American Feminism Key Source Documents 1848–1920

‘Why should not woman seek to be a reformer?’ asks Lucretia Mott in her 1849 address, ‘Discourse on Woman.’ This volume contains a selection of documents which demonstrate women fulfilling that reforming ambition, from the ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, to Carrie Chapman Catt’s address to the Legislatures of the United States in 1919, the year before the ratification of the federal woman suffrage amendment. Among the women who made the dramatic call for the first Convention to take place were Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Mary Ann McClintock as well as Elizabeth Cady Stanton. At Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848, three hundred men and women gathered in the Wesleyan Chapel where they heard a variety of speeches, discussed the Declaration of Sentiments and heard Mrs. Stanton read it aloud. The text, reproduced in this volume, was the first of many entries into the public arena for the members of the suffrage movement, a substantial number of whom are represented here. As Carrie Chapman Catt summed it up: ‘To get the word “male” in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign … During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.’

In the United States of America, the first Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Seneca Falls in 1848, issued a challenge to patriarchal power. The women who gathered there reflected a longing for female liberation and empowerment in their demand for legal, political and social equality with men. In exploring different ways of achieving this, the early women reformers identified the importance of both education and work. This volume records the ways in which women with varying political perceptions, from different geographical areas, class categories and racial groupings, struggled to achieve improvements in both education and employment.

Feminism takes as its central premise the seemingly sensible idea that women ought to have power in their own lives and influence over the lives of others. Power to do what and influence over whom are perennial questions. If nineteenth-century women were to exercise power over their lives, what more natural place to begin than with the female body? It would seem, then as now, that the female body should be an uncontested area for female control.

The private and social gathering together of women in nineteenth and twentieth-century America subverted public and political definitions of female activity, even as it appeared utterly conventional to an unfamiliar eye. Clubs formed by affinities of race, ethnicity, social class, and by interest, education, and religion. Women socialized informally in parlors, talking about poetry, art, drama, music, history, and even science, coming together to understand their spiritual inheritance and cultural life. Clubs developed from the seemingly casual perusal of literature and from conversations women had in their homes and debates they had in public and private schools. By the 1880s the United States had produced a first generation of young women who attended college, many of them studying at female seminaries and some at prestigious colleges, including women’s institutions such as Smith College and coeducational colleges such as Oberlin. Even formally educated women, however, were expected to marry, raise children, and secure the domestic tranquility of their families.