Antebellum Idealism and Reform Impulses, 1820s–1850s

This is Unit Thirteen, part three, on the women's movement that came out of abolition. Part two closed with women excluded from leadership in the antislavery societies they had helped build. This half is what they did about that. Two things to watch. The first is a piece of editing. At Seneca Falls a convention took the most familiar sentence in American public life and changed as few words as it could, and one of those changes does far more work than the famous one. The second is a warning about evidence. The best-known sentence any woman spoke in this period survives in two published versions that are not the same, and the more famous one appeared twelve years after the event. Unit Two taught you how to handle exactly that. By the end you will be able to state the three changes in the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. To explain what antislavery gave the women's movement. To explain what Sojourner Truth exposed. To state the honest position on her speech. And to explain why phrenology caught on.

Three entries on women organising, and the third put the whole question into public debate.

Black women organising separately.

USH1 1847 The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society

Black women faced racism from White abolitionists and sexism from Black and White men alike, and so they formed organisations of their own, with eighteen founders including Sarah Mapps Douglass and the formerly enslaved Hetty Reckless. They ran petition drives, arranged boycotts of goods produced by enslaved people, and funded a school for Black girls.

Two sisters from a slaveholding family.

USH1 1848 The Grimké Sisters

Sarah and Angelina Grimké were born into a prosperous South Carolina slaveholding family, moved to the North and converted to Quakerism, with Angelina among the first women members of the American Anti-Slavery Society. She noted that investigating the rights of enslaved people improved her understanding of her own, which is the link the next entry turns on.

The tour that scandalised the country.

USH1 1849 Promiscuous Assemblies

In eighteen thirty-seven the Grimké sisters toured publicly, speaking on immediate abolition to what were called promiscuous assemblies, meaning mixed-gender audiences, and respectable society was scandalised, since women lecturing to men was unheard of. Garrison endorsed them and other abolitionists opposed them, and the reaction pushed women's proper sphere to the front of public debate.

Three entries on how women entered reform, and the door was entirely conventional.

The traditional half.

USH1 1850 The Traditional Half

Women entered reform through the perception of women as nurturers, and temperance women amplified their customary role as moral guardians of the household, with others taking larger roles in educating children and adults in republican principles. The entry point was entirely conventional. What women did once they were inside it was not conventional at all.

The argument for women as teachers.

USH1 1851 Catharine Beecher

Catharine Beecher argued in eighteen forty-five that the United States had abandoned moral principle through democratic excess, leaving virtue in jeopardy amid riots and disorder, and claimed women could restore moral equilibrium by cultivating right and wrong in children. She accepted that women were inherently more moral and nurturing, and used that premise to argue they were uniquely suited to teach.

What the law allowed.

USH1 1852 What the Law Allowed

Women had severely restricted rights of property and legal authority, and until states passed property legislation in the eighteen forties husbands controlled wives' earnings and inheritance, with new laws granting limited additional authority, applied unevenly across the regions. Unit Seven covered coverture, the doctrine underneath all of this. This entry covers the first statutory cracks in it.

Two entries on the comparison at the movement's centre, and the first comes with a caution.

The comparison abolitionist women drew.

USH1 1853 The Comparison

Antislavery work was the catalyst for antebellum feminism. Many northern women concluded that they faced constraints comparable to those on enslaved people within a patriarchal society. Lydia Maria Child wrote that the comparison between women and the colored race is striking, and that both had been kept in subjection by physical force. Progressive men supported abolition while keeping conventional gender expectations at home, and White women, Black women and free Black men were all excluded from leadership in the movement's own organisations. Handle that comparison carefully, because it is the anchor's and it is also contested. Free northern White women and enslaved Black people did not face the same conditions, and you will hear the objection later in this lecture. What the comparison did accomplish was practical. It gave women a vocabulary of rights and a training in political method, and the leadership of the women's movement came almost entirely out of abolitionism.

The meeting that produced a convention.

USH1 1854 London, 1840

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in eighteen forty and resolved to hold a women's rights convention, with eight years passing before that convention actually took place. They met at an antislavery meeting that seated its women separately, which is the fact their resolution came directly out of.

Two entries on the era's sciences of self-improvement, and the second has a sting in it.

The health reformers.

USH1 1855 Graham and the Body

Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who began in temperance, built a Science of Human Life calling for vegetables, fruits and grain and no alcohol, meat or spices, with hydropathy, or water cures, becoming popular in the eighteen forties and fifties. He treated masturbation and excessive sex as causes of disease, and he invented the Graham cracker in eighteen twenty-nine.

The science of the mind.

USH1 1856 Phrenology

Phrenology was the mapping of the cranium to specific human attributes, holding that the mind contained thirty-seven faculties whose strength could be read from the shape of the skull. Franz Joseph Gall developed it in Europe and the practice reached the United States in the eighteen twenties. The anchor notes that while phrenology is pseudoscience, Gall's underlying claim that different parts of the brain govern different functions was an important advance in understanding the organ. It promised to read a stranger's character as a set of known faculties, at a moment when Americans were surrounded by strangers, and the anchor explains its popularity by the desire of people in a rapidly changing society, where older ties to community and family were being challenged, to understand one another. Set it beside the polygenism of Unit Twelve. Both are cranial pseudoscience of the same decades, and one sorted strangers while the other argued that Black and White people were separate species.

Two entries on the convention, and the second is the sharpest thing in this lecture.

The convention at last.

USH1 1857 Seneca Falls

About three hundred women and men, many of them drawn from abolition, met at Seneca Falls, New York in eighteen forty-eight in a convention organised by Mott and Stanton, the first of what became a series of continuing annual gatherings. They adopted a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, and they modelled it deliberately on the Declaration of Independence.

What they changed in it.

USH1 1858 The Alteration

The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments works by rewriting the smallest possible number of words in the founding text, and there are three changes worth knowing. The equality clause of seventeen seventy-six holds that all men are created equal. The eighteen forty-eight document holds that all men and women are created equal. The seventeen seventy-six text speaks of certain unalienable rights and the later one of certain inalienable rights, which is a variation in wording rather than in meaning. And the grievance clause is transformed. The Declaration of Independence states that the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments states that the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. The third change is the sharpest and it is the one usually missed. In seventeen seventy-six the tyrant is one named man, a king, and the remedy is independence from his government. In eighteen forty-eight the tyrant is men collectively, and the rest of the sentence is left standing. That substitution makes the grievance permanent and domestic rather than political and foreign, and it means the remedy cannot be separation. Note also what the strategy costs and what it buys. By borrowing the most familiar sentence in American public life, the convention made its claim impossible to dismiss as foreign or novel, and it bound its cause to a document its opponents also revered. Unit Six covered the original, including its reference to merciless Indian savages, which is a reminder that a founding text can be claimed by people it did not include.

Two entries on the woman who challenged both movements from inside them.

Sojourner Truth.

USH1 1859 Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree into slavery and gained her freedom in eighteen twenty-six, then devoted herself to abolition and to women's rights. She sued to secure her son's freedom and won, the first Black woman to do so. Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both supported her, and she challenged both of their movements from inside them.

What she challenged.

USH1 1860 What Truth Challenged

Truth questioned the priority given to men within abolitionism and the priority given to White women within the women's rights movement. Some advocated a sequence in which White women would gain the vote first and Black women later, and Truth opposed that framework directly. Her speech at the Akron women's rights convention in eighteen fifty-one is the best-known statement of the position, arguing that she had as much muscle as any man and could do as much work, that she had ploughed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and asking why, if woman had a pint and man a quart, she could not have her little pint full. Truth's argument exposes what that earlier comparison conceals. The claim that women were like enslaved people was made by women who were not enslaved, and it treated womanhood as a single condition. Truth had done field labour that the ideology of female delicacy said women could not do, which refutes the premise by testimony rather than by argument. The two movements shared people and methods, and they did not share a single account of who needed what.

One entry now, and it is where a method this course taught in Unit Two finally pays off.

The problem with the speech.

USH1 1861 Two Versions of One Speech

The speech survives in two published versions and they are not the same. Reverend Marius Robinson published a transcription in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in eighteen fifty-one, the year it was delivered. Frances Dana Gage published a different version in the Anti-Slavery Standard in eighteen sixty-three, twelve years later, during the Civil War. The famous refrain by which the speech is now known belongs to the later of the two versions. This is the payoff of Unit Two, where the course first taught reading a document against its author's motive. Apply the same method here and ask what each version was for. Robinson was reporting a convention for readers who might have attended it. Gage was writing during a war over slavery, for readers who needed a symbol. Neither is necessarily dishonest and they cannot both be verbatim. The honest position is the anchor's, which is to record both and attribute each.

One entry to close the unit, and it points at where the two movements come apart.

After Seneca Falls.

USH1 1862 After Seneca Falls

Some participants in abolition embraced feminism openly, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony, and Anthony and Stanton later founded the Woman's National Loyal League during the war. They sought a million signatures petitioning Congress to end slavery. The two movements ran together until the Reconstruction amendments divided them.

Look at what you can now do. You can state the three changes at Seneca Falls: all men and women created equal, a wording variation between unalienable and inalienable that carries no change in meaning, and the grievance clause, where a named king becomes mankind collectively — which makes the grievance permanent and domestic, so the remedy cannot be separation. You can explain what antislavery gave the women's movement, which was a vocabulary of rights and a training in political method, inside organisations that would not let them lead. You can explain what Truth exposed, which is that the comparison at the movement's centre was made by women who were not enslaved and treated womanhood as one condition, and that she refuted it by testimony about work she had actually done. You can state the honest position on her speech, which is that two versions exist, the famous refrain belongs to the later one published twelve years after, and both should be recorded and attributed. And you can explain why phrenology caught on, which is that it promised to read strangers in a society full of them.