Feminism and the Women's Movement

Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism

Barbara Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317796091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Feminism and the Women's Movement, Barbara Ryan integrates a broad historical view with an analytical framework drawn from the theory of social movements. Relying on participation and observation of diverse groups involved in the woman's movement, interviews with long-term activists, and readings of historical and contemporary movement publications, she discusses the changing nature of feminist ideology and movement organizing. Ryan portrays the successes and difficulties that women have faced in their efforts to effect social change in recent history.

Chapter 1

The Early Woman’s Movement: From Equal Rights to Suffrage

But I ask no favors for my sex, surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.

(Sarah Grimke, 1837)¹

Early women’s rights advocates began their activism by thinking that women’s secondary position in society was the result of some mistake, an oversight, carried on through ignorance and custom, to be righted by bringing the matter to public attention. In the nineteenth century, women’s rights advocates embarked on a mission to inform the public of the need for change in women’s status in the social system. They undertook a variety of issues, eventually focusing on the vote as a necessary step in the process of having a say in the social and political decisions over their lives. A simple enough demand in a democracy premised on citizenship participation. But the history of the early woman’s movement reveals another story altogether.

Beginning with the first call for the franchise in 1848, over 500 separate campaigns were launched in the years it took to achieve women’s suffrage. These included 56 state referendum campaigns, 277 separate efforts to persuade state party conventions to add women’s suffrage to their planks, 19 congressional battles, and the ratification campaign in 1919 and 1920 (Kraditor 1981; Papachristou 1976; Blatch and Lutz 1940; Catt and Shuler 1923). Susan B. Anthony traveled the country speaking on women’s rights and suffrage for over 40 years (Barry 1988). Elizabeth Cady Stanton engaged in lyceum trips, those “long weary pilgrimages from Maine to Texas, that lasted twelve years; speaking steadily for eight months—from October to June” (Stanton and Blatch 1922: 218). More than 200 suffragists were arrested, eventually to be vindicated by an appeals court which ruled their arrests and imprisonment illegal, but not before many had suffered imprisonment and forced feedings. Yet, a century later we are informed that:

One of the easiest victories of the democratic cause in American history has been the struggle for the extension of the suffrage . . . . The struggle for the ballot was almost bloodless, almost completely peaceful and astonishingly easy. Indeed the bulk of the newly enfranchised, including Negroes and nearly all women, won battles they never fought. (Schattschneider 1960: 100)

That the denial of suffrage was only one of many wrongs women set out to right, and that this one issue took 72 years to win, is lost in Schattschneider’s description. In calling the achievement of women’s suffrage “astonishingly easy,” whole generations of women’s lives are negated. In addition, the resistance to women changing conceptions of themselves and their place in society is obscured.

In actuality, the first U.S. woman’s movement had a long and varied history involving many aspects of social movement change. Indeed, the fact that this first wave of the women’s movement had a markable beginning and end makes it readily assessible for examining issues pertaining to the origin, spread, and decline of a social movement.

The Origins of the Woman’s Rights Movement

When the woman’s movement began many people had never seriously entertained the thought that women’s role might be differently arranged than it was. But the idea of women’s rights was not new. Preceding the rise of an organized women’s movement, debates on the equality of the sexes can be traced back to much earlier historical periods. For instance, written protests are found in the eighteenth century, most notably with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. Published in England in 1792, Wollstonecraft was about 50 years ahead of her time, and this publication was generally met with ridicule by women and men alike. However, she did find readers in the United States as two editions were published and a synopsis of her work was printed in 1792 in The Lady’s Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge.

The first tract on women’s equality to be taken seriously, and to gain wide- spread recognition, was by John Stuart Mill. In 1861 he published The Subjection of Women (see Mill 1970), an intellectual analysis of women’s position in society, developed over a 28-year working relationship with Harriet Taylor. Through this publication Mill is often credited with providing the liberal philosophy which spawned the ideology of the woman’s rights movement. However, this assertion fails to take into consideration the collaboration of Mill with Taylor, and, in particular, the influence of Taylor’s more feminist views.²

In addition, the development of the woman’s movement precedes the publication of Mill’s article. An organized woman’s movement began in the United States in 1848 when the first women’s rights conference was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Although this conference is considered the beginning of the U.S. woman’s rights movement, the roots of 1848 go back to the tum of the century and are found in a number of parallel developments, beginning with women’s activism in moral reform causes.

Philanthropy and feminist consciousness raising

In the early 1800s, women began working for reform in the areas of prostitution and prisons. Women’s involvement in these issues almost always began through church auxiliaries and, in accordance with the dictates of the times, were separate from male reform organizations. Over time this church-related activity developed into an accepted role for women outside the home: benevolent philanthropy.

There were two important outcomes for women working in moral reform societies. First, they were able to develop confidence in their ability to organize and get things done. In recognizing their own capabilities, women began to cultivate “both a sense of personal worth and a pride in their sex” (Berg 1978: 193). And second, they developed a conscious awareness of themselves and other women as a sex category.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the spread of industrialization and urbanization created both misery and affluence side by side. Middle-class women, being beneficiaries of the latter, had time for outside activities. Through their charity work they became aware of class inequalities; but even more starkly, they were confronted with the negative effects of gender differentiation. Women, they knew, were a group separate from men. Still, as they could see when they began associating with those less fortunate than themselves, women did not constitute a unified group equally affected by their sex classification. Early philanthropy was centered on poor widows, unmarried mothers, and prostitutes; the mission for the middle-class woman was to help these lost souls convert to a better way of life (Hogeland 1976). However, interactions with prostitutes and poor women led reformers to feel that the problem was not deviant women; rather it was a social problem created by an unfair system. Deviant women were, after all, only women who did not have a male protector. Indeed, without the men who supported them, what would their own situation be?

Rather than instilling a feeling of superiority, reform work left middle-class women feeling vulnerable. In a remarkable tum of events, philanthropist women identified with “deviant” women, emphasizing the similarities of women rather than the differences (Berg 1978). Here then was a germ of feminist thinking, a reversal of de Beauvoir’s conception of women as “other”—that “moment in woman’s self-perception, when she begins to see man as ‘the other’ . . . when her feminist self-consciousness begins” (Lerner 1977: xxiii).

Philosophical and religious influences

Women had been influenced as much as men by the libertarian sentiments generated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (O’Neill 1969). Closer to home, the American Revolution provided an ideology which, at least in theory, legitimized the idea of sex equality. Nevertheless, when applied to women, there were other material and ideological beliefs overriding the philosophy of the new democracy. During much of the 1800s, both by law and by custom, women were considered “non-persons.” African-American women who were slaves had no rights at all, while other women were restricted in their opportunities for self-support through poverty wages. Married women were prevented by English Common Law from inheriting property, controlling their own earnings, or retaining custody of their children upon divorce. No woman could serve on a jury or vote on the laws that governed them (Bjorkman and Porritt 1917).

The law was a powerful restraining force on the emancipation of women, but an equally strong restraint was the religious principles which maintained wives’ rightful subordination to their husbands. On the other hand, the power of religious ideology was a motivating factor for some women. Many of the early activists were first initiated into a consideration of women’s equality through the practices of their Quaker religion. Another religious support was the evangelist revival begun in the late 1700s.

The new evangelism was a refutation of fundamental beliefs found in Calvinism, most importantly the belief in predestination. The puritan work ethic, derived from Calvinism’s ethos of hard work and frugality, was based on a belief in having been chosen by God at birth for a heavenly afterlife. The way one knew they had been chosen was revealed in their success in their present life through clean living, equated with hard work. Such beliefs set the stage for the accumulation of surplus, a necessary precondition for the growth of a capitalist economic system in the new society. Over time, as capital accumulated, the proof of one’s chosen state was displayed through ornate homes and leisure consumption. Symbolically, non-employed and elaborately adorned wives be- came part of this display, described by Thorstein Veblen (1899) as conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.

In opposition to the increasingly distorted beliefs and practices of Calvinism, the wellspring of revivalism was that good works, not predestination, were your passage to heaven. One could earn their way in.

The evangelist revival presented a doctrine of perfectionism in which there was an “acceptance of an obligation to perfect oneself and one’s community” (Griffith 1984: 20). Thus began a spirit of reform which influenced the spread of most early nineteenth-century social movements. The major contribution evangelism made to women’s advance was to encourage activist participation in church work. Many women were attracted to this revivalism, and “Congregational Presbyterian women began to do in the late 1820s what only Quaker women had been able to do up to this juncture—to speak in public” (Rossi 1973: 257).

The educated woman

Aside from a Quaker or revivalist background, the most common feature women activists shared was an educated background. Education for slaves was non-existent and for non-salve women suppressed. Before an organized woman’s movement began, middle-class women were agitating for the right to higher education. Arguments were put forth in terms of the benefits to be accrued to the husband and children of educated mothers and wives. Believing this to be true, Emma Willard petitioned New York legislators for funding to open a female seminary which would offer courses in the tradition of men’s. colleges. The state refused her request, but in 1821 she opened Troy Female Seminary with local tax money. Even as Willard espoused a traditional role for women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a student at Troy, found a role model in Willard as a person with self-respect and dignity. Given the liberating effects of education, it is not surprising to learn that women who graduated from Troy did not follow traditional gender role expectations. In spite of the fact that Willard’s goal was to make better wives and mothers, “her pupils were less likely to marry than women in general and, if married, they bore fewer children than their contemporaries” (Scott 1984: 80).

In 1833 Oberlin College opened its doors to all races, creeds, and sexes. Initially women were admitted so that they might be trained for their future role as proper minister’s wives and for the calming influence they might exert on boisterous male students (Hogeland 1976). Overriding the known subversive elements of an educated mind, women were allowed to slip into the universities. This mistake was explicitly discovered when some of the first Oberlin graduates, instead of being cultured appendages of their husbands, began breaking down gender barriers. Early graduates included Lucy Stone, soon to become a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement, and her sister-in-law Antoinette Brown, first woman to become an ordained minister.

For activist women, education was seen as a chance for women to improve their own lives, as well as a vehicle for changing traditional views of women held by the rest of society. The Enlightenment conviction that reason paves the way to progress lay at the base of most progressive social movements of this period. Rational principles generated in women an “enthusiastic, if naive, belief in education as the cure-all for human ignorance and corruption” (Rossi 1973: 3). Thus, it was educated women who began the woman’s rights movement, convinced that, by educating the populace about the injustice of women’s position, equitable laws and practices would follow.

Temperance and abolition work

An important reform movement which moved women into the public arena was temperance. In the l830s hundreds of church-related temperance societies with women’s auxiliaries were formed. Unlike early philanthropists, women who joined the temperance movement did not do so solely for altruistic reasons. Although temperance began as a campaign based on moralistic and ethical standards of behavior, a husband’s consumption of alcohol could be destructive to his wife’s life because married women were dependent on and subject to their husband. Women temperance workers did not generally believe in women’s equality; they wanted restrictions on alcohol use in order to maintain a secure “moral” family life. Nevertheless, they were involved in an attempt to change gender relations since it was men’s behavior they were trying to regulate.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton publicly connected temperance and women’s rights by advocating divorce when alcoholism was present. Shocking as this was to most reformers at the time, within a few years they began to feel that “temperance was a matter of women’s rights as well as a religious and humanitarian reform” (Papachristou 1976: 19). In 1849 Amelia Bloomer established The Lily, a temperance newspaper, which also became a voice for women’s suffrage when Stanton began contributing articles under the pseudonym “Sunflower” (Griffith 1984: 64).

Social reformers tended to be involved with multiple issues: temperance, moral reform and, the cause which was most likely to lead women into activism in their own behalf, abolition. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown, and the Grimke sisters were all involved in efforts to eliminate slavery. In the early 1830s when anti-slavery societies were formed, Lucretia Mott was present at the organizing meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. None of the women in attendance were allowed to sign the founding document, but Mott asked for and was given permission to speak. A short time later she helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (Papachristou 1976: 3–4) and later was one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Conference.

In the course of speaking against slavery and the criticism they received for this activity, female abolition workers became self-consciously aware of women’s subordinate position. Frances Wright, a British-born activist, publicly attacked the idea of an “appropriate sphere of woman” and shocked audiences when she lectured on the combined issues of anti-slavery, social reform, and women’s rights. Two American speakers to confront criticism were Angelina and Sarah Grirnke, who studied under Theodore Weld, an advocate of women’s participation in the evangelism movement. In their lecture tours with the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Grirnke sisters often received a negative reception-not on the content of their abolition talk, but because they were women speaking in public. As a result, they began including the issue of women’s rights in their lectures. Talk of women’s rights, though, antagonized many of the clergy and abolitionist s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Early Woman’s Movement: From Equal Rights to Suffrage
• Chapter 2: The Woman’s Suffrage Movement and the Aftermath of Victory
• Chapter 3: Resurgence of Feminism: The Contemporary Women’s Movement
• Chapter 4: Ideological Purity: Divisions, Splits, and Trashing
• Chapter 5: Social Movement Transformation: the Women’s Movement from 1975 to 1982
• Chapter 6: Changing Orientations in Ideology and Activism
• Chapter 7: American Women and the Women’s Movement during the Reagan/Bush Years
• Chapter 8: Divisions Revisited: Pornography, Essentialism/Nominalism, Class and Race
• Chapter 9: The Search for a New Mobilizing Issue: The Women’s Movement after the ERA
• Chapter 10: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index