First Wave of Fem. Notes

1
First Wave Feminism and the
• Primary (public) focus on female citizenship
– And the suffrage movement
• But also (less public, less clearly identified as
“feminist”) focus on challenging assumptions
about women’s “essential natures”

Abolitionism and Feminism
• First Wave Feminist activism grew out of
Abolitionism
– Which in itself led to the rise of a suffragist
movement
• Originally to ensure the ending of slavery
– Because it was assumed that women as a group would
end slavery if given the vote

• But later as a basic human right
– That had been denied women politically
– In this latter sense, it needed to disprove theories about
women’s supposed inability to exercise citizenship on
their own behalf.

Abolitionism as both
Inspiration and Experience
• Women’s moral opposition to slavery
– Part of Second Great Awakening
• But also source for political experience
– In abolitionist societies
• Such as the Boston Women’s Antislavery Society
– And as a place where women’s discourse
could be heard

• In part because of the support of leaders like
William Lloyd Garrison
• And because women were speaking to OTHER
women as well as society as a whole.
Women’s Voices in Abolitionism
• One of the chief sites where women’s
political voices can be heard in nineteenthcentury
America
• And even more interesting, a site where
women of broad class and race
backgrounds leave their publiclyexpressed
political thoughts behind for us
to rediscover.

Maria W. Stewart (1803-79)
• One America's first black
women political writers.
• In 1832, in Boston, she
mounted lecture platform
to speak to assembled
crowd of men and
women (promiscuous
assembly) against the
colonization movement, a
scheme to expatriate
black Americans back to
West Africa.
• Her public career was
barely 3 years long.
2

Maria W. Stewart
• After husband (a free black shipfitter) died in
1829, underwent religious conversion and gave
self over to career of secular ministry of political
and religious witness.
• Stewart published a political pamphlet, a
collection of religious meditations and delivered
4 public lectures which were later printed.
• Took public stage after the mysterious death of
David Walker, a black Boston author of an
inflammatory pamphlet “Walker's Appeal,” a call
for slave rebellion in the American South.
Maria W. Stewart
• Stewart knew that she too faced danger
for her unpopular political and abolitionist
beliefs, perhaps especially because of her
race.
• "Many will suffer for pleading the cause of
oppressed Africa," she wrote, "and I shall
glory in being one of her martyrs.“
• Criticized Boston white society for racism
and segregation, but ALSO criticized
Boston’s free black community for its
passivity and “cooperation” with slavery.
Maria W. Stewart
• Argued that women had not only the right
but the duty to speak up about oppression
• Especially those who were “doubly
oppressed” by their race AND gender
• Women must speak on behalf of each
other and children
– Esp. on behalf of unprotected women (like
herself)
– Who were targeted because of the double
standard
Positing Sisterhood
• Angelina Grimké’s
"Appeal to Christian
Women of the South,"
and "Appeal to Women
of Nominally Free
States"
• Theme of both
appeals:
– sisterhood of black and
white women.
– "The female slaves are
Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
• Angelina Grimké's
"Appeal to Women in
Nominally Free
States," which came
out of the 2nd annual
women's antislavery
convention:
• "In consequence of the
odium which the
degradation of slavery has
Positing Sisterhood
• Both appeals, those of sisterhood and of
the degradation of both black and white by
the existence of slavery, promoted political
activism among women based on the
familiar ideas characterizing the cult of true
womanhood: women had greater moral
virtue, sensitivity, and piety.
Positing Sisterhood
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Sojourner Truth
(1797-1883)
• Part of Second Great
Awakening
• And attacked the
exclusion of Black women
from the category of
womanhood – “Ain’t I a
Woman?” – in the midst
of her argument for
women’s suffrage
(delivered 1851, at
Women's Convention,
Akron, Ohio):
Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t a Woman?” (1851)
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the
negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty
soon. But what's all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have
the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any
best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered
into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a
man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children,
and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!
And ain't I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"]
That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint,
and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a
woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!
Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women
together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the
men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.
Abolitionism and Feminism

• Abolitionism is the pre-history of the
Woman’s Rights movement in the U.S.
• Where “First Wave Feminism” is born and
tempered
• The internal politics of the Abolitionist
movement itself creates feminist
consciousness and trains women to be
able to conceptualize and express it.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• Within moral reform movement, women
had to fight for their voices to be heard
– But they also believed, because of “Female
Moral Authority,” that women were morally
compelled to speak
– So those who silenced them were, by
definition, immoral.
• Even if the silencers were clergymen or otherwise
moral leaders.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• The abolitionist movement taught women how to
organize
– Abolitionist women emerged as leaders on a local and national
level
• It was a small step for these leaders to argue that the
most expedient way to end slavery was to give women
(who were assumed to be antislavery as a group) the
vote.
– There was an assumption that even Southern women would vote
to end slavery.
• When abolitionist women argued at Seneca Falls in 1848
that women needed the vote, many female leaders
transferred their activism to feminist activity in addition to
abolition.
– For abolitionist women after 1848, suffragism and abolitionism
became the SAME movement.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• First Wave Feminism developed within
abolitionism because:
– A) women in their struggle to speak and to
counteract the proslavery church and sexist
clergy of the north developed a consciousness
of their own oppression
– B) Garrisonian abolition taught women what to
do with that perception and how to make a
movement.
• It gave women the ability to analyze institutions and
provided them with the assumption that absolute
human equality was a first principle in both morality
and politics.
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Abolitionism and Feminism
• This linkage between abolition and feminism appears
even before 1848
– See, for example, the 1836 "Annual Report" of the Boston
Female Anti-Slavery Society.
• “We sometimes, but not often, hear it said--
‘[Abolitionism] is such an odd, unladylike thing to do.'
We concede that the human soul, in the full exercise
of its most God-like power of self-denial and exertion
for the good of others, is, emphatically, a very
unladylike thing. We have never heard this objection,
but from that sort of a woman who is dead while she
lives, or to be pitied as the victim of domestic tyranny.
The woman who makes it, is generally one who has
struggled from childhood up to womanhood, through a
process of spiritual suffocation. (cont.)
Abolitionism and Feminism
• This linkage between abolition and feminism appears even
before 1848
– See, for example, the 1836 "Annual Report" of the Boston Female Anti-
Slavery Society.

• “…Her infancy was passed in serving as a convenience for the
display of elegant baby linen. Her youth, in training for a more
public display of braiding the hair, and wearing of gold, and
putting on of apparel…. This is the woman who tells us it is
unladylike to ask that children may no longer be sold away from
their parents, or wives from their husbands, in the District of
Columbia, and adds, 'they ought to be mobbed who ask it.' We
present her the only argument she can comprehend — the fact
that 80,000 of the noblest among the matronage of England,
have annually entreated of their government, to do all in its
power for the extinctions of slavery, till they prevailed.” -- (3rd
Annual Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society
(1836), p. 26.)

Ideology: Sexual difference
• In 1870-1890, many suffragists, such as
Stanton and Anthony, argued that women were
human beings first and females second.
– Important argument because
• it implied that the lives of women consisted
of more than their sex roles or their
biological capacity for childrearing.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• This “sexual difference” argument challenged
the 19th-century views
– that the family was the basic social unit and
that the male head of the family was the link
between the family and the broader society
(both politically and economically).
– that men knew the best interests of women
and that, within marriage, the interests of
husband and wife were inseparable and
united.
– that men acted in the interests of women and
children when they represented them at the
polls and in their political deliberations.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• The suffragists proclaimed that the interests of
all women, those who married and those who
did not, were denied by their absence from the
political world.
• These suffragists challenged the male monopoly
on citizenship in the interests of sexual equality.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Suffragists expected women to use the vote to
open the public sphere to women
– so that as women gained greater rights in the
public world,
– they would demand more rights in the private
arena, such as:
• divorce,
• the right to pursue self-expression,
• self-actualization,
• the right to control their own bodies in marriage,
• the right to protect themselves from male lust and
violence, etc.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Women with the vote could then protect
themselves and pursue their own intellectual,
occupational, spiritual development free from
dependence upon men and fully equal to them.
• In arguing for women’s citizenship
because of their equality first, suffragists
attacked the concept of “true
womanhood,” even the politically
expedient variant of “female moral
authority”
Ideology: Sexual difference
• But in the 1870s, suffragists argued that
while this might be true, women should be
given the vote because they were equal as
human beings, as individuals.
• If given equal access to education and
opportunity, women could achieve at the
same level that men could, even if they
would still be different from men.
• This point is FEMINISM – First Wave
Feminism.
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Ideology: Sexual difference
• Yet, even while arguing for equality,
suffragists continued to argue that women
were different from men – and that women
voters would vote differently (in a positive
sense) than would men.
• Suffragists argued that women’s votes –
hard-won and thus appreciated – would be
less corruptible than men’s (especially the
votes of immigrants – but more on that
later).
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Indeed, women could be counted upon to
use their votes to do the civic work that
they did in their own households: “Social
Housekeeping”
• Women would teach children, clean up
urban messes, care for the sick and
elderly, and create a more humane and
less corrupt society if they were allowed to
vote.
• See for example, Jane Addams:
Ideology: Jane Addams & Social Housekeeping
• “[Life in] the modern city is ... going badly
[because] the quickly-congregated
population has not yet learned to arrange
its affairs satisfactorily. Unsanitary
housing, poisonous sewage,
contaminated water, infant mortality, the
spread of contagion, adulterated food,
impure milk, smoke-laden air, illventilated
factories, dangerous
occupations, juvenile crime,
unwholesome crowding, prostitution and
drunkenness are the enemies which the
modem cities must face and overcome,
would they survive. Logically their
electorate should be made up of those
who can bear a valiant part in this
arduous context, those who in the past
have at least attempted to care for
children, to clean houses, to prepare
foods, to isolate the family from moral
dangers.... (cont.)
Ideology – Jane Addams & Social Housekeeping
• “…City housekeeping has failed partly
because women, the traditional
housekeepers, have not been
consulted.... The men have been
carelessly indifferent to much of this civic
housekeeping, as they have always been
indifferent to the details of the household.
The very multifariousness and
complexity of a city government demand
the help of minds accustomed to detail
and variety of work, to a sense of
obligation for the health and welfare of
young children and to a responsibility for
the cleanliness and comfort of other
people. Because all these things have
traditionally been in the hands of women,
if they take no part in them now they are
not only missing the education which the
natural participation in civic life would
bring to them but they are losing what
they have always had."
Challenge: Racism and Ethnocentricity in the Movement
• Anthony used the “Race Card”
• This led many Black First wave feminists to
organize separately.
• In 1896, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-
Barnett, Margaret Murray Washington, Fanny
Jackson Coppin, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, and former
slave Harriet Tubman meet in Washington,
D.C., to form the National Association of
Colored Women (NACW).
– And, of necessity, they will have to address issues
of race (esp. lynching)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
“A white woman has only one
handicap to overcome, a great
one, true, her sex; a colored
woman faces two-her sex and her
race.” -- Mary Church Terrell
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Margaret Murray Washington
Charlotte Forten Grimké
Racism and Ethnocentricity
• Although the later phase of First Wave
Feminism will reflect efforts to invite
African American women back into the
movement
– Women of color will be understandably wary
• The strategies of the second phase of
suffrage will create a serious chasm
between white feminists and feminists of
color which is still being felt in the
feminist movement today.
– And which may even render feminism
irrelevant to many women today

(notes by prof. lavendar)