Ellen Carol DuBois

The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism

The major theoretical contribution of contemporary feminism has been the identification of the family as a central institution of womens oppression.1 On the basis of this understanding we are seeing the beginnings of a revisionist history of American feminism which challenges the significance that has traditionally been attributed to the woman suffrage movement. Aileen Kraditor and William ONeill have suggested that the woman suffrage movement did not lead to female emancipation because it accepted womens traditional position within the home.2 While attacking this whatwent-wrong approach, Daniel Scott Smith has contended that suffragism should yield its claim to the central place in the history of nineteenth-century feminism to a phenomenon he calls domestic feminism.4 Similarly, in her study of the female moral reform movement of the 1830s, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that it can hardly be assumed that the demand for votes for women was more radical than the moral reform movements attack on the sexual double standard.4 These revisionist efforts are commendable in that they expand our sense of nineteenth-century feminism to include a much larger and more diverse group of womens activities than merely suffrage. On the other hand, I think they do an historical disservice to the woman suffrage movement. Nineteenth-century feminists and antifeminists alike perceived the demand for the vote as the most radical element in womens protest against their oppression and we are obligated to honor the perceptions of the historical actors in question. When considering nineteenth-century feminism, not as an intellectual tradition but as a social movement, as a politics that motivated people to action, twentieth-century historians are in no position to redefine what was its most radical aspect. What we can do is analyze the position of nineteenth-century women and the nature of suffragism in order to understand why the demand for the vote was the most radical program for womens emancipation possible in the nineteenth century. I would like to suggest an interpretation of nineteenth-century suffragism that reconciles the perceived radicalism of the woman suffrage movement with the historical centrality of the family to womens condition. My hypothesis is that the significance of the woman suffrage movement rested precisely on the fact that it bypassed womens oppression within the family, or private sphere, and demanded instead her admission to citizenship, and through it admission to the public arena. By focusing

Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific

Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of woman suffrage1 has both national and international dimensions. It is a series of complex political battles within and against particular nation-states. Equally important, these battles have taken place within international networks of individuals, ideologies, and organizations. Scholars have often treated the history of woman suffrage as a modest matter, about which little remains to be learned (especially in comparison to other aspects of womens history). In truth, we have only begun to scratch the surface.2 The multiple and interconnected stories of womens mobilization on behalf of citizenship await piecing together, and the implications of this history for understanding nation-building and nationalism, political democracy, interna-

Margaret Fuller in Italy

Abstract On July 19, 1848, the day when the first womens rights convention began in Seneca Falls, New York, Margaret Fuller, the author of Americas only full-length feminist tract, was far away, in the midst of a life-changing sojourn in Italy. As a Transcendentalist, her vocation was to understand and live out her challenging, unusual, complex “nature,” a task complicated by being the lone woman among Americas first indigenous intellectual circle. The challenge of being true tohernature, to unite a mind understood as male with feelings understood as female, was a task for which there were few precedents. To the degree that Fuller ever resolved that tension, Italy was where she was able to do so. The article explores Fullers motivations for going to Italy and her transformations there, and speculates – inasmuch as she never returned – what she might have brought back to the emerging womens rights movement in the USA as a result.

On Labor and Free Love: Two Unpublished Speeches of Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Surprising as it might seem, Elizabeth Cady Stanton remains a relatively shadowy figure in the history of American feminism. Much more the individualist and intellectual than her political comrade, Susan B. Anthony, she did not leave a trail of dedicated proteges behind her to record her contributions in honorific biographies.1 Yet her impact on American suffragism was enormous. For the movements first halfcentury, Stanton was its chief ideologue and theoretician. In the annals of nineteenth-century feminism, only the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman equaled the genius and originality of Stantons political thought. In her efforts to understand the nature and origins of womens oppression, Stanton consistently reached beyond the accepted beliefs of her contemporaries to investigate daring, often heretical ideas. As a follower of William Lloyd Garrison, she had learned, while still a young woman, to subject all superstition to the test of reason and free thought.2 This iconoclasm, along with her unswerving dedication to the emancipation of women, was the hallmark of her forty years of political leadership. From the 1850s, when she argued for liberalized divorce to the pietistic women of the temperance movement, to the 1890s, when the

The Woman Suffrage Movement Revisited@@@Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869.

In the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century. For this new edition, Ellen Carol DuBois addresses the changing context for the history of woman suffrage at the millennium.In the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century. For this new edition, Ellen Carol DuBois addresses the changing context for the history of woman suffrage at the millennium.