Suffragists

SUFFRAGISTS FOUGHT for the vote for women in the United States, England, New Zealand and Australia. After the American Revolution's fervor faded, the initial impulse for expansion of rights gave way to a conservative retrenchment, then prosperity brought domestic complacency—for some. Women lost the right to vote in New York in 1777, Massachusetts in 1780, New Hampshire in 1784, and everywhere except New Jersey in 1787, when the U.S. Constitutional Convention empowered the states to determine voting qualification. New Jersey took the vote from women in 1807. Between 1820 and 1880, middleand upper-class women were stereotyped under “The Cult of Domesticity.” Working-class women were forgotten.

Men thought that woman's place was in the home, but some women thought they belonged in school. Emma Hart Willard opened the first endowed school for girls, Troy Female Seminary in New York, in 1821. In 1833, Oberlin College became the United States's first coeducational college, awarding the first degrees to women in 1841. In 1837, Mount Holyoke College (Massachusetts) opened. It would eventually be the first four-year women's college. Vassar opened in 1861, Wellesley and Smith in 1875.

Women became active in other spheres too. In 1836, Sarah Grimké began speaking on abolition and women's rights; the Congregational Church of Massachusetts issued a Pastoral Letter in 1837 against women speaking against slavery in public. The National Female Anti-Slavery Society Convention of 1837 attracted 81 delegates. Women were barred from the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. In 1844, Lowell, Massachusetts, textile workers organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, an early women's labor organization. With that prelude, the movement began in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. On the legislative front, Mississippi enacted the Married Woman's Property Act in 1839.

The Seneca Falls Movement, the first women's rights convention in the United States, generated the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which outlined the goals and issues of the movement. After that, women's rights advocates met regularly. When Australian suffragists organized in 1889 they demanded equal rights for women, equal justice, equality in marriage and in divorce, child custody in divorce, and equal property rights—the Seneca Falls demands.

On the periphery, Amelia Bloomer began the dress reform movement in 1850, but “serious” suffragists rejected bloomers as a potential distraction from more important women's issues. African American women such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth joined the women's movement in the 1850s. Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, relating the brutality of slavery to a wide audience. Vulcanization, successful in 1859, made condoms reliable and family sizes shrank from 5 to 6 children to 2 to 3 children by late in the century. Civil War work gave women additional organizational experience and work skills. Similarly, the memorial societies, popular with southern white women between 1865 and 1880, forced women into the public sphere. Southern black women at the same time organized uplift organizations.

Universal suffrage was the goal of the American Equal Rights Association, formed in 1866 by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The 1868 Fourteenth Amendment defined citizens and voters as male. [Page 433]The Fifteenth Amendment established voting rights for black men. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments split the women's rights movement in 1869. Stanton and Anthony established the radical New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe established the more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association in Boston, Massachusetts. Because the NWSA wanted an amendment giving universal suffrage, it refused to work for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, causing a break with Frederick Douglass's anti-slavery movement in 1870.

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