Seneca Falls Essay Example For Students

Seneca Falls Essay One hundred and fifty years ago this summer, in the little country town of SENECA FALLS in upstate New York, several dozen excited women and a few interested men held the first meeting in the world devoted solely to womens rights. It was 1848, the springtime of the peoples in Europe; and, although these Americans were far removed from the emancipatory proclamations in Europe, they caught the fever and produced one of their own, the Declaration of Sentiments: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. Compared to the apocalypticism of The Communist Manifesto, another product of that year, the SENECA FALLS Declaration seems modest, a relic of right-thinking republicanism rather than a portent of wrenching revolutionary transformation. Yet its effects were destined to be no less profound, and far more benign. The gathering in 1848 emerged from a long, fitfully articulated history of womens grievances, though the participants were not aware of it. The interruption of historical memory and, in its absence, the strains of improvising a politics of grievance on the spot, have always characterized this tradition. The written record of female protest extends back to the late middle ages, to the French woman of letters Christine de Pizan and her Book of the City of Ladies. It was in the late eighteenth century, however, that the language of the rights of man gained momentum around the northern Atlantic world, shifting the idea of justice for women out of the register of utopia to make it, for a few highly politicized women in the age of revolution, a plausible goal in the here and now. Thus, in 1776, Abigail Adams admonished her patriot husband, away in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, to remember the ladies in their declarations, a nudge tempered by coyness but at heart quite serious. Later, in Paris, groups of women in the early days of the Revolution protested, unsuccessfully, their exclusion from representation and the franchise. And the excitement of the revolutionary debate in France stirred the young English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who was trying to earn her own living outside a mans household. In 1792 she produced, in a few red-hot months, her sensational Vindication of the Rights of Women, the first full-scale argument for womens equality. The Americans of the middle of the nineteenth century knew little or nothing about these earlier claims and events, which were erased by the revanche against the French Revolution. The intertwined devils of Jacobinism and sexual irregularity tainted the reputation of Wollstonecraft, who died in 1797 giving birth to a child out of wedlock. (The baby grew up to be Mary Shelley. The Vindication passed out of print, and with it any knowledge that a woman had spent concentrated intellectual labor in reflection upon the oddity of her sexs inability to profit from the universal rights of man. The absence of an accessible tradition makes the Americans resourcefulness all the more remarkable. In the 1830s, a few firebrands of gender subversion wandered around the English-speaking world, representatives of the utopian socialist fringe where revolutionary womens rights still flickered: Fanny Wright, for example, a labor radical and an early advocate of contraception. Yet such sensations operated at a remove from the respectable ladies who called the meeting at SENECA FALLS. For them, there was no living memory of advocacy for womens rights. In the 1830s, as the struggle to end slavery accelerated, women in the inner circles of abolitionism began to stretch the metaphor of enslavement to encompass their own situations. The energy of extrapolation, rather than the confidence of tradition, galvanized their thinking. The analogy of woman and slave was by turns histrionic, sentimental, and brilliantly revealing, given all the actual ways in which men had the ability to coerce and to constrain wives and daughters, and given the legal fact that wives and daughters were, to some degree, the property of their husbands and fathers. Thine in the bonds of womanhood, the Southern ex-slaveholding renegade Sarah Grimke signed each of her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), a paraphrase of the bonds of slavery designed to detonate regular provocations throughout the text. The controversy over womens proper role was one of several differences that split the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. The nub of the issue was a womans right to follow the dictates of her conscience into public protest. The conversion of Sarah Grimke and her sister Angelina, daughters of a leading South Carolina family, to the cause immediately made them prized speakers on the antislavery circuit. Yet the prohibitions against women exposing themselves to audiences including men were so strong that leading New England clergymen threatened to withdraw their support from the movement unless the Grimkes retired. In free black circles, too, women became dedicated antislavery activists: Maria Stewarts public lectures aroused concerted opposition from African American men, as Suzanne Marilley discovers in her interesting book. The radicals led by William Lloyd Garrisonthe immediatists who pressed for an unconditional end to slaverybacked the Grimkes. The moderates in antislavery politicsgradualists who believed in courting mainstream opinionlined up with the clergy to send the women back home. The ruckus spread through the ranks, carried by the fevered gossip of protest politics as well as by Sarah Grimkes published Letters, a truculent rejoinder to the ministers. The result can be glimpsed in a letter from 1841, reprinted early on in Ann D. Gordons captivating first volume of Elizabeth Cady STANTONs and Susan B. Anthonys papers. Elizabeth Cady STANTON came of age in upstate New York, a hotbed of all sorts of reform, where the debate over womans nature was a muted clamor in the background. Newly married to Henry STANTON, an antislavery pragmatist who had broken with Garrison, STANTON refused to abjure her own loyalties to the womens rights wing of abolition. In language echoing Sarah Grimkes, the young wife declared herself preeminently an independent morally responsible being, answerable not to her husband but to a higher authority. I do in truth think act for myself deeming that I alone am responsible for the sayings doings of E. C. S. Elizabeth Cady STANTON was twenty-four when this volume of the Selected Papers begins. She was the daughter of a distinguished and well-heeled family: her mother was from the great New York land-holding Livingston clan, her father made his name in politics and the law. She benefited from the best education available to girls in antebellum America, which meant access to a good library (her fathers) and a stint at Emma Willards boarding school for girls, which was the first attempt to provide a serious curriculum beyond the ladies academies regime of French and music. No college and no career awaited a student upon leaving Willards, and so, in the early 1840s, the newlywed settled into provincial domesticity. Voracious for life and ideas, Mr. STANTONs wife must have been a handful. On the honeymoon trip that she and Henry took in 1840 to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, he found her capacity for fearless conversation irritating. Henry admonished her, she dutifully wrote a cousin, for her lack of discretion; she was too gay, she talked too much, she professed her views on slavery before people who knew much more than she did. Yet Lucretia Mott, an older Quaker abolitionist of great distinction, found her enchanting, an open generous confiding spirit. The two immediately forged a bond. In London, the British forbade the women to participate in the convention and cordoned them off in a balcony behind a curtain, setting off a bitter floor fight that the Garrison faction lost. STANTON and Mott sat in seclusion with the others for three days and fumed. They vowed to hold a meeting on womens rights when they returned to the States. But the plan lay fallow for years: Philadelphia was a long way from upstate New York, and STANTON was preoccupied with having babiesthere would be seven over the course of nineteen years, the last in 1859and managing a large household. Throughout the 1840s, there was scant letter-writing. STANTON seems to have bided her time at the edge of history, waiting to jump. Like other abolitionists, she had an acute sense of historical calling that translated, psychologically, into a belief that it was only a matter of time before her own hunger for change became general. She seldom fell prey to the dissenters depleting fear that her grievances were superfluous. She was sociable, and blessed with an optimistic outlook. She was also given to cheerful indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh: guiltless overeating (by the 1850s she was plump, and heading toward obesity) and perhaps guiltless sex (the marriage was chilly, but the seven babies make one wonder). They say I am good natured, generous, always well happy, she matter-of-factly informed a friend. She popped out most of her babies with aplomb: a twelve-pound Margaret was born after STANTON lay down for fifteen minutes. As a mother, she was confident and warm, particularly intelligent and loving, Ellen DuBois tells us in her biography of STANTONs second daughter, Harriot. When Mott visited relatives nearby in the summer of 1848, STANTON mobilized immediately. She may or may not have read Mary Wollstonecraft, but in any case she knew exactly the place in history that she wished to stake out: the first womans rights convention that has ever assembled, she stressed to a neighbor. Her circle of friends, crack political organizers by virtue of their years in what Suzanne Marilley nicely terms the free space of Garrisonian antislavery work, threw together the meeting in three days. They worried that the attendance would be small: it was high summerbusy on the farms, hot and slow in town. Yet a substantial crowd gathered, about two-thirds women and one-third men. The Declaration of Sentiments produced at SENECA FALLS went far beyond Wollstonecrafts Vindication in its list of injustices. In lofty abolitionist-inspired rhetoric, the signers pointed out that women were legally the subjects of their husbands and fathers; that wives could not hold property in their own names; that divorce was an economic and social disaster for women; that they could not go to college or become doctors, lawyers, or clergy; that no decently paid work was open to them; and so forth. The culprit was man: He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God. The perpetrators identity remained vague, a generic despot; but the pressure of the Declarations specific grievances was to make actual male people responsible. This conception of the effects of male power over women came from the images of subjugation in Grimkes Letterstake your feet off our backs, Grimke urged her male readers, and let us stand upright on the ground God designed us to occupyand produced a detailed view of the resulting social debilities. In retrospect, it marked a turning point. For Wollstonecraft had little use for her sex as it was presently constituted: the Vindication tended to blame either womens supposedly thwarted characters or the lack of reasonable education for the handicaps that they suffered. The Declaration of Sentiments, by contrast, was a firm defense of women as they were, poised to exercise their God-given capacities were it not for men. In its implicit ideas about the workings of power, you catch a faint echo of the clarion call of 1848: 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 remedies for which the signatories called were vague, tending toward a call for moral enlightenment for both men and women; but there was one point that was precise and political. This was the demand for womens suffrage, and it was STANTONs special contribution. The idea was startling. Women in revolutionary France had raised the issue, but nobody in England or America had ever broached it. Some of the organizers balked at the proposal; but Frederick Douglass, who attended the meeting, threw his considerable moral weight behind STANTON, and the resolution prevailed. It was the harbinger of a program that would eventually hold out to its participants, first in the United States, then in Britain, and then throughout the world, the epochal promise of equalizing, and even obliterating, the social effects of sexual difference. Susan B. Anthony was not at SENECA FALLS, though she lived nearby. Slightly younger than STANTON, Anthony was a schoolteacher in 1848, working to support herself and to help out with the failing fortunes of her debt-ridden family. Raised as a Quaker and sent, in the familys prosperous years, to a good Quaker boarding school for girls, Anthony was also up-to-date on abolition and reform, but her need to earn a living kept her from active involvement. In the contrasting textures of Anthonys and STANTONs letters in Selected Papers, more vivid differences also appear. Despite her provincial base, STANTON moved in a cosmopolitan Anglo-American milieu, intellectually and socially; her mind stretched to Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill, and Jane Eyre. Anthonys world, the upstate countryside, was a universe of pigs and parsnips, of the homey concerns of a large struggling family. The epistolary styles of the early correspondence are wonderfully revealing: STANTONs letters are lifted by the swooping cadences that the great nineteenth-century political minds used even in their most intimate letters, Anthonys letters are knotted intricately in the everyday particulars of money, work, and sickness. Do write very soon, she adjures the folks, tell me about the strawberries peaches, cherries plums. Joseph talks some of going with us going to his fathers Joshua and Elisha want to come too. I guess I will come home live this winter let Mary and Merritt go to Washington Co. The marvel is that Anthony ever lifted her head from her appointed furrow. It was difficult for anyone to extricate any kind of self from this kin-based country life of thick obligations, dependencies, and anxieties, but it was virtually impossible for a woman to do so. STANTONs difficulties in grabbing time away from her household to read and to write are more easily appreciable now: they are a little resonant with our own dilemmas of bourgeois busyness. But it was Anthony, the unmarried sister whose labor and time were claimed not by one family but by several, who had the harder time launching herself. It seems to me that no one feels that it is any thing out of the common course of things, for me to sacrifice my every feeling, almost principle, to gratify those with whom I have chance to mingle, she complained of one stint helping out a relative. Yet slowly she crafted an independent life, helped by her friendship with STANTON, which began in 1851. First in temperance work, and then in abolitionism combined with womens rights, Anthony found her voice as a speaker and her genius as an organizer. From her complicated, dutyridden family life she brought to political work a habit of altruism and a focus on details. Anthonys later persona in the womens movement was so much the workhorsethe stoic mother of us all, as Gertrude Stein called herthat it is jolting to realize that she was not yet thirty when she threw in her lot with the cause. She worked incessantly, often traveling alone by coach or even on foot. Although she seldom noted the costs, the stress of her young life can be glimpsed in her letters: the penny-pinching of organizational funds, the slogging on bad roads, the miserable crowds at lectures, the loneliness, the struggle to support herselfall that went into the cold hard labor of which she complained in a low moment. The Selected Papers uphold a nowcommon view of STANTON as the brains of the pair and Anthony as the dogsbody organizer, but the books offerings deepen the meaning of both roles. This was a different political and intellectual world, in which the determination to eradicate the evil of slavery gave drive and authority to all sorts of American lives, mixing up ideas and politics. The friendship had the consequence of attaching some of STANTONs intellectual boldness to Anthony the schoolteacher-organizer, and some of Anthonys political acumen to STANTON the cerebral housewife. Anthony thrilled to STANTONs leaps of the mind; and their sallies into the world helped to transform STANTON from a bold thinker into a political swashbuckler. In the human soul, the steps between discontent and action are few and short indeed, she once observed to her abolitionist cousin Gerrit Smith; and it was in large part Anthony who helped her to compress the distance. In the 1850s, each moved from the edges to the center of radical reform. STANTON did so by means of her prominence at SENECA FALLS, which instituted a loose organization for womens rights embodied in annual conventions. Anthony became a paid organizer for anti-slavery. The renewed interest in women was so strong in the ranks that female lecturers sometimes alternated topics: one night slavery, the next womens rights. The new pride of status, coupled with the exhilarating new friendship, unleashed in these extraordinary women a torrent of work that continued unabated through the Civil War. The political culture of the 1850s provided audiences with an enormous sense of political efficacy (even for disenfranchised women), and a rich repertoire of metaphors and images: of bondage, which STANTON translated into the mental bondage of undereducated, housebound women, and of universal democracy, the redolent term for a consortium of rights-bearing individuals. Ann Gordons subtitle for this first volume of the STANTON-Anthony Papers, In the School of Anti-Slavery, is apt, for Northeastern reform politics at midcentury were indeed a huge pedagogical effort in reasoning, arguing, writing, orating, and storytelling. STANTON and Anthony learned from their fellows a method that was closely reasoned and argumentative (rather than exhortatory and denunciatory, in the twentieth-century mode of left-wing persuasion). Long speeches and long articles geared to patient audiences turned upon the enunciation of a series of errors, refuted point by point to listeners accustomed to sitting for hours. A fair sample of the method can be gleaned from STANTONs first public address on womens rights, delivered right after SENECA FALLS. She states a mistaken idea (let us consider mans claims to physical superiority), then circles around it, raising a calm objection, a commonsensical point, some shrewd reversal of accepted wisdom. Men are intellectually superior, Satan picked the weaker sex for his designs, women are satisfied with things as they are: little is left of these hoary claims when she is done. Even the easily verified point that the Bible tells wives to obey their husbands seems shaky after STANTON has worked over Genesis and Pauls epistles. These speeches and writings are heavy going today, but even a cursory look shows how intrepidly and efficiently STANTON, with Anthony close behind, cut her way through the defense of the status quo to occupy her own intellectual redoubt. In the 1850s, the vote was only one concern among many. Searching for a pure liberal lineage for feminism, recent writers have suggested that this early movement kept itself away from the task of changing private life, but nothing could be farther from the truth. In the 1850s, womens rights leaders used the metaphor of bondage to argue that disenfranchisement was inextricable from womens relegation to the home. Anthony eventually settled on the vote as sufficient, but STANTON never lost the drive to peer into the crevices of private life. What do you women want? : this volume of papers shows that she raised the rhetorical question years before Freud put it slightly differently; and unlike Freud, she went on to speculate on why they didnt get it. The pedagogy of abolition helped both women in the 1850s to entertain simultaneous, even contradictory, ardors. The vote was their passion, but they also challenged differences between the sexes that even friends and compatriots tolerated as natures inevitabilities. It was the unjust nature of marriage for women that quickly became STANTONs hobby horse. The Participial Adjective Part of English EssayLet the eccentrics, the untutored, the politically suspect come on, she wrote her new ally: politically, I would rather make a few blunders from a superabundance of life than to have all the proprieties of a well embalmed mummy. Woodhulls superabundance of life sprang from both her suffrage extremism and her willingness to talk about sex. A veteran of the rough gender economy of seedy boarding-houses, she had a bred-in-the-bones appreciation for the part that mens social and sexual privileges played in the system of inequality. Yet she did not conclude that men should be reined in, which was the womens rights position. She concluded that women should be let loose. With a daughters eagerness to kick over the traces, she denounced marriage as legalized prostitution and advocated a philosophy of free love, a branch of utopian socialism that championed the womans right to sexual fulfillment separated from child-bearing. (This idea made free-lovers the prescient champions of contraception. ) Free-lovers spurned legal marriageit coerced what should be freely givenand argued for a heterosexual union close to our own notions of living together, a higher monogamy outside marriage that could be dissolved at will. At the edgesand Woodhull skirted the edgesthe ideal of a higher monogamy could stray into the realm of serial, even multiple partners. All this made free love tantamount to prostitution in the minds of the respectable. Still, Woodhulls wildness appealed to STANTON. She had been moving toward similar conclusions about marriage (though the lurid metaphor of legalized prostitution had not yet occurred to her), but she was on her own: even Anthony, loyal as she was, struggled against her distaste for her friends preoccupation with sexual matters. Woodhull, a shady lady who had schooled herself in a world of anarchists and utopian socialists into which STANTON had never ventured, brought vitality to the older womans intuitions and meditations. But STANTONs embrace of a loose woman outraged her political enemies all the more. The Boston group in particular looked to draw blood. STANTON was too big a target, but not Woodhull. And Woodhull was aware that there was danger in several quarters. As Goldsmith shows, the rival womens rights factions were not the only ones who saw their chance as Woodhull shifted from suffrage to advocating free love. There were also the resentful members of her family. In 1873, Woodhull made a spectacular admission to a packed New York house: Yes! I am a free lover! I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love for as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! This crippled Woodhulls viability as a speaker, transforming her in the public mind from a personage evoking the liminality of the stage actress to a self-confessed harlot. Desperate and angry, Woodhull played the hand that proved her undoing. In a monthly paper, she and her sister published the revelation of an adulterous liaison between the charismatic minister Henry Ward Beecher, scion of the eminent reformer family, and his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton. The affair was common knowledge among the reformer sophisticates of Manhattan and Beechers Brooklyn Heights church; and so were the dalliances of Libby Tiltons husband Theodore, an up-and-coming newspaperman, liberal politico, and one of STANTON and Anthonys stalwarts. But Woodhull charged that Beecher and his cronies were hypocrites for repudiating publicly the ethos that they privately enjoyed. Free love seems to have become the rage in Brooklyn Heights, a moony opportunism that justified serial infidelities, mens and womens, in an age when divorce was next to impossible. The explicit nature of the revelations, coupled with Beechers success in cleaning up his reputation in the long divorce trial that followed, sealed Woodhulls fate. Hounded by the vice crusader Anthony Comstock for her obscene lectures and her writings about free love, she was indicted and jailed repeatedly over the next few years. For all of Goldsmiths assiduous research into the historical context, her portrait of Woodhull is flat. It falls back into a line of sensationalized journalistic depictions of the fabulous siren: a backwoods original, an entrepreneur and con artist, a self-promoter devoid of inner life. Goldsmith is too unskeptical about the scandal-mongering against Woodhull; and she is weirdly uninterested in relationships between women and in the drama of womens rights, in which Woodhull created a starring role for herself. Thus she ends up demoting a rich political conjuncture into a tale of gullibility and opportunism. Even New York Citya historic refuge of plotters, conspirators, and flamboyant radicalscould not provide Woodhull sanctuary. None of her new acquaintances came to her aid, not even STANTON. Woodhull sank down to the dim lower levels of the lecture circuit. By 1877, America was no good for her. She moved to England, where her old skills landed her a rich Londoner named John Martin, who set her up, a respectable lady for the first time in her life, in a fine big establishment in the substantial suburb of Kensington. Despite her husbands valiant efforts, London society shunned her. Goldsmith does not say so, but among those who would have chosen not to visit would have been the Martins neighbors at Hyde Park Gate, the eminent critic Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia. There, on the little sealed loop of a street, where everybody knew everything about everybody, and all the residents took their daily walks, we may spot (thanks to Hermione Lees Virginia Woolf) Mrs. Martin. We may see her as the small, curious Virginia saw her, out of the corner of her eye, a shadowy figure draped in her mothers suspicions of a somehow infamous suffragist past. How Woolf, with her second sense of a secret history of women which drifted through the London streets, would have loved the story! How she would have kindled to the evanescent metropolitan moment when that odd, dashing female past glanced against her own gathering feminist present! III. The vote was not won until 1919, but other demands for equality were achieved in the late nineteenth century, including the opening of higher education to women. Newly-founded womens colleges and coeducational public universities sent out self-consciously New Women to work in the world as doctors, businesswomen, settlement house residents, artists, professors. This was the first generation of middle-class women to choose paid work over what one of their number, Jane Addams, called the family claim. They were going to matter in the world. In the 1880s, the small Virginia Stephen and the middle-aged Mrs. Martin lived in a London where (Woolf later recalled wryly) a respectable woman was as likely to be seen alone in town as to walk outside in a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge. Similar rules of seclusion held in the United States. In both countries, however, they were buckling under the to-ings and fro-ings of New Women, independent-minded and often marriage-spurning daughters. One of the beneficiaries of the changing dispensation was Elizabeth Cady STANTONs daughter Harriot. Primed with her mothers fierce pride (STANTON modestly enjoined her daughter to love and work for humanity, to go on with my work when I am done, to make life easier in any direction for those who come after you), she received a stiff education at Vassar and then went on to Europe, where she imbibed the latest currents in the social sciences and soon married Harry Blatch, a kindly Englishman. Marriage and two daughters scarcely slowed her: she plunged into politics, working with the British suffragists at the point when votes for women were inseparable from broader issues of enfranchisementa historical moment that resonated with her mothers first involvement in the issue in the 1850sand then, briefly, with the Fabians. The Fabians were hostile to womens rights, but the mixing of labor, socialist, and womens concerns in concrete legislative proposalsand especially the keen interest in the plight of working womentaught her a practical and inclusive approach to electoral politics that went far beyond the strategies in use in the United States. When Blatch returned to America in 1896, Ellen Carol DuBois suggests, she was uniquely equipped by virtue of her maternal heritage and, more important, by the intellectual receptivity that heritage had bequeathed her, to become a leader in transforming womens rights into its twentieth-century incarnation as feminism. In America, Blatch found a stultifying suffrage movement that bored its devotees and repelled its opponents: Most of the ammunition was being wasted on its supporters in private drawing rooms and in public halls where friends, drummed up and harried by the ardent, listlessly heard the same old arguments. Still, distinct from this network of staid matrons was an inchoate milieu of young New Women who defined themselves by the modernist term feminism. Imported from France, feminism denoted youth, psychology, sex, financial independence, self. And elements of the marginalized nineteenth-century critique of marriage resurfaced, this time with broader appeal to a generation more interested in expressing female sexual desire than in containing men. Blatch swiftly attached herself to this milieu and reinvigorated the scene in the city. She organized an Equality League, a small but influential group that brought together some of New Yorks most brilliant New Women professionals with gifted working women and labor organizers from the trades. The focus was on the bond that joined employed women across class lines, on the conviction that paid work, since it freed women from economic dependence on men, was the necessary basis for sex equality. The feminist movement of the nineteenth century had treated the working woman as a pitiable victim, imagined quintessentially as the starving seamstress in her garret. But feminists in the early twentieth century promoted a spirited, youthful working woman as the exemplar of emancipation, the feisty rebel girl of the picket lines to be admired, emulated, and supported. The tinge of youthful hope, the emphasis on a destiny outside marriage, the scornful rejection of conventional womanhood: all this went into the militant suffragism of the rebellious daughters. By the early 1910s, suffragism was one of the largest and most varied democratic movements in the countrys history, encompassing a cast of characters that stretched far beyond the stalwart mothers of the nineteenth century. The superabundance of life with which STANTON had flirted now materialized in a politics that combined intellectual force with social eclecticism. Recruits from the socialists, the trade unions, African American groups, and the immigrant Left worked for the vote. Disgruntled high society ladies mixed with working women, New Women all. The militant movement that again surged out of New York City took womens rights into the era of modern electoral politics. There was plenty of the plain, dead-ahead slogging at which Anthony had excelled; Blatch learned the arts of legislative lobbying and door-to-door electioneering. Yet the range greatly expanded. Late-Victorian ladies had kept politics safely indoors, where they protected themselves from exposure to the smearing public eye. Blatch and her contemporaries took their campaign outdoors, in marvelous outdoor parades (all dressed in white marching down Fifth Avenue) and coast-to-coast all-female automobile entourages. They tapped the enlivening properties of commercial culture with suffrage hats, suffrage postcards, suffrage dances, even suffrage movies. The feminism of the daughters made some room for a feminism of the sons. The enthusiasm was contagious, and blended with the optimistic American spirit of the new. Even liberals and progressivesespecially young menwho ten years earlier would have been cool to the suffrage issue now warmed to its promise. At the The New Republic, just founded and buoyant with modern sensibilities, the editors gave over an issue in October 1915 to rousing support for the New York State campaign that Blatch orchestrated. A string of male pundits proclaimed the value, the importance, the necessity of votes for women. Walter Lippmann, a card-carrying suffragist since his days at Harvard, believed that a great deal of change between men and women was in the works and he welcomed it. In an essay deeply sympathetic to feminism, he made suffrage the centerpiece of an all-embracing program: At bottom the struggle might almost be described as an effort to alter the tone of peoples voices and the look in their eyes. But that means an infinitely greater change, a change in the initial prejudice with which men and women react towards each other and the world. Thought will not flow freely and inventively so long as it runs in the narrow channels of the older tradition. Rather remarkably, Lippmann proves to have been the first advocate of the no-more-nice-girls idea: This change women cannot bring about by being nice girls, dancing well, dressing well, becoming adept in small talk, marrying an honest man, supervising a servant, and seeing that the baby is clean, healthy and polite. They have to take part in the wider affairs of life. Their demand for the vote expresses that aspiration. Such encouraging male counterpartsfrom The New Republic, the radical Masses, whereverwere brothers to be welcomed. Older womenthe mothers so committed to the niceness that the daughters were fleeingwere more problematic. Suffrage veterans disliked the feminists sexually adventurous spirit and their eagerness to defy ideals of feminine propriety. For the new generation, however, the repudiation of older womens timidity before the gender status quo seemed a virtual requirement of the modern spirit. Ellen Carol DuBois has done more than any contemporary historian to bring to life the history of suffrage politics, and she sees a great deal at stake in these efforts to preserve the sense of a complex historical legacy. She is exquisitely attuned to the undertow of disaffiliation between women in this high-flying political moment. Blatch, the paradigmatic daughter, was one of the few to see that repudiation of past womens efforts was not without its costs, that it depleted the present as well as emancipated it. For her, the challenge of finding a relationship to the legacy of the nineteenth century was personal and political. Blatch needed to be her own person as well as her mothers daughter, and she resolved this dilemma politically, by extending her sense of feminism beyond her mothers reachinto issues of womens paid work, for example, that the latter was ill-fitted to understand. At the same time, Blatch sensed that her mothers most heterodox ideas, spurned by her Victorian contemporaries, resonated with the requirements of female modernity. She deeply resented Susan Anthonys ascendancy, and the secondary status to which her mother had been relegated in the history of suffrage. She worked hard to restore the full range of STANTONs thought, which had been excised and pruned away to fit the single-issue focus of the late-nineteenth-century campaign. For Blatchs most searching feminist contemporaries, discovering the breadth and the complexity of STANTONs ideas was exhilarating. I have longed to rush in upon you with my excitement over your mother, the historian Mary Beard wrote Blatch after having raced through the collection of STANTONs papers that Blatch had amassed and deposited at the Library of Congress. Every item in those folders excites me. Here was a usable past that billowed out from the confines of Victorian maternalism. Even the reputation of Victoria Woodhull, whose role in suffragism had been consistently suppressed in the official history of the movement, made a comeback after her death in 1927; and STANTON, whose devotion to Woodhull had been held against her for thirty years in the suffrage movement, gained luster through the association. IV. This saga of generation and memory, of mothers and daughters, is the standard by which the convulsions of contemporary feminismor rather, postfeminismmust be measured. We are the heirs of a great tradition of intelligence, courage, and imagination; but you would not know it from the post-feminism that surrounds us. Characterizing Harriot Blatchs self-understanding when she was just out of Vassar, Ellen DuBois nicely captures the mentality: young, self-confident, and sure she had never experienced discrimination by sex, a century later she would have been called a postfeminist, exhibiting in equal measure arrogance and naivete about the condition of her sex. The postfeminist of the 1990s revolts against a fantasy of traditional feminists as older, puritanical, limiting, hectoringthe tight-lipped, overly serious, disapproving mothers. Indeed, the generational tension seems a little familiar. Here, again, surely, is a feminism of the daughters. But it is not that at all, because this construction of womanhood is fundamentally timid and trivial. A career decision, a wardrobe decision, a cosmetic-surgery decision: these are the occasions for the postfeminist call-to-arms. Sisters, fight for the legitimacy of your lingerie! Do not surrender your nail polish to the prudish mothers! You are free to swish your hips! Contemporary postfeminist writingsnotably the recent books by Katie Roiphe, Karen Lehrman, and Elizabeth Wurtzelbelong to the literature of adolescence rather than the literature of ideas. They confuse sex with life, as adolescents do. They are driven mainly by appearances. They are unable to grasp the requirements of the world outside the self. They defend little and they build nothing. From these books the misogynists and the enemies of equality have nothing to fear. In the hands of the postfeminists, even Elizabeth Cady STANTON, the champion of dress reform, the inveterate foe of mens power over womens self-esteem, the fierce analyst of the ways in which the coercive power of men over women disguised itself within marriage, is complacently enlisted as just another advocate of female self-improvement. In this readingwhich is really the consequence of a lack of readingSTANTON joins Sharon Stone in a single sacred sisterhood. The strenuous worldview at the heart of the feminist tradition has been usurped by the epicene worldview of the womens magazines, which hides its indifference to critical thinking, its substitution of psychology for politics, its prescriptions for conformity, its enslavement of women to style, all behind the good and complicated name of feminism. This is not the feminism of the daughters. It is the feminism of the girls. Not bad girls, just girls; shrewd, not rebellious; ostensibly brazen, but essentially anxious. Confronted with these whining and self-indulgent outbursts, one longs for the spirit of SENECA FALLS, for the imagination, the empathy, and the ingenuity of the past, for the superabundance of life that is feminisms legacy. By Christine Stansell Christine Stansell is Professor of History at Princeton University. Her new book, American Moderns, will be published next spring. Copyright of New Republic is the property of New Republic and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holders express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: New Republic, 08/10/98, Vol. 219 Issue 6, p26, 12p, 3bw. Item Number: 888132 Many strong and varied reform movements took root and flourished in the Northern United States in the decades before the Civil War. Abolitionism and a movement for womens rights arose in these years; temperance and moral reform crusades garnered both male and female supporters; utopian communities and other diverse religious groups strove to perfect society; and varied health reforms, from hydropathy to vegetarianism to homeopathy, promised to provide a safer and healthier alternative to treatments offered by regular physicians. In this reform atmosphere, it is not surprising that a movement began to free women from the restrictive clothing of the antebellum period; in fact, many of these reform currents contributed to the movement to reform womens dress.