-four hour child care, for free abortion on demand, for an end to job discrimination, for roles beyond that of wife and mother-can not be met under this system . . . the logic of the demands taken together-that women should have full control over their lives, freed from responsibilities within the family-is something a system dependent on the continued oppression of women cannot tolerate . . .
Feminists today already have fewer illusions than our sisters did about what a particular change within the capitalist system can do . . . Through the examples of the Black struggle and the antiwar movement, women today have acquired far more faith in themselves, and in the power of mass movements to change society. We will no longer tolerate anyone putting our struggle last.
The struggle for woman's suffrage was unable to end the oppression of women-the oldest, deepest form of oppression in history-does not mean that it failed or should not have been waged. It simply means that those of us in the feminist movement today must pick up our sisters' struggle, inspired by their examples, and carry it farther.
. . . .
Biblio.