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ABSTRACT

THE BIRTH OF THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE PRESS
IN THE UNITED STATES:
THE REVOLUTION AND ITS FOUNDERS

By

Janet Frances Krober

This study examines The Revolution, the first woman suffrage
newspaper in the United States, and assesses its place in the woman's
rights movement. The paper traces the development of woman's rights
activism and ideology, showing that the impulse to publish Ihg_
Revolution was born from the discontent women had felt since early
colonial times. Brief biographies of the founders of The Revolution
and a description of the birth, life, and death of the paper are in-
cluded. A non-quantitative content analysis of the news and editorial
columns indicates the manner in which news and comment on seven topics
were presented.

The Revolution, a sixteen page weekly newspaper, was published
from 1868 to 1870 by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the
woman suffrage activists, with assistance from Parker Pillsbury,
George Francis Train, and others. The paper was a radical woman's
rights advocate that alienated many conservative feminists with its
denunciations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, advocacy of

reformed marriage and divorce laws, support for workingwomen, and refusal

Janet Frances Krober

to support the Republican Party. The paper played a major role in

the split in the suffrage ranks that occurred in 1869, providing Mrs.
Stanton and Miss Anthony with a forum for presenting their side of the
controversy thus placing the two in opposition to such former friends
and co-workers as Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Wendell Phillips,
Thomas N. Higginson, and William Lloyd Garrison.

The study traces The Revolution's handling of seven themes:
suffrage, woman's rights and wrongs, marriage, women in religion,
"what women are doing," workingwomen, and personal and public health.
The conclusion drawn from this assessment is that Mrs. Stanton and
Miss Anthony were not bound by contemporary myths, prejudices, or
social beliefs about the sphere and capability of women. In reports
or comment on all the themes, the paper advocated that rational
assessments of women's abilities be made and that women be allowed to
prove themselves as individuals.

This radical message did not appeal to the many suffragists"
who wanted the right to vote without changing existing social and
cultural frameworks. The view of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton that
the vote was just one aspect of a host of changes--legal, political,
religious, philosophical, social, psychological, and domestic-~that
would have to be made in order for women to achieve an equal position
in society, was borne out in the twentieth century as newly enfranchised
women saw rights they had won, particularly in education and employment,

slip away from them. An examination of The Revolution shows that,

Janet Frances Krober

contrary to the assertion of later activists, the early suffragists
did not believe that the vote, by itself, could ensure that women

would have “their rights, and nothing less."

Accepted by the faculty of the School of Journalism,
College of Communication Arts, Michigan State University, in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts

degree.

 

Dir ctor of The s

THE BIRTH OF THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE PRESS
IN THE UNITED STATES:
THE REVOLUTION AND ITS FOUNDERS

By

Janet Frances Krober

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

School of Journalism

T976

three men:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study of women was enriched by the contributions of

--George A. Hough III, my adviser, who provided guidance,
encouragement, and criticism throughout the project

--Roger Mustalish, my husband

--and the late w. Cameron Meyers, who introduced a
non-historian to the joys of studying history

My thanks.

ii

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . ........................ 1
Chapter - Page
I ANTECEDENTS ..................... 4

Breaking the Ground: Early Activists

Women's Place Defined: Legal Restrictions

Women Define Their World: Political Activities

Women in American Journalism: Printers,
Publishers, Editors, and Authors

II FOUNDERS OF THE REVOLUTION .............. 35

George Francis Train
Parker Pillsbury
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: The Early Years

Susan B. Anthony: The Early Years

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony:
A Fifty Year Friendship

III THE REVOLUTION: FORMAT AND CONTENTS ....... '.'. 73

 

Overview

Major Themes in The Revolution
Suffrage
Woman's Rights and Wrongs
Marriage

Women in Religion
"What Women Are Doing"
Workingwomen
Personal and Public Health
IV THE REVOLUTION: ITS DEMISE AND LEGACY ........ l35

End of The Revolution
Legacy of The'Revolution

WORKS CONSULTED . . . . ................... ISO
APPENDIX ........................... 155

INTRODUCTION

The January 8, l868, issue of the New York Daily Tribune

 

contained an editorial, "Grounds of Impartial Suffrage," in which

the following argument was presented: "Deprive a race of the ballot,
and every agency of the Government which ought to protect will com-
bine to oppress them. Deprive the Southern Freemen of the ballot,

and oppression, resistance, and a war of the races, are inevitable."1

In the lower right hand corner of the same page of the Daily
Tribune was this comment: "The newspaper crop this season is unusually
promising, and, according to present appearances, the harvest of news
and opinions in New York will be the largest known for many years. . . .

Mrs. [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton, Miss [Susan 8.] Anthony and Parker
2

 

Pillsbury are rousing the world of women with The Revolution.“

 

Apparently the editors of the Daily Tribune did not see any
direct connection between an editorial about suffrage for blacks and

a story about the promotion of suffrage for women. The Revolution,

 

however, was founded not so much to "rouse the world of women" in
general as it was to serve as a forum for the proponents of woman
suffrage. In a statement of purpose in the first issue, the editors

promised: "The Revolution will contain a series of articles, beginning

 

'The Daily Tribune (Jan. 8, l868), p. 4.

2Ibid. '

next week, to prove the power of the ballot in elevating the char-
acter and condition of woman. . . . [to prove] that the ballot will
secure for woman equal place and equal wages in the world of work;
that it will open to her the schools, colleges, professions, and all
the opportunity and adversity of life. . . .“3

If the staff of The Revolutionhad had control over the
Daily Tribune, the editorial, "Grounds of Impartial Suffrage" would
have been broadened in scope to include the demands of women for
suffrage. But The Revolution was not able to convince the public
of the need to treat the woman suffrage question as a serious issue
of human rights and liberty. The Revolution, rather than becoming
the vehicle for waging a successful battle to attain woman suffrage,
would become just another brief episode in the struggle of American
women to gain full equality with men.

The Revolution was a short-lived endeavor, and its sub-
scribers never numbered more than 3,000. Yet historians consider the
paper to have been a strong force for suffragists: "The weekly
sixteen-page paper, smaller than today's tabloids, made a contribution
to the women's cause out of all proportion to either its size, brief
lifespan, or modest circulation. . . . It was a lively mirror of the

status and struggles of women on many fronts."4

 

3The Revolution, I (Jan. 8, 1868), p. 1.

 

4Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (New York: Atheniun
Press, 1974), p. 151.

The Revolution was important not only in publishing news
about woman suffrage activities, but also in bringing forth the
ideology of feminism. A brief study of the history of women in
America will show that the issues Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton aired in their newspaper had been raised by other women since
the early colonial days.

The Revolution is available, on microfilm or in bound
copies, in libraries throughout the United States. The University
of Minnesota Library Special Collections Division has a complete set
of volumes I through V (Jan. 8, 1868 to May 26, 1870), which en-
compasses the time Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton were responsible for
the paper. The set is bound into three books, with volumes I and II
in the first, III and IV in the second, and the incomplete Volume V

in the last. All three books were autographed by Susan B. Anthony.

CHAPTER I
ANTECEDENTS

Breaking_the Ground: Early Activists

The history of the woman's rights movement in the United
States began almost as soon as women came to the British colonies.
The first women settlers landed in Virginia in 1608; however, it was
not until 1619 that large numbers of women began immigrating to the
New World. It was just fifteen years later that a woman arrived to
challenge male supremacy.

Anne Hutchinson, who came to Massachusetts Bay Colony in
1634, was an independent religious thinker who held Sunday meetings
for women to discuss and comment on the morning's sermon. (Men had
been having such meetings for years, but women had always been ex-
cluded.) These meetings, which attracted as many as 100 women each
week, soon became forums to which Mrs. Hutchinson could expound her
own religious views. Not surprisingly, the elders of the colony
disapproved of her activities and had Ann Hutchinson tried, excom-
municated, and banished from the colony.1

In 1647, Mistress Margaret Brent, property owner in her own

right and executor for the estate of the late Governor Calvert,

approached the colonial legislature of Maryland, demanding her right

 

1Kathryn Taylor, Generations of Denial (New York: Times
Change Press, 1971), pp. 28-29.

to two votes--one to represent each property holding. Although her
attempt failed, Mistress Brent had the dubious fortune of "uncon-

sciously distinguishing herself as the first woman in America to

claim the right to vote."2

For the most part, colonial life, centered as it was around
the family and the church, does not seem to have provided an impetus
to colonial women to seek changes in their status. Particularly in
the New England colonies, the

family was, first of all, a "business"-—an absolutely central
agency of economic production and exchange. Each household
was more or less self-sufficient; and its various members were
inextricably united in the work of providing for their funda-
mental material wants. Work, indeed, was a wholly natural
extension of family life and merged imperceptibly with all of
its other activities.3
With the drive for independence from England, however, came a political
climate and emphasis on liberty and human rights that encouraged some
women to question their own place in the new republican society.
Abigail Adams was one of these women. In 1777 she wrote to her hus-
band, John:
In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for
you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more
generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put
such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember,

all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and
attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment

 

2Julia Cherry Spruill, Women's Life and Work in the Southern
Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1972), p. 239.

3John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth
Colony (London: Oxford University Press, T970), p. 183.

a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in
which we have no voice or representation.4

Judith Sargent Murray was another woman with a keen interest
in woman's rights. Writing under the pen name Constantia, she wrote
a number of feminist articles, criticizing the social forces operating
to keep women from exercising their mental and physical powers.5 In
an article entitled "0n the Equality of the Sexes," which appeared

in the March and April, 1790, issues of Massachusetts Magazine, Mrs.

 

Murray listed the ploys used by men to prevent women from using their
power to think and reason. She concluded:

Should it still be vociferated, "Your domestick employments are
sufficient"--I would calmly ask, is it reasonable, that a candi-
date for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent
being, who is to spend an eternity in contemplating the works
of Deity, should at present be so degraded, as to be allowed no
other ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of
a pudding, or the sewing the seams of a garment?5

The arguments presented by women at this time were wide-
sweeping indictments of the very structure of society. This era of

feminist writing culminated in the publication in 1792 in London of

 

4Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 15.

5There is some evidence that Mrs. Murray's work was widely
read. Charles Brockden Brown, a popular novelist in the late eighteenth
century, wrote Ormond, a novel that appeared in 1799, fifteen years
after Mrs. Murray's first article was published under the pseudonym,
Constantia. The heroine of Ormond, a woman named Constantia, expresses
views such as: "To marry in extreme youth would be proof of pernicious
and opprobious temerity,“ an opinion that echoes Mrs. Murray's. See
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New
York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 86—88 for discussion of Ormond.

6Constantia (Judith Sargent Murray), "0n the Equality of the
Sexes," in Up from the Pedestal, ed. by Aileen S. Kraditor (New York:
Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1968), p. 34.

 

Mary Wollstonecraft's essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, an
event generally considered to mark the birth of the woman's rights
movement in English-speaking countries. In the essay, Miss Wollstone-
craft systematically listed the criticism brought against contemporary
woman--criticism of her childishness, vanity, and inability to reason--
and showed that the society of man, rather than the laws of God or
nature, was responsible for woman's disabilities. Miss Wollstonecraft
was particularly scornful of the methods men used to control the be-
havior of women: "How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us
only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes! . . . Men, indeed,
appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to
secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in
a state of childhood."7

Most of Mary Wollstonecraft's arguments, logically constructed
as they were, could not be refuted directly, and no one seems to have
attempted to do so. But there was, in the early nineteenth century,
a sudden flurry of writing that defined the difference between men
and women as a difference in "spheres." Proponents of this separate
but equal doctrine attempted to show that women and men, because of
inherent differences, were meant to perform different functions in the
world. Thus women, by tending to home and children, were not exhibiting

subservience, but were acting freely within their sphere:

 

7Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1967), p. 50.

Much abstruse study or metaphysical reasoning seldom agrees with
the natural vivacity or the slender frame of many females, there-
fore the moral and physical distinction of the sex must be allowed;
if the powers of the mind are fully equal, they must still estimate
the rights of men, and own it their prerogative exclusively to con-
tend for public honours and preferment, either in church or state,
and females may console themselves and feel happy, that by the
moral distinction of the sexes they are called to move in a sphere
of life remote from those masculine contentions, although they

hold equal rights with them of studying every branch of science,
even jurisprudence.

But it would be morally wrong, and physically imprudent, for
any woman to attempt pleading at the bar of justice, as no law can
give her the right of deviating from the strictest rules of recti-
tude and decorum . . .8

Concurrent with the theoretical arguments about liberty,
human rights, and woman's sphere, a practical movement was underway
to extend to more women the benefits of formal education. The process
was to be a slow one, because, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, it was believed by many men that woman's brain was smaller
than man's, and thus she was capable only of inferior reasoning.9
Furthermore, as long as women were confined to the home, it was diffi-
cult for many people to see the need for providing women with education.
The airing of the subject of universal education for boys inevitably

led to an acknowledgement that the same advantages must be made avail-

able to girls.

 

8Hannah Mather Crocker, "Observations on the Real Rights of
Women," in Up from the Pedestal, ed. by Aileen S. Kraditor (New York:
Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1968), p. 42-43.

9Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 23.

In 1821, Emma Hart Willard opened the Troy Female Seminary,
the first endowed institution for the education of girls. This was
a step forward, but the school did not provide college-level mental
challenge, as students such as Elizabeth Cady soon discovered: "I
had already studied everything that was taught there except French,
music, and dancing, so I devoted myself to these accomplishments."1O

It was not until 1833 that Oberlin, which began as a
seminary and soon became a college, accepted students of all races,
colors, and sexes. Most of the women students at Oberlin, however,
followed a special, abbreviated course. In 1841, the first woman was
graduated from the regular college-level program. Shortly after this,
Lucy Stone, the suffragist, and Antoinette Brown, the first woman to
be ordained a minister, were graduated from the full college program.

But still, no institution had taken the final necessary
step--teaching all its women students, as a matter of course, the
same academic subjects as those taught to men. It took Mary Lyon,
who in 1837 opened Mount Holyoke Seminary, to devise for women a
curriculum that included the subjects that had traditionally been
considered "masculinez" algebra, geology, intellectual philosophy,
and human physiology. Although this step might not, on the surface,
appear to be of great importance, it has been viewed as a real gain

in the woman's rights movement:

 

10Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ejghty Years and More (London:
T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 35. '—

 

10

The long struggle first envisaged by Judith Sargent Murray and
launched by Emma Willard, taking women beyond the pudding and the
nursery, had passed a decisive stage. Mary Lyon had put into
their hands the means by which they could carry on that struggle
in many different directions. What a few had dreamed and dared
was now being proved in life and practice: that women's minds
were constituted, in bulk and cell structure and endowment, the
same as those of their masculine counterparts; that, given
opportunity, discipline, and direction, they could encompass the
same subject matter as a man. . . .11
A few exceptional women--writers, philosophers, and educa-
tors--were beginning to question woman's place in a purportedly egali-
tarian society. But what of the mass of American women? Certainly
the ideas of a few women could not, by themselves, serve as the impetus
of so widespread and far-reaching a social movement as the woman's
rights movement came to be. It is far more likely that the status of
all women, the legal, political, and social privileges and restrictions
operating in their daily lives, ultimately led thousands of American
women into the struggles over slavery, temperance, woman suffrage,
dress reform, working conditions, and the many other reforms that

swept the country in the Jacksonian era.

Woman's Place Defined:
Legal Restrictions

Perhaps the most thoroughly documented index of the status
of American woman in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
can be found in the laws that pertained to her. American law was, at

that time, dominated by common law, and Blackstone's definition of a

 

1lFlexner, Century of Struggle, p. 36.

11

married woman was the basis for much of the property law in the various
states: “husband and wife are one, and that one, the husband."
According to common law, a married woman had no power to enter con-
tracts, make a will, or keep the wages she earned, unless she had

her husband's permission. "Even if a wife were assaulted or raped,

she could not prosecute her attackers unless her husband would bring

the suit."]2

Any property a woman owned became her husband's at the
time of marriage.

Divorce was unattainable for most couples. In any case in
which dissolution of marriage was granted, the woman had no right to
her children and no right to any property settlement, even if she was

13

the partner who had brought the property to the marriage. In fact,

cases have been recorded in which the courts had to order a man to
surrender to his estranged wife her clothing.14
These laws came to be viewed as inequitable by an increasing
number of women. Indeed, Elizabeth Cady Stanton traced her own
interest in the woman's rights issue to the education she received in

her father's law office, listening to the pathetic stories of wives

and widows: "The tears and complaints of the women who came to my

 

12Andrew Sinclair, The Better Half: The Emancipation of
the American Woman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 84.

13Jessie J. Cassidy, compiler, The Legal Status of Women
(New York: The National-American Woman Suffrage Association, 1897),
p. 55. '

14

pp. 343-44.

Spruill, Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies,

12

father for legal advice touched my heart and early drew my attention
to the injustice and cruelty of the laws. . . . The students [clerk-
ing with Attorney Cady]. observing my interest, would amuse themselves

by reading to me all the worst laws they could find, over which I

would laugh and cry by turns."15

Although the law could be harsh on women, almost from the
beginning the legal status of American women was superior to that of
their sisters in England.

The colonial courts had recognized some of the rights of the
wife. She had the right to live with her husband in house and
bed. She had the right to be supported by him, even if he
abandoned her. She had the right to be protected from violence
at his hands. All of these rights for wives showed that the
colonial courts had recognized a certain equality in marriage
between husband and wife, since both were economically necessary
to one another. None of these rights had been recognized under
contemporary English law. . . . Because of the shortage of
skills and women, and because of the long absences of seafaring
husbands, married American women also received more independence
than their English counterparts. Some were allowed to run estates,
businesses on their own, even when they had husbands. According
to Blackstone, wives were classed with minors and idiots; they
had no responsibility under the law. But in America. . . need
brought justice to the law in particular cases.16

And gradually, some statutory changes began to be made in women's favor.
Most notably, many states passed laws recognizing the right of married
women to own property, in some cases granting the right to will property,
in others the right to control one's own wages or retain control of

property brought into the marriage.

 

15Stanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 31.

16Sinclair, The Better Half, p. 84.

13

Women Define Their World:
Pothical Activities

Ironically, it was on the political front, where they
would remain technically powerless until 1920, that women made their
presence felt. It is impossible to speculate whether there would
have been a nineteenth century political movement for woman's rights
if slavery had been abolished by the Founding Fathers. If debate
over slavery had not dominated political forums from 1820 through
the Civil War, it is possible that women would have been slower to
react to the inequities they suffered. But the libertarian arguments
of the Revolutionary era, virtually put on the shelf for more than
thirty years, were revived by abolitionists trying to show the logi-
cal fallacy of owning slaves in a country founded on the "self-evident"
truth that all men are created equal. And Woman's rights proponents
were quick to see the advantage they could gain from the re-emergence
of such arguments. Sarah Grimke, an abolitionist and woman's rights
advocate, wrote in 1837: "I rejoice because I am persuaded that the
rights of women, like the rights of slaves, need only to be examined,
to be understood and asserted, even by some of those who are now
endeavoring to smother the irrepressible desire for mental and spiritual
freedom which glows in the breast of many who hardly dare to speak

17

their sentiments." Margaret Fuller expressed similar hope: "It

 

17Sarah Moore Grimke, "Province of Woman. The Pastoral
Letter,“ in Up from_the Pedestal, ed. by Aileen S. Kraditor (New
York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1968), p. 54.

14

should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better
understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made
in behalf of Woman. As men become aware that few men have had a
fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair
chance."18

Women played an important role in the abolition movement,
speaking, writing, raising money, and housing runaway slaves. The
Grimke sisters, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Jane Grey Swisshelm--
all of whom, to varying degrees would later support woman suffrage--
were early abolition workers. Indeed the editors and publisher of
The Revolution--Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Parker
Pillsbury-~a11 joined the abolition movement before turning their
attention to furthering the cause of woman's rights.

Even among the liberal men of the abolition movement, however,
women were made to feel their own lower status. Women speakers often
were forced to yield to men speaking from the floor, were sometimes
themselves prevented from speaking from the floor, and were usually
shouted down if they tried (as they often did) to equate the cause of
woman's rights with that of abolition.

Early evidence of the place they were to hold among reformers
came to abolitionist women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention held
in Landon in 1840. All American anti-slavery societies had been in-
vited to send delegates to the convention, and eight women were among

those named as delegates. The women were barred from the convention

 

18Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1971), p. 24.

 

15

floor, however, and although a few of their brothers (notably
William Lloyd Garrison) joined the women in the spectator's gallery,
the majority of American men delegates did not protest the exclusion
of the women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose husband was a delegate,
was also in the gallery:
The clerical portion of the convention was most violent in its
opposition. The clergyman seemed to have God and his angels
especially in their care and keeping, and were in agony lest
the women should do or say something to shock the heavenly
hosts. . . . It was really pitiful to hear narrow-minded
bigots, pretending to be teachers and leaders of men, so
cruelly remanding their own mothers, and the rest of womankind,
to absolute subjection to the ordinary masculine type of
humanity.19

Mrs. Stanton spent much of her time in London discussing
the woman's rights question with Lucretia Mott, one of the ousted
delegates. The two women agreed to call a woman's rights convention
when they returned to the United States-~a resolve that was fulfilled
eight years later, when the two women organized the woman's rights
convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y.

Working for the abolition cause taught women a number of
invaluable lessons, including: (1) the art of speaking before a
mixed sex (or "promiscuous") audience; (2) the effective use of
petitioning, lobbying, and other political tactics; (3) the substance

of human rights and libertarian philosophies; and (4) the limits

placed on women even in so liberal a reform movement as abolition.

 

19Stanton, Eighty,Years and More, pp. 80-81.

16
This last lesson would be re-taught again and again as women worked
for temperance societies, church organizations, and other social

causes:

Women had been willing so long to hold a subordinate position,
both in private and public affairs, that a gradually growing
feeling of rebellion among them quite exasperated the men, and
their manifestations of hostility in public meetings were often
as ridiculous as humiliating.

True, these gentlemen were all quite willing that women
should join their societies and churches to do the drudgery. . .
to circulate petitions from door to door; to visit saloons; to
pray with or defy rumsellers; to teach school at half price,
and sit round the outskirts of a hall, in teachers' State con-
ventions, like so many wallflowers; but they would not allow
them to sit on the platform, address the assembly, or vote for
men and measures.20

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which marked the begin-
ning of organized agitation for woman suffrage in the United States,
was a haphazardly planned affair. Eight years had passed since the
World Anti-Slavery Convention. Mrs. Stanton, having borne four
children and having recently moved from cosmopolitan Boston to the
slower-paced Seneca Falls, was visiting Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt,
Martha Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock on July 13. As Mrs. Stanton
was to recall: "I poured out, that day, the torrent of my long
accumulating discontent with such vehemence and indignation that I
stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare

anything."2]

 

201bid., p. 186.

2'Itn'd.. pp. 147-48.

~17

The women sat down around a mahogany table (now in the
Smithsonian Institute) and wrote an announcement that appeared in
the next day's edition of the Seneca County Courier:

Woman's Rights Convention--A convention to discuss the social,
civil and religious rights of woman will be held in the Wesleyan
Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the
19th and 20th of July current; commencing at 10 a.m. During

the first day the meeting will be held exclusively for women,
who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are
invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott of
Philadelphia and other ladies and gentlemen will address the
convention.22

The women had five days to plan the convention. They decided to let
Lucretia's husband, John, conduct the meeting. The next step to be
taken was drafting a declaration of sentiments. After much delibera-
tion, the women decided to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence,
sentence by sentence, substituting the word "man" for King George III.
The Declaration began:
"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for
one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of
the earth a position different from that which they have hither-
to occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's
God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind

requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to
such a course.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men
and women are created equal. . . ."23
After listing sixteen grievances, the Declaration presented

eleven resolutions, including the controversial ninth: "Resolved,

 

22Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda
Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. I (New York:
Fowler & Wells, 1881), p. 67.

231b1d.. pp. 70-71.

18

That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to them-
selves their sacred right to the elective franchise." This resolu-
tion, which was included, over the objections of most of the conference
organizers, at the insistence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick
Douglass, was the only resolution not passed unanimously by convention
participants.

Although the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention
initially were reluctant to ask for anything as radical/as the right
to vote, it was to turn out that suffrage would be the single issue
on which the largest bloc of nineteenth century women would agree.

In fact, the Seneca Falls Convention is commemorated as the beginning
of the organized drive for woman suffrage.

July, 1848 certainly was not the first time the idea of
women voting had been raised. Abigail Adams, although not specifically
suggesting that women be given the right to vote, had requested that
members of the Continental Congress "would remember the ladies and
be more generous and favorable to them." Thirteen years later, Mary
Wollstonecraft had written: l'I may excite laughter by dropping a
hint which I mean to pursue some future time, for I really think that
woman ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily
governed without having any direct share allowed them in the delibera-

tions of government."24

 

24Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 220.

19

In fact, there had been a very limited history of woman
suffrage in the United States. Women in New Jersey had voted be-
tween 1776 and 1807, when the legislature voted to limit the franchise
to free, white, males.25

Whatever the reluctance of the organizers of the Seneca Falls
Convention to raise the issue of woman sUffrage, the meeting was a
success. The women and men at the convention heard and participated
in a number of lively debates. They heard Elizabeth Cady Stanton
present her first public speech. After working separately on each
resolution, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men (a third of those

)26

present signed their names, "but many of them withdrew their names

as soon as the inevitable storm of newspaper ridicule and vituperation
burst upon their heads."27
Susan B. Anthony did not attend the Seneca Falls Convention,
as news of the meeting did not reach Canajorharie, N.Y., where she
was teaching, until after the meeting had been held. But she was
interested in details of the meeting and read everything she could

find about it and the woman's rights convention held later in July in

Rochester, N.Y. Despite her interest, however, "when she read the

 

25Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 164.

26Ibid., p. 77.

27Rheta Childe Dorr, Susan B. Anthony (New York: Frederick
A. Stokes Co., 1928), p. 51.

20

eleventh resolution calling for the right to vote, she laughed."28

She soon discovered that her father, mother, and sister not only had
attended the Rochester meeting, but all had signed their names to
the demand for equal suffrage, even though they were Quakers who
themselves did not vote.

But Miss Anthony, like many of her contemporaries, would
hesitate before becoming committed to the woman suffrage movement.
The many other reforms of the day--moral reform, dress reform,
temperance, abolition, and vegetarianism, to name a few--all had
many dedicated female supporters. Temperance was Susan Anthony's
major interest, and she would soon give up her teaching job to serve
as a paid lecturer for the temperance cause.

In the course of her travels, she met Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, who convinced Miss Anthony as she would over the years convince
countless other women, that woman had to have autonomy herself before
she could work effectively for other reforms.

From Seneca Falls, the organization of a suffrage movement
was accomplished very quickly, and from 1848 to 1861 annual suffrage
meetings were held around the country. Women began using petitions
and lobbying techniques and even testified before state and federal
legislative committees to further their own cause as well as the

Negro's.

 

28Ibid., p. 52. Miss Dorr incorrectly refers to the

eleventh resolution. It was the ninth resolution, demanding woman
suffrage, that elicited a laugh from Miss Anthony.

21

Although the Civil War temporarily halted woman suffrage
activity, the conflict provided numerous opportunities for women to
expand the scope of their activity. The Sanitary Commission, an
effort initiated and conducted by women, provided the Union with much
needed public health services. "Behind the famous greeting, 'Hello,
Sanitary,’ which echoed down the rows of cots to the women bringing
jelly, fruit, clean clothing, soap, and other essentials to the
ragged men, lay the work of a complex organization which, by the end
of the war, numbered some 7,000 local societies throughout the North
and West, and which raised--and spent--the huge sum of $50,000,000."29
The war also gave women a chance to enter the clerical profession,
for large numbers of civil service workers were needed in Washington,
D.C.

During the early years of the war, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony organized the National Woman's Loyal League and
supervised the collection of 300,000 signatures on petitions asking
for emancipation of the slaves. The petition drive "was acknowledged
by President Lincoln and members of Congress as furnishing an authori-
tative public demand for the Emancipation Proclamation."30

The war ended and the emancipation of slaves accomplished,

the question of the extension of suffrage was again on the public

 

29Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 107.

30Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman
Suffrage and Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1970) D p- 35.

22

mind. The woman's rights leaders, who not only had worked for the
emancipation of the Negro and had served in the war effort, but also
had subsumed their own interests during the war, cherished the be-
lief that they, along with the Negro, would be rewarded with the
franchise. They soon learned otherwise, when the Fourteenth Amend-
ment was proposed. The amendment had two sections, the first, de-
fining citizenship, and the second, forbidding any state to deny the
right to vote to its male_citizens. The amendment was devastating
to feminists:

For the first time the word male was mentioned in the Consti-
tution, which, in its original form had contained not a
syllable limiting the qualifications of voters, as to sex,
race, social or financial status. . . . To Susan [B. Anthony],
chief among the women who had toiled so unselfishly to lift the
curse of negro slavery from the land, this new affirmation of
women's subjected status came as a stunning blow. Not only in
the Women's Loyal League had Northern women rendered devoted
service to the Union. In the Sanitary Commission, in military
hospitals, in first aid stations under fire, in war work of
every description back of the lines, they had worked faithfully
and well. Even, in some cases, in the planning of campaigns
and in the secret service women had distinguished themselves.
They had been the first to go into the South as teachers in
negro schools. And now, for their sole reward, they found that,
as Elizabeth Cady Stanton expressed it, they had "boosted the
negro over their own heads." 1

The Fourteenth Amendment was passed, an "implied denial of

suffrage to women," said the Springfield Republican.32

 

 

31Dorr,'Susan B. Anthony, pp. 178-79.

32Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, pp. 41-42.

23

But, as the suffragists would so bitterly recall years later,
the post-war years were labeled "the Negro's hour,‘' and nothing the
women did seemed to change the situation. Men such as Wendell Phillips,
Gerrit Smith, and Horace Greeley--men who had worked side by side with
women in the abolition movement--now turned their backs on their sisters.
In fact, the debate over suffrage for Negroes alone versus universal
suffrage caused a split among women in the suffrage movement, leading
to the formation of the conservative American Woman Suffrage Associa-
tion and the liberal National Woman Suffrage Association.

The first state referendum on the woman suffrage question
was held in Kansas in 1867, and, despite the valiant efforts of suffrage
leaders including Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, the measure was defeated.

These setbacks to the woman's rights cause were happening at
a time when women, having entered the outside world in increasing num-
bers, appear to have needed the support of an organized movement on
their behalf. The Printer's Circular, a New York trade paper, reported
in 1869 that "75,000 women in New York and its suburbs were dependent
on their own labor at wages half those of men in the same occupations--
ranging from $4.50 a week for seamstresses to $18 a week for editors."33

There were, however, some encouraging signs. In 1866, woman

suffrage conventions again started convening annually. In 1867, women

 

33Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. III
(New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1930), p. 93.

24

were admitted to the national cigarmakers' union and in 1869, to the
national printers' union. In December, 1868 Sen. 5. C. Pomeroy of

Kansas proposed a woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution. And
early in l868, woman's rights journalism began a new era--The Revolution,

the first national suffrage newspaper, arrived on the scene.

Women in American Journalism:
Printers,_Publishers, Editors,
and'Authors

Journalism had traditionally provided a forum and a profession
for a small number of American women. In colonial times, many women
inherited newspapers and printing establishments when their husbands
died. Not a few women proved to be able printers and businesswomen.
Three of the first four newspapers in the colonies were, at some time,

under the direction of women.34

In colonial New York, Anne Zenger
published the New-York Weekly Journal during the eight months her hus-
band, Peter, was in jail on charges of seditious libel. Her ability
to keep the paper alive gave Zenger a forum for presenting his views
on his case.35
Southern women also were active in printing and publishing.
Colonial South Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia all were served by

women newspaper publishers.36

 

34Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States from
1690-1872 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1873), pp. 55-112, passim.

35Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History
of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927), p. 32.

36
pp. 263-267.

Spruill, Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies,

25

These women--primarily printers, but also writers and
editors when necessary--carried a great deal of the printing load
during the Revolutionary era. One woman who played a vital role was

Anne Green, publisher of the Maryland Gazette. Maryland, because of

 

its central location, was an important link between the New England
and Southern colonies:

Until Aug. 20, 1773, when William Goddard began publication in
Baltimore of the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, the
Gazette was the only Maryland newspaper, and its role in report-
ing the political events leading to the Revolution was an
important one. Mrs. Green printed communications from the
Northern colonies showing the increasing protest against the
Townshend Acts and the establishment and success of nonimporta-
tion agreements. Through her columns John Dickinson's Letters
from a Pennsylvania Farmer reached the public. Accounts 0? the
Boston Tea Party and the Boston Port Act of 1774 aroused great
excitement. By informing the people of plans and protests else-
where as well as at home, the Gazette no doubt unconsciously
helped to push the revolutionary cause.37

A few years later, when the nation was established, and
the war emergency was over, the value of women's services, in journalism
as well as in other areas, seems to have declined. The satire of
Steele and Addison, concentrating as it did on the weaknesses, dress,
and silly habits of the "fair Sex," was, after nearly one hundred years
being picked up by American writers. Noah Webster's comment in the
March, 1788 issue of the American Magazine is representative of con-
temporary advice given to the "ladies:" "To be lgyely you must be content

to be women; to be mild, social, and sentimental--to be acquainted with

 

37Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607-1950,
Vol. II (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 80.

26

all that belongs to your department--and leave the masculine virtues,
and the profound researches of study to the province of the other
sex."38 Webster's statement reflected the opinion of a majority of
his contemporaries and, in fact, was the philosophy behind the gears
of "ladies' magazines" typified by Godey's Lady's Book, edited for
many years by Sarah Josepha Hale.

But the seeds of rebellion had been planted, and an in-
creasing number of women would defy Webster's dictum. By this time,
the writings of Judith Sargent Murray and Mary Wollstonecraft had
been disseminated, and new writers and thinkers were emerging. One
of the earliest and most radical of the nineteenth century American
women writers was Frances (or Fanny) Wright, whose scandalous conduct
shocked her contemporaries. Frances Wright, a Freethinker, was a
follower of the Scottish reformer, Robert Owen.’ Among the causes
espoused by the two were abolition, opposition to organized religions,
and support for women's rights. If Frances Wright had confined her
activities to writing, her radical views probably would have been
tolerated, but she spoke in public at a time when people literally
did not know what kind of sound to expect when a woman got up to speak
in public.

After attempting to establish a Utopian community in Tennessee,
Miss Wright and Owen moved to New York, where they edited and published
the Free Enquirer from 1829 to 1835. According to Frank Luther Mott:

"Controversy was the meat on which the Free Enquirer fed. . . . The

 

38Mott, History of American Magazines, Vol. I, p. 64.

27

editors were the chief contributors. . . . With such striking per-

sonalities in charge, the Free Enquirer was of course interesting."39

Among the reforms advocated by the Free Enquirer were: abolition of

 

capital punishment, improvements in the status of women, birth con-
trol, and other unpopular causes.40 Frances Wright met strong
hostility from the public and generally is not considered to have
had a favorable effect in advancing reformist ideas. “Frances Wright
appeared on the scene too soon to influence the first generation of
feminists directly, although some of them had certainly heard of her
activities."41
Anne Royall, while as flamboyant an individual as Miss
Wright, had less lofty goals.. Although she did support an impressive
array of reforms such as liberal immigration and tariff laws, the
abolition of flogging in the United States Navy, better conditions
for wage earners, and the right of freedom of expression, Mrs. Royall
was also prone to publishing a bit of gossip and scandal. Mrs. Royall
began publishing in Washington, D.C. in 1831, issuing Paul Pry, a
"lively weekly in which local gossip and sharp—tongued editorial

"42

comment found prominent place. She edited Paul Pry for five years

 

39Ibid., Vol. I, p. 538.

40Gerda Lerner, "Women's Rights and American Feminism,"
American Scholar, XL (Spring, 1971), 241.

4]Ibid.

42Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1936), p. 30.

 

28

and then began a new weekly, The Huntress. In both publications Mrs.
Royall defended Sunday transportation of the mails, supported states'
rights, opposed the Bank of the United States, and campaigned for
religious tolerance. She was taken seriously, not only by her opponents,
but also by other newspaper publishers. In 1829, because of her
opposition to organized religion, Mrs. Royall was brought to trial,
accused of being a "common scold," an old common law offense punish-
able by dunking--an offense which, by definition, only a woman could
commit. During her trial, many editorials were published on the case,
and public concern seems to have been aroused about the effect of
Anne Royall's conviction (she was, at the last minute, spared the
indignity of the dunking) on the recently won right of freedom of
speech and of the press.43
Jane Grey Swisshelm was the first woman editor and publisher

in the United States to include the woman's rights question in her

sphere of interest. Mrs. Swisshelm, editor of the Pittsburgh Saturday

 

Visiter (which was later consolidated with another paper as the family;
Journal and Visiter,) the St. Cloud (Minn.) Visiter, the St. Cloud
Democrat, and the Reconstructionist (published in Washington, D.C.),

was the first woman in the Washington press corps. Mrs. Swisshelm, a
small, delicate-looking woman, had a sharp mind and acid pen. Frank
Luther Mott, writing of the Pittsburgh Saturdaerisiter, noted: “It was

primarily an antislavery journal, but the very boldness of its editress

 

43Robert Somerlott, "Anne Royall: 'Common Scold,'" M§,,
March, 1974, p. 16.

29

made it an argument in itself for woman's rights."44

Jane Grey
Swisshelm supported woman suffrage, although she never became in-
volved in any woman suffrage organization. Her editorials in the
Pittsburgh Visiter, advocating married woman's property rights, are
credited with hastening this reform in Pennsylvania.45
Perhaps the best known woman journalist of the time was
Margaret Fuller, editor of the transcendentalist journal, the Dial,
reporter for Horace Greeley's Tribune, and author of the widely discussed
essay, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Miss Fuller's woman's rights
arguments were similar to those of Mary Wollstonecraft--sweeping
indictments of the countless ways society discriminated against women.
Like Miss Wollstonecraft, Miss Fuller blamed most of women's inade-
quacies on environment, rather than on hereditary deficiencies. After
pointing out the hypocrisy of some of men's concern for women's
frailties ("Those who think the physical circumstances of Woman would
make a part in the affairs of national government unsuitable, are by
no means those who think it impossible for negresses to endure field-
work, even during pregnancy, or for seamstresses to go through their
killing labors"),46 Miss Fuller presented the basis on which equality

for women must rest: "Yet then and only then will mankind be ripe

for this [harmony of the sphere], when inward and outward freedom for

 

44Mott, History of American Magazines, Vol. II, p. 50.

45James, Notable American Women, Vol. III, p. 416.

46Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 35.

30

Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded
as a concession. As a friend of the negro assumes that one man cannot
by right hold another in bondage, so should the friend of Woman assume
that Man cannot by right lay even well-meant restrictions on Woman."47

Miss Fuller was not involved in the political woman's rights
movement. Nevertheless, her writings were quoted extensively by
feminists long after her tragic death by drowning in 1850.

Mrs. Murray, Miss Wright, Mrs. Swisshelm, and Miss Fuller
each reported on a wide range of subjects--abolition, suffrage, woman's
rights, to name a few. A number of nineteenth century woman journalists,
however, concentrated on a single reform. Because of the limited scope
of interest of these individuals, it is not surprising that their
periodicals were short-lived, and their names are almost forgotten.

But, as evidence of the social ferment of the period, some of these
editors and publishers should be mentioned.

The abolition movement brought with it opportunity for women
journalists and writers. Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, the first
American woman to work for the antislavery cause, edited the "Ladies'
Respository" section of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, published

by Benjamin Lundy. Lydia Maria Child gave up popularity as a novelist

 

31

and editor of a children's magazine to work for the abolition cause
and served as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1841
to 1843.48

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a black woman from Delaware, left the
state in the late 18505 to go to Canada. She settled in Windsor,
Ontario, where, for three years, she published the Provincial Free-

men-49

 

Julia Ward Howe, famous as the author of the "Battle Hymn
of the Republic," was, with her husband, an editor of the ngtgg
Commonwealth, an anti-slavery newspaper.

In the 18405 and 18505, woman's rights advocates began to
feel the need for more publications devoted to their particular
interests. Women, however, often lacked money and expertise and
often were forced to move because of their husbands' business commit-
ments, leaving successful ventures behind or transplanting them to
the frontier. Two successful newspapers that did not survive such
moves were The Lily, "devoted to the Interests of Women," edited and
published by Amelia Bloomer (best known for her effort to introduce
the trouser and tunic costume advocated by those who believed in dress

reform) and the Windham, Vermont, Countrnyemocrat. The latter paper

 

48For discussion of Mrs. Swisshelm, Miss Chandler, and Mrs.
Child, see Dorothy Langdon Yates, "Belles of Freedom: Three Women
Antislavery Editors," unpublished M.A. thesis, Michigan State University,
1969.

49Flexner, Centuryrof Struggle, p. 98.

32

was published by Clarina Howard Nichols, who wrote a number of editor-
ials on the need for reform of married women's property laws. It
should be noted that Elizabeth Cady Stanton began her prolific writing
career by publishing pieces in The Lily, which was published in Seneca
Falls.50

Some of the better known woman's journals of the period
were the Genius of Liberty, edited and published from 1852 to 1854 by
Mrs. E. A. Aldrich, the Pioneer and Woman's Advocate," published by
Anna W. Spencer in Providence, R.I., and Paulina Wright Davis's Una,
founded in 1853, also published in Providence.

The Woman's Advocate, published in Philadelphia from 1855
to 1860, had the distinction of being owned, edited, and printed by

women under the direction of Anna McDowell.5]

The Woman's Advocate

was a moderate publication, concerned mainly with moral reform. Many

of the articles in the paper dealt with prostitution and other evidences
of moral decline, especially in the cities. Once, however, Sarah Grimke
wrote a column for the Woman's Advocate in which she went closer to

the home as the root of the problem of woman's inequality: “Instead

of regarding his wife as a help-mate for him, an equal sharer in joys

and sorrows, he [the average hquand] looks upon her as a useful

 

50Mott, History of American Magazines, Vol. II, p. 50.

5lBertha Stearns, "Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers,"
American Historical Review, XXXVII (July, 1932), 678-99.

33

article of furniture which is valuable only for the benefit derived
from it, but which may be thrown aside at pleasure."52
A number of dress reform papers were published at this
time. Dress reform was an issue embraced by many woman's rights pro-
ponents, who argued that the fashionable style of dress, with skirts
that swept up the dirt of the street, corsets and stays that prevented
women from breathing deeply, and garters that interrupted circulation
in the leg, was, in fact, a deterrent to women seeking an equal place
with men in society. The Bloomer costume was the most publicized anti-
dote to contemporary fashions; The Lily, while it did not succeed in
selling the costume to the public, did profit from the publicity the
question brought the paper.
Lydia Sayer was one woman who never ceased supporting the
Bloomer costume. She published a magazine, The Sybil, from 1856 to
1864 in Middletown, N.Y., in which she tried to revive interest in the
Bloomer costume. Unfortunately, most of the woman's rights advocates
who had supported the costume had, by 1856, ceased to wear it. Although
Miss Sayer did not receive much public support, she continued to wear
the reform costume until her death in 1910.53

There were many more newspapers and magazines that lasted

only a few weeks, months, or years. The rate at which such special

 

52Woman's Advocate, Feb. 15, 1838, in Carroll Smith Rosenberg,
"Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles
and Social Stress in Jacksonian America," American Quarterly, XXIII
(October, 1971), 562-84.

53Robert E. Riegel, "Women's Clothes and Women's Rights,"
American Quarterly, XV (Fall, 1963), 390-401.

34

interest publications appeared and disappeared in the 18405 to 18605
is astonishing, especially considering the limited financial resources
at women's disposal.

These publications served a much needed function for
suffragists, for "the press in general did little to further the

"54 Leaders such as Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, and

women's cause.
Miss Stone took full advantage of the array of publications at their
disposal. It was inevitable that suffrage workers would eventually
decide to publish periodicals of their own. The Revolution was the
first realization of this impulse to spread the woman suffrage and
woman's right message throughout the United States. Although the
newspaper survived only two and a half years, it led the way for a
long line of suffragist periodicals that would help carry the move-

ment for women's enfranchisement until the battle finally was won in

1920.

 

54Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 81.

CHAPTER II
FOUNDERS OF THE REVOLUTION

The Revolution was launched by an unlikely publishing team:
two women activists (one the mother of seven children, the other a
former schoolteacher), a presidential candidate, and a minister. Yet
these four individuals--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,
George Francis Train, and Parker Pillsbury--despite their differences
in background, philosophy, and strategy, did succeed in starting and
carrying on the first woman suffrage periodical in the United States.

The social climate was favorable for such a publication.
The issue of woman suffrage was re-emerging in the late 18605 after
having been buried during the Civil War. As an increasing number of
women in more parts of the expanding nation began to take an interest
in the question of their own right to the ballot, there was a "great
seed of a medium through which the cause of woman might be thoroughly
advocated."] .

But like many abstract ideas, the launching of a suffrage
newspaper depended on the right mixture of events and personalities.
In this case George Francis Train acted as the catalyst that put
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury at the editor's desks and
Susan B. Anthony in the publisher's offite at The Revolution's Park

Row headquarters.

 

1Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony,
Vol. I (Indianapolis: The Hollenbeck Press, 1898), p. 300.

35

36

Although all four persons were responsible for launching
the publication, The Revolution is usually thought of as Miss Anthony's
and Mrs. Stanton's newspaper. And, in fact, the two women did bear
most of the responsibility for the newspaper. This fact is understand-
able. Whereas for Train and Pillsbury, woman suffrage was just one of
many pet causes, for the women, the experience with The Revolution was
one segment of a lifelong dedication to the woman's rights cause.

For each individual, however, an appreciable commitment of

time, money, and energy was devoted to keeping The Revolution alive.

 

In order to understand the impetus for this effort, it is necessary
to examine the lives that were brought together for the publishing

venture.

George Francis Train

Elizabeth Cady Stanton described him as "a large, fine-looking
man, a gentleman in dress and manner, neither smoking, chewing, drink-

ing, nor gormandizing."2

Lucy Stone, on the other hand, feared that
his "presence as an advocate of woman suffrage was enough to condemn
it."3 George Francis Train appears to have excited such extreme feel-

ings in others throughout his life.

 

2Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (London:
T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 256.

3Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls (New York:
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1974), p. 224.

37

Train was born in Boston in 1829 and spent most of his youth

in Massachusetts. After his mother, three sisters, and father died

in a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans, the boy was raised by his
grandparents. When he was fourteen, George Train began working for
his uncle, a shipping merchant. Thus began a lifelong fascination
with travel and modern means of transportation. By the time the

Civil War started, Train had been to England, Australia, and the
Orient, had been responsible for commissioning the building of the

famous ship, the Flying Cloud, had raised capital in England for

 

building an intercontinental railroad in the United States, and was
beginning to persuade the townspeople of Liverpool, London, and
Staffordshire of the need for streetcars in these cities.

But besides being a successful businessman, Train was a
highly opinionated individual, and the fiercely pro-Union speeches
he made in England made him increasingly unpopular there. "Love of
country was always stronger in me than love of money, and I let slip
no opportunity to defend the cause of the Union and to prove to the
English of the upper classes that they were mistaken in supposing
that the Confederacy could succeed."4 In 1862 Train returned to the
United States and started promoting the Credit Mobiler method of

financing the soon to be built Union Pacific Railroad. While he was

 

4George Francis Train, My Life in Many States and in Foreign
Lands (New York: 0. Appleton and Co., 1902), p. 271.

38

in Nebraska working on this venture, Train became an active Democrat.
In 1867, the party offered his services to Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were canvassing Kansas, trying to get
voter support for a woman suffrage referendum.
By this time Train was well-known--his flamboyant actions
and speeches and his ardent support for certain causes were enough to
turn many people against him. But added to these sins was the fact
that Train was a Democrat--a member of the party that had supported
the institution of slavery. Heretofore, woman suffrage advocates had
been closely allied with the Republicans. This alliance was a natural
outgrowth of the common interest the two groups had in abolition and
antislavery. Most suffrage supporters did not want to go against
their Republican friends: however, Susan B. Anthony was a pragmatist.
George Francis Train was willing to devote his own time and money to
the woman suffrage cause. Besides, in 1867 most Republican men had
temporarily abandoned the woman suffrage question, and were, in fact,
urging the women to wait until Negro suffrage was granted by the federal
government.
Under these circumstances, Miss Anthony had only one choice:
The Republicans not only had forsaken the women but were waging
open war upon them. The sole hope of carrying the amendment was
by adding enough Democratic votes to those of Republicans who would
not obey their party orders to vote against it. . . .The following
telegram was sent to Train: "Come to Kansas and stump the State

for equal rights and woman suffrage. The people want you, the
women want you."5

 

5Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. I, p. 286.

39

The women were not sorry with the decision. George Francis
Train was a sincere, exciting speaker who attracted a great deal of
publicity for the woman suffrage cause:

The person who got the longest notices--not all of them entirely
complimentary-~was George Francis Train. Just then at the height
of his fame as a financial wizard, a millionaire, a traveler in
mythical lands of the Far East, a friend of royalty in Europe,
and above all a sartorial miracle, Kansas came miles to see him.
Ranchers and cowboys, buffalo hustlers and gamblers, in high
boots and ten gallon hats, chaps and spurs and flannel shirts,
came to hoot and remained to wonder. Women and girls came to
giggle and admire. But George Francis Train was no mere tailor's
dummy. He gave them the worth of their money not only by dis-
playing raiment the like of which the frontier had never beheld,
but by speeches full of political dynamite, and by all the dramatic
touches he could contrive to add to the program.5

Train's greatest and best-remembered contribution to the woman's

rights cause, however, came at the very end of the Kansas campaign.
One day, as Train and Miss Anthony were traveling to Junction City, he
asked why the women did not have a newspaper.‘ She had told him that
they could not find anyone to provide the financial support necessary
for such an undertaking. After expressing amazement that men like
Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Tilton would not advance
the money, Train said he would have to do so himself. Miss Anthony had
not taken him seriously, however, and had gone about the business of
arranging for that night's speeches.

It was nine o'clock when they reached. . . Junction City. . . and,

as usual, Miss Anthony had to make her speech without change of

dress, and a half hour later Mr. Train stepped on the platform
refreshed and resplendent. His first words were: "When Miss

 

6Rheta Childe Dorr, Susan B. Anthony(New York: Frederick A.
Stokes Co., 1928), p. 195.

40

Anthony gets back to New York she is going to start a woman

suffrage paper. Its name is to be The Revolution; its motto,

'men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and

nothing less.' This paper is to be a weekly, price $2 per year;

its editors, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury; its 7

proprietor, Susan B. Anthony. Let everybody subscribe to it!"
Here was the chance the women had been waiting for--the chance to
publish their own newspaper.

The campaign for suffrage was unsuccessful, the woman suf-
frage amendment receiving 9,070 votes of 30,000 votes cast. But the
loss was not mourned by the campaigners, who were looking ahead to
The Revolution. Train was true to his word--in his own fashion.
After the election, he and the two women started on the journey East.
They spoke at most major cities on the way and arrived in New York
in time to make arrangements to start publishing Jan. 8, 1868.

Train remained in New York to see the first issue distributed.
Unfortunately, he chose this time to go to England, where he was
immediately arrested for his support of the Fenians. He had handed
Miss Anthony $600 before he left New York and continued to send
stories to the paper while he was in prison, but any hopes the women
had entertained of maintaining the paper with Train's support were
disappointed. The women turned to other sources, but never were able
to generate any dependable support. After his return to the United
States, Train did make some minor financial contributions to the paper.

But opposition to him had never abated, and in 1869 he offered to with-

draw his name and all support from The Revolution. Miss Anthony

 

7Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. I, p. 290.

41

accepted his offer, and the columns of The Revolution no longer were
filled with the "mad extravagances" of George Francis Train.

Train's political involvement kept him in the spotlight for
the next three years. He decided in 1869 to begin campaigning for
the 1872 presidential election, using as his motto: "We the people,
not I the king."8 He was confident of his chances: "I had not the
slightest doubt that I should be elected; and, with this sublime self-
confidence, threw myself into the campaign with an energy and fire
that never before, perhaps, characterized a Presidential candidate.
I went into the campaign as into a battle."9 As the campaign pro-
gressed, Train realized that he would not win and dropped out of the
race in 1871.

Although not as a presidential nominee, Train was destined
to be in the public eye in 1872, the presidential election year.
Once again, he was involved in a controversial situation involving
both woman's rights advocates and publishing. Henry Ward Beecher,
the famous preacher and abolitionist, was accused of committing
adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, whose husband, Theodore, was a protege
of Beecher. The story had been brought before the public by Victoria
Woodhull, the seer, stockbroker, and suffragist who edited and published

Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, a gossipy woman's rights periodical.

 

8John Wesley Nichols, ed., The PeopJe's Candidate for Presi-
dent, 1872, George Francis Train (New York: n.p., 1872), back cover.

9Train, My Life in Many States and Foreign Lands, p. 318.

42

Miss Woodhull soon came under public fire for publishing the story,
as much for the obscenity of her discussions of the affair as for
the fact that she had intruded on the private lives of Beecher and
the Tiltons. In defense of Miss Woodhull's freedom of speech, Train

in his newspaper, Train Ligne, published passages of pornographic

 

writing, which the following week he identified as passages from the
Bible. This stunt landed Train a six-month stay in the Tombs prison
in New York City. Furthermore, the court ruled that Train was insane,
a finding that cost him $30 million in property he held in Omaha; for
the rest of his life, Train was denied all rights to the property.
This incident also gave Train the dubious distinction of being the
first American to incur the wrath of Anthony ComstoCk, the censor who
would later harness a great number of people-~Emma Goldman to H. L.
Mencken.

Train continued his world travels, setting three records
for traveling around the world: in seventy-eight days in 1870, then
in sixty-eight days in 1890 (beating Nellie Bly's record of seventy-
three days), and finally, in 1892, in just sixty days. In his auto-
biography, Train claimed that he was the model for Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days, but this notion was not substantiated
by his biographers.

After his last voyage, Train settled permanently in New York
City. His later years were spent writing his autobiography, My Life
in Many States and in Foreign Lands, experimenting in a genre he called

psychic verse, and talking with children. He died Jan. 19, 1909.

43

Train's overall contribution to the woman's right movement
was spotty. Before his participation in the 1867 suffrage campaign
in Kansas, Train does not appear to have expressed public opinion on
the question of woman's rights. In fact, because he was a Democrat,
Train was suspected in 1867 of supporting woman suffrage as an attempt
to forestall the coming of Negro suffrage.

But Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony do not
seem to have been troubled by questions of Train's sincerity. Al-
though his reputation would haunt the women for years after Ihe_
Revolution had folded, they accepted his support and defended his name
for the rest of their lives: ”Miss Anthony often said that all the
severe criticisms made upon him for years had not been able to impair
the respect with which he inspired her during. . .Kansas. . . campaign.
Mrs. Stanton, essentially an aristocrat and severe in her judgment of
. men and manners, spoke highly of Mr. Train in her Reminiscences.“10

There is no existing indication of Train's own feelings
about woman's rights and woman suffrage. He included woman suffrage
on his platform when he made his bid for the presidency, and he was a
friend of Victoria Woodhull. In his autobiography published in 1907,
however, Train does not mention The Revolution, Susan B. Anthony, or
Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Nor is his connection with the suffragists

mentioned in the Dictionary_of American Biography, National Cyclopedia

 

 

10Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, I, 292.

44

of American Biggraphy, or a biography, The Nine Lives of Citizen
Train, published in 1945.

Perhaps this ambiguity is unimportant. In 1867, when
Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton were answering suffragists who ques-
tioned Train's motives, the two women pointed out that, regardless
of his eccentricities, Train was willing to give active support to
their cause at a time when many former supporters were urging women
to wait. Whatever his shortcomings, George Francis Train was instru-
mental in providing the impetus for a great experiment that no one

else had dared try--the launching of a suffragist journal.

Parker Pillsbury

If George Francis Train seems to have been guided by whim
more than by principles, Parker Pillsbury was the opposite. Pills-
bury based all his reform activities--in the abolition and the
woman's rights movements--on the firm Christian principles that had
first led him to the ministry.

Pillsbury was born in Hamilton, Mass., in 1809, son of
Oliver and Anna Smith Pillsbury. Shortly after Parker's birth, the
family moved to New Hampshire, a state that would be Parker Pillsbury's
permanent residence for the rest of his life. He attended district
schools and until in his mid-twenties worked on the family farm and

as a wagoner.

45

Pillsbury was interested in antislavery and temperance and

"1] so in 1835 he entered Gilmanton

"had inherited a religious nature,
Theological Seminary, a short-lived institution located near his home.
Because of his doubts about the adequacy of the training he received
at Gilmanton, Pillsbury spent a year at the reputable Andover Theo-
logical Seminary. Here, however, Pillsbury's opposition to slavery
got him in trouble with the school's faculty, many of whom supported
the institution. One professor, for example, Professor Moses Stuart,
"constantly wrote and preached the God-given right of white Americans
to keep the Negro in chains."12

In 1839 Pillsbury was licensed to preach (he never did be-
come an ordained minister), and for a year he served as pastor of a
Congregational church. But "Christians in general opposed the anti-
slavery movement, and pulpits were closed to its advocates,"13 so
Pillsbury gave up the profession he had trained for. In 1840, he
devoted his life to reform.

That year marked the real beginning of a split in the
abolitionist ranks. On one side were those who considered woman's
rights an extension of the same principles as those behind antislavery.

The opposition consisted of those who wanted to tackle one reform at

a time.

 

nNational Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. II (New
York: J. T. White andTCo., 1893-1911), p. 331.

12Lawrence Lader, The Bold Brahmins: New EngJand's War
A ainst Slavery: 1831-1863 (New York: 1E. P.1Dutton & Co., Inc.,
1961), p. 125.

13

 

National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. II, p. 331.

46

The issue of woman's rights had been a tacit part of the
antislavery situation for years, as long as women had become involved
in the reform movement. Gradually in the United States, it was be-
coming more common for women to speak in abolition meetings and serve
as delegates at antislavery conventions. But this liberal trend had
not spread to Great Britain, and when American women delegates
attempted to be seated at the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in
London in 1840, they were barred from the convention floor. The
ousted women delegates were joined by American men such as William

Lloyd Garrison and Nathaniel P. Rogers, editor of the Herald of Free-

 

ggm, who protested the insult to elected delegates.

Parker Pillsbury was not at the World Anti-Slavery Conven-
tion--he was in Concord, N.H. editing the Herald of Freedom in
Rogers's absence--but Pillsbury's sympathies were with the women. In

his autobiographical account of the abolition movement, Acts of the

 

Anti-Slavery Apostles, Pilleury would write of the event:

In. . . 1840 . . .was held in London the memorable World's
anti-slavery convention, made memorable most of all by its
rejection of several American commissioned delegates, one of
them being Mrs. Lucretia Mott, because they were women.
"British usage," was the only plea in justification, in a
realm that had had women at the head of state and church,
parliament, army, navy, the whole nation, many times, all
down the centuries from Boadicea to Queen Victoria.)4

The years 1840 to 1842 appear to have been Pillsbury's most

exciting time. Garrison had suggested that abolitionists establish a

 

14Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles
(Concord, N.H.: n.p., 1883), p. 88.

47

policy of “coming out," that is of forcing slave-supporting churches
and pastors to show their hand. Pillsbury and Stephen Symoads Foster
took Garrison's decree to heart and turned their attention to purging
the churches of all pro-slavery elements. The two men would travel
throughout New England and would enter a church during services, ask-
ing permission to address the congregation. The two never seem to
have waited for the granting of that permission; they would take
advantage of the silence brought about by the surprise of the con-
gregation and would begin bringing up antislavery arguments. Not
surprisingly, their action met with much opposition. The men were
thrown out of churches, beaten, and taken to court for disturbing
the peace. In fact, the two stirred up so much violence among slavery
advocates that "even Garrison and Phillips felt their militancy was
being carried too far."15 Pillsbury and Foster, however, felt they
were doing the right thing. In a letter to Foster, Pillsbury wrote:
“To the popular prevailing denominations we are infidels indeed, and
we mean to be, and are willing to be scandalized as such."16
Revisionist historians in the 1960s questioned the motives
for Pillsbury's zeal. Lawrence Lader mentions that Pillsbury "prized

his patched and shredded coat, manhandled by many Sunday congregations."17

 

15Alma Lutz, Crusade for Freedom: Women in the Antislavery
Movement (Boston: BeaconEPress, 1968), p. 215.

16Lillie B. Chace Wyman, "Reminiscences of Two Abolitionists,"
New England Magazine, January, 1903, p. 541.

17Lader, Bold Brahmins, p. 123.

48

And, in fact, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles, Pillsbury's account
of the period, does dwell on descriptions of the opposition abolition-
ists met from violent mobs. Martin Duberman is one historian who

sees Pillsbury as a fanatic; Duberman was speaking of Pillsbury,

among others, in this passage: "Some of the abolitionists, it is
true, yere_palpable neurotics, men who were not comfortable within
themselves and therefore not comfortable with others, men whose
'reality testing' was poor, whose life-styles were pronouncedly com-

pulsive, whose relationships were unusual compounds of demand and
"18

fantasy.
Pillsbury's enthusiasm may seem strange to historians look-
ing back one hundred years, but the man was dedicated to the anti-
slavery cause. His dedication was admired by many of the leading
liberals of the period. "Emerson declared him to be the strongest
man intellectually of all that great abolition coterie composed of

Garrison, Phillips, Foster, Rogers, and himself,“19

according to
Pillsbury's obituary in the New York Times. Oliver Johnson, another
abolitionist, said of Pillsbury: "Endowed with a vivid imagination,
he could set the enormities of the slave system and the guilt of its
supporters in their true light. His speeches were strong in argument,

earnest and solemn in the manner of delivery, and adorned with an

 

18Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New
Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, N.J.: ’Princeton’University
Press, 1965), p. 406.

19New York Times, July 8, 1898, p. 7.

49

imagery which to many was exceedingly fascinating."2O And James
Russell Lowell described Pillsbury this way:

Brows, broad-shouldered Pillsbury,

Who tears up words like trees by the roots--

A theseus in stout cow-hide boots

A terrible denouncer he!

Old Sinai burns unquenchably

Upon his lips; he well might be a 2]

Hot blazing soul from fierce Judea.

,_ In addition to public speaking, Pillsbury did more writing
and editing for the antislavery cause. In 1845-46 he again edited
Herald of Freedom and in 1866 he was editor of the National Anti-
Slavery Standard, the newspaper that earlier had been edited by Lydia
Marie Child. '

But Pillsbury, like others, found his growing interest in
women's rights conflicting with the post-war strategy mapped out by
the antislavery leaders. Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Greeley,
Frederick Douglass, and others insisted that women should postpone
their activities on behalf of their own suffrage, equal protection,
and equal pay for equal work until the Negro had gained these rights.
In support of this idea, the antislavery advocates supported the

Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which conferred citizenship

to the Negro. The problem with this amendment, however, was that it

 

20New York Daily Tribune, July 9, 1898, p. 16.

21National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. II, p. 331.

50

introduced the word I'male" into the Constitution. Heretofore,
woman suffrage advocates had been able to point out that the Con-
stitution did not specifically exclude women; the newest amendment
would nullify that argument. Pillsbury sided with the women on this
issue and resigned as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard,
since its parent organization supported the amendment.

Two years later, in l868, Pillsbury was employed with
Elizabeth Cady Stanton as co-editor of The Revolution. Pillsbury's

 

role in The Revolution is not well-documented. He had met Mrs.
Stanton in 1843 when she lived in Boston. Undoubtedly, he, Mrs.
Stanton, and Miss Anthony had lectured together on the temperance
or antislavery circuit. But it was Train who chose Pillsbury, and
none of the existing diaries or letters of Train, Mrs. Stanton, or
Miss Anthony give any indication of the reason for Train's choice
and Pillsbury's agreement to serve as editor.

Whatever the reason for choosing Pillsbury, he served the
entire two and a half years that the paper was under Miss Anthony's
and Mrs. Stanton's control.

Apparently, Parker was a self-effacing editor. In May,
1870 when the paper had been sold, Mrs. Stanton wrote to Miss Anthony:
"You and Parker Pillsbury gone and our Revolution no more! There is

is a sadness, though relief, in the fact. I was sorry Parker took

51

out of our farewell editorials all mention of him. It was wrong of
him to do so, because it makes us look selfishly forgetful."22

After 1870 Pillsbury preached at free religious societies
in Salem and Toledo, Ohio, Battle Creek, Mich., and other western
towns. He wrote many pamphlets and in 1883 published Acts of the
Anti-SlaveryrApostles.

Pillsbury returned to New Hampshire where he lived to the
age of 89. One of his last public acts was to send a letter to the
National American Woman Suffrage Association annual convention in
1897, the year before his death.

Pillsbury appears to have been a well-known public figure,
even after the heyday of his involvement in controversial issues had
subsided. He died July 7, 1898, during the height of excitement
over the Spanish-American War. Despite the resulting competition
for news space in the next day's newspapers, Pillsbury's obituary
appeared in most of the New York dailies, as well as in newspapers
as far west as Minnesota and as far south as Atlanta.

Although extensive documentation of the nature of Pillsbury's
support for woman's rights is not readily available, his willingness
to support Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the period

1865-70 was an outstanding service. Of all the abolitionist leaders

 

22Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch, eds.,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and
Reminiscences, vei; II (New York: Harper & Brothers PUblishers,
1922). p. 126.

52

the women had worked with since the 18405, only four later chose to
champion the women--as one of these four, Pillsbury truly earned the
reputation of "being one of the earliest and most uncompromising nine-

teenth-Centur‘y advocates of justice to women.“23

Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON:
THE EARLY YEARS

"Doctor," said I, "which do you like best, boys or girls?"

"Why, girls, to be sure; I would not give you for all the
bays in Christendom."

"My father,“ I replied, "prefers boys; he wishes I was
one, and I intend to be as near like one as possible. I am
going to ride on horseback and study Greek. Will you ive me
a Greek lesson now, doctor? I want to begin at once." 4
The determined young girl not only learned horseback riding
and Greek, but also excelled in Latin and mathematics, winning
scholastic awards in these subjects at a nearby boy's academy.
Despite her efforts, however, Elizabeth Cady soon learned
that the achievements of a daughter were qualitatively different from
those of a son. In response to her awards and honor, her father,
heartbroken over the death of his sole son, could only respond, "Ah,

you should have been a boy,"25

 

23Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography, Vol.
XVIII (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), p. 609.

24Stanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 21.

251 1a., p. 23.

53

Thus at the age of eleven, Elizabeth Cady first faced the
problem of discrimination that she would fight all her life.

Elizabeth Cady was born Nov. 12, 1815. Her father, Judge
Daniel Cady, a strong, successful lawyer, jurist, and politician
was ambivalent in his feelings about women. He encouraged his bright
daughter to excel, but he did not derive full parental satisfaction
from her achievements.

Despite his inability to provide strong emotional support
for his daughter, Judge Cady's profession did have a profound posi-
tive effect on Elizabeth's development. As a child, she often would
sit in her father's office listening to the sorry tales of wives and
widows--women who, because of the property laws in existence at the
time, often were plunged into instant poverty by cruel, alcoholic,
or simply careless husbands. "The tears and complaints of the women
who came to my father for legal advice touched my heart and early ‘\\
drew my attention to the injustice and cruelty of the laws."26
Elizabeth became so enraged by the laws that one day she decided to
snip all offending laws out of her father's statute books. Luckily,
her father intervened:

Without letting me know that he had discovered my secret, he
explained to me one evening how laws were made, the large

number of lawyers and libraries there were all over the State,

and that if his library should burn up it would make no difference

in woman's condition. "When you are grown up, and able to pre-
pare a speech," said he, "you must go down to Albany and talk

 

54

to the legislators; tell them all the things you have seen in
this office--the sufferings of these Scotchwomen, robbed of
their inheritance and left dependent on their unworthy sons,
and, if you can persuade them to pass new laws, the old ones
will be a dead 1etter."27
But again, Judge Cady's mixed attitudes toward women can be seen.
For later, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, fulfilling her father's wish,
first began making public speeches, her father, disgusted at the un-
womanliness of her tactics, temporarily cut her out of his will.

In addition to studying, horseback riding, and satisfying
her interest in law, Elizabeth spent her childhood playing with her
many sisters and cousins and helping with housework. When she was
eighteen, she was sent to Emma Willard's Troy Seminary, an institution
she found to be disappointing. At the time, Troy Seminary was the
best option open for girls, but after her schooling at a boys'
academy, Elizabeth was simply too far advanced for the curriculum
offered at Troy.

After completing her studies, Elizabeth returned to her
parents' home. She spent a great deal of time visiting her cousin,
Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist. During this period, she saw the
underground railroad at work and met many antislavery activists, in-
cluding Henry B. Stanton. The two wanted to get married, but Judge
Cady objected--he did not want his daughter to marry an abolitionist.

Elizabeth and Henry could not be deterred, however, and the wedding

took place May 11, 1840; the word "obey“ was omitted from the marriage

 

55

vows at Elizabeth's insistence. A few days later, the couple de-
parted for London where Henry was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery
Convention.

Elizabeth was there only as a spectator, but the action of
the convention soon had her involved. The convention delegates denied
seats on the floor to woman delegates from the United States. The
fact that the women were highly respected made no difference to the
convention. After this outrage, Mrs. Stanton spent a lot of time
talking to Mrs. Lucretia Mott, a leading abolitionist and one of the
ousted delegates. The women agreed to call a woman's rights convention
when they returned to the United States.

The plan was to be postponed for eight years, as Elizabeth
had to assume the duties of wife and mother. After the convention,
she and Henry traveled in England, Scotland,Ireland, and France.

The visit combined business with the pleasure of the wedding trip, as
Henry was making antislavery speeches and writing articles. The
contact the Stantons made with antislavery proponents in Europe intro-
duced Elizabeth to some of the future leaders of the woman's right
movement east of the Atlantic.

The Stantons returned to the Cady home in Johnstown for
two years, and then the young couple moved to Boston, where they would
spend an intellectually stimulating three years. It was in Boston
that Elizabeth first met abolitionists Parker Pillsbury, Frederick
Douglass, John Greenleaf Whitier, Lydia Marie Child, Abby Kelly, and
Theodore Parker. After the birth of her third child, Elizabeth

56

received a gift from her father--a new house in Chelsea. She enter-
tained often, Henry was doing well in his law career, and the two
were deeply involved in the abolition cause.

The damp climate of Boston was bad for Henry's health,
though, so the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls, N.Y. The change from
Boston was a shock to Elizabeth. Suddenly she found herself in a
small town, plagued with servant problems, and forced to assume more
household and child care responsibilities than she was accustomed to.
Furthermore, Henry's career kept him in Albany most of the time. For
the first time in years, Elizabeth found herself with no educated
adult company.

She read as much as she could and this made life bearable, but
she was hungry for the stimulating companionship she had had in
Boston. She began to understand the practical difficulties of
women in the average household and how impossible it was for

them to develop to advantage when in contact most of their lives

with servants and children. The worn anxious look on the faces
of most of the women she met made her realize that something

must be done to better their condition. . . .She had no intention

of being resigned to what was supposed to be woman's sphere, and
she thought often during those days of the woman's convention

which she and Lucretia Mott had planned in London and rediscussed
one memorable day in Boston. If women could only get together to
discuss their problems and their needs, it would give them courage
to improve their condition. They would see the need of more edu-
cation, of more opportunities to earn a living, of better pay for

the work they did. They would recognize the importance of the

married woman's property bill and an improved legal status. They

could pool their experiences so as to simplify their housework
and learn to take more intelligent care of their children. The
possibilities were unending.28

 

28Alma Lutz, Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton (New York: The John Day Co., 1940), pp. 41-42.

57

In 1848, Elizabeth discovered that Lucretia Mott was visit—
ing in the area. The two women met and, with Lucretia's sister,
Martha Coffin Wright, and Mrs. Jane Hunt, picked up their unfinished
business--the calling of a woman's rights convention. The women wrote
up announcements of the meeting, rented a church, and waited for July
19 and 20, the days that were to mark the beginning of organized
suffrage activity in the United States. . ./

After this convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would seldom
again complain about boredom. The Seneca Falls convention opened
the door to numerous other woman's rights conventions; furthermore,
the 18505 brought with them increased abolition agitation.

In 1851, Susan B. Anthony came to Seneca Falls to attend an
antislavery meeting and to visit with Amelia Bloomer. While there,
she met Mrs. Stanton. Miss Anthony, by a cOmpletely different route,
was to join Mrs. Stanton in a half-century battle for equal rights

for women .

SUSAN B. ANTHONY:
THE EARLY YEARS

Susan B. Anthony's background was very different from
Elizabeth Cady Stanton's. Susan was born on a farm near Adams,
Massachusetts, the daughter of Daniel Anthony, a Quaker, and Lucy
Read Anthony, a Baptist. The first fifteen years of Susan's life were
happy ones. Her parents encouraged all their children to use their
brains. Susan was educated in a district school and in a home school

established by her father.

58

Daniel was an independent thinker who sometimes defied his
Quaker meeting; despite this independence, however, the influence of
Quaker doctrine was strong in the family. Clothing was simple,
dancing was forbidden, and temperance was strongly espoused and
strictly followed.

When she was seyenteen, Susan was sent to a Quaker seminary
in Philadelphia. The school was operated by Deborah Moulson, a woman
who believed in harsh discipline. Susan was not happy here; her
diary from this period is filled with descriptions of inadvertently
breaking the rules, receiving punishment, and feeling guilty. For
this reason, Susan was not completely saddened when in 1838 her father's
business losses made it necessary that she leave school.

The family cotton milling business had to be sold, so the
Anthonys moved to a small farm in Hardscrabble (Later Center Falls),
N.Y. Susan helped with farm chores and taught in local schools.

In 1839, she left home to teach and in 1843 found a good
position at Canajoharie Academy near Rochester. She remained there
for five years, during which time her teaching was highly praised by
the townspeople. It was also at Canajoharie that Miss Anthony re-
ceived at least three marriage proposals. After five years, however,
she realized that she was growing tired of teaching so she returned
to the family farm. She found her parents and sister deeply involved
in the reforms of the day--notably temperance, abolition, and woman's
rights. Daniel Anthony had long been interested in reform. During

his milling days, he had provided his workers, many of them young

59

girls, with decent wages and good housing and food-~practices unheard
of at most mills. Even in the early 18305 he had abhorred slavery,
going so far as to seek cotton for his mills that had not been raised
by slaves. Now, in 1848, his home was open to such men as Douglass,
Garrison, and Wendell Phillips.

Susan discovered that her father, mother, and sister had
attended the Seneca Falls convention and had voted for the suffrage
resolution presented there. This was a surprise to Susan, since
Quakers, as pacifists, had long refused to vote for officials in a
government that engaged in war. The Anthonys were pragmatists, how-
ever, and realized that in the face of an evil like slavery, voting
was necessary as one possible means of achieving emancipation while
avoiding war.

Susan spent the next three years in Center Falls, attending:
abolition and temperance meetings. Then in 1851, while visiting
Amelia Bloomer in Seneca Falls, Susan met a woman she had long ad-
mired--Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mrs. Stanton has described the
encounter:

How well I remember the day! George Thompson and William Lloyd
Garrison having announced an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca
Falls, Miss Anthony came to attend it. These gentlemen were

my guests. Walking home, after the adjournment, we met Mrs.
Bloomer and Miss Anthony on the corner of the street, waiting
to greet us. There she stood, with her good, earnest face and
genial smile, dressed in gray delaine, hat and all the same
color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neat-
ness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why I did not
at once invite her home with me to dinner, I do not know. She

accuses me of that neglect, and has never forgiven me, as she
wished to see and hear all she could of our noble friends.29

 

ZQStanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 163.

60

It can be imagined that Susan soon was invited to the Stanton house
for a good many dinners. The two women soon became close friends
and coworkers. Susan had committed herself to work for the New York
Temperance Association, but after a year of making speeches, distri-
buting pamphlets, and organizing conventions, she was convinced by
Mrs. Stanton's arguments that the settling of the woman's rights

question was of utmost importance. Nor was Mrs. Stanton's voice the

only one exhorting Susan on the need for\womansuffrage In 1852,

Susan received a letter from her father with this idea:

11
I see notices of your meetings in multitudes of papers, all,
with a few exceptions, in a rejoicing mood that woman at last
has taken hold in earnest to aid in the reformation of the
mighty evils of the day. Yet with all this "rejoicing" probably
not one of these papers would advocate placing the ballot in the
hands of woman as the easiest, quickest and most efficient way
of enabling her to secure not only this [temperance] but other
reforms. They are willing she should talk and pray and "flock
by herself“ in conventions and tramp up and down the State,
footsore and weary, gathering petitions to be spurned by legis-
latures, but not willing to invest her with the only power that
would do speedy and efficient work.30

The combined influence of Mrs. Stanton and Mr. Anthony can be seen in

this speech, delivered by Miss Anthony in 1852: "““""‘Z
.Woman has so long been accustomed to non-intervention with
law-making, so long considered it man's business to regulate
the liquor traffic, that it is with much cautiousness she re-
ceives the new doctrine which we preach; the doctrine that it
is her right and duty to speak out against the traffic and all
men and institutions that in any way sanction, sustain or
countenance it; and, since she cannot vote, to duly instruct
her husband, son, father or brother how she would have him vote,
and if he longer continue to misrepresent her, take the right to
march to the ballot-box and deposit a vote indicative of her
highest ideas of practical temperance.3

/———-—-—/

 

 

30Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthopy, Vol. I, p. 85.

3]Ibid., p. 71.

61

Susan B. Anthony was committed to the woman suffrage camp. From that
point on, the main thrust of her work would be in support of woman's
rights and suffrage.

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND

SUSAN B. ANTHONY:
A FIFTY-YEAR FRIENDSHIP

To many observers, the long and close affiliation of Miss
Anthony and Mrs. Stanton was most notable for the differences between
the two: "the plain Miss Anthony appeared severe and devoted herself
with single-minded intensity to the suffrage movement and related re-
forms: Mrs. Stanton was an attractive woman of catholic tastes and
wide-ranging interests whose jelly disposition quickly won friends.
Their association was based, perhaps, less on temperamental affinity
than upon a mutual recognition of the complementary nature of their
talents.“32
The women soon realized that these characteristics could be
put to good use. Mrs. Stanton described the collaboration:
In thought and sympathy we were one, and in the divison of labor
we exactly complemented each other. In writing we did better
work than either could alone. While she is slow and analytical
in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer,
she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I

the philosophy and rhetoric, and, together, we have made argu-
ments that have stood unshaken through the storms of long years;

 

32Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, Vol. III
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 344.

 

62
arguments that no one has answered. Our speeches may be con-
sidered the united product of our two brains.33
And, in fact, the women would work together for temperance,

dress reform, liberalizing of property laws and divorce laws, aboli-
tion, suffrage, and a host of other reforms. The friendship did not
always go smoothly. Despite her friend's pleas to the contrary, Mrs.
Stanton continued to have children. Miss Anthony was disturbed by
the number of women whose commitment to reform declined when the
interests of husbands and children had to be considered. Nor was she
always gracious about expressing her views. In fact, when Lucy Stone
was starting her family, Susan's abuses apparently were so strong, a
rift developed between the two women that would eventually contribute

34

to a split in the nation's suffrage ranks. Mrs. Stanton, however,

did not take Susan's remonstrances too seriously, gently reminding
her:
Let Lucy and Antoinette [Brown, Lucy Stone's sister-in-law] rest
awhile in peace and quietness and think great thoughts for the
future. It is not well to be in the excitement of public life
all the time; do not keep stirring them up or mourning over their
repose. . . .Now that I have two daughters, I feel fresh strength
to work. It is not in vain that in myself I have experienced all35
the wearisome cares to which woman in her best estate is subject.
Another difference between Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
was their approach to reform. Susan B. Anthony believed in tackling

one problem at a time. The need for this approach was impressed upon

 

33Stanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 166.

34Burko, Ladies of Seneca Falls, p. 193.

35Stanton and Blatch, Elizabeth Cady_Stanton, Vol. II, p. 67.

63

her in 1852, when she, as a proponent of the dress reform movement,
wore the so-called "Bloomer Dress," a costume consisting of Turkish
trousers and an overskirt. After a few months, Miss Anthony finally
gave up the outfit, as she began to realize: "The attention of my
audience was fixed upon my clothes instead of my words. I learned
the lesson then that to be successful a person must attend but one
reform."36
Mrs. Stanton, however, was interested in writing about
and publicly discussing a wide range of reforms--including divorce
reform, a subject that dismayed many woman's rights advocates who
felt such ideas merely gave fuel to the fire of those anti-suffragists
who predicted that suffragists were trying to destroy the family.
Despite these personal differences, the two women never
ceased to defend the other in public:
We have indulged freely in criticism of each other when alone,
and hotly contended whenever we have differed, but in our
friendship of years there has never been the break of one hour.
To the world we always seem to agree and uniformly reflect each

other. Like husband and wife, each has the feeling that we
must have no differences in public.37

During the 18505, the women organized a national suffrage
network and held annual woman suffrage conventions around the country.
They continued to support abolition and temperance causes, and, as the
threat of war became imminent, became actively involved in the politics

of reunification of North and South.

 

36Harper, Life and Work of SusanB. Anthony, Vol. I, p. 177.
37Stanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 166.

64

In the midst of all this activity, Susan B. Anthony was
developing a convincing style of arguing for the necessity of woman
suffrage. To her brother Daniel she wrote in 1859:

Even the smallest human right denied, is large. The fact that

the ruling class withheld this right [the vote] is prima facie

evidence that they deem it of importance for good or for evil‘y_
. . .For any human being or class of human beings, whether

black, white, male or female, tamely to submit to the denial of

their right to self-government shows that the instinct of liberty

has been blotted out. . . . ¢_—»
It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exhorbi-

tant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to

establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is

the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as

just to women as to men, the principles that one class may

usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who

are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work

on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth,

"All governments derive their just powers from the consent of

the governed."38

The same year, she wrote to the Friends of Human Progress:

. .I would exhort all women to be discontented with their
present condition and to assert their individuality of thought,
word and action by the energetic doing of noble deeds. Idle
wishes, vain repinings, loud-sounding declamations can never
bring freedom to any human soul. What woman most needs is a
true appreciation of her womanhood, a self-respect which shall
scorn to eat the bread of dependence. Whoever consents to live
by'the sweat of the brow'' of another human being inevitably
humiliates and degrades herself. . . .No genuine equality, no
freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any founda-
tion save that of pecuniary independence.39

With the onset of the Civil War, the women saw a rapid de-
cline in interest in woman suffrage. Putting their own interests

aside, the two suffragists organized the Woman's National Loyal League,

 

38Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. I., pp. 169-70.

65

which secured more than 300,000 signatures on petitions calling for
emancipation of the slaves.

Both Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had seen enough politi-
cal maneuvering in their careers not to be naive, yet the two truly
believed that American women, who had contributed a great deal to
the war effort, would, along with the Negroes, be given the right to
vote. When it became apparent that the women were to be excluded,
suffragists became very bitter. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a very
outspoken critic of post-war policy:

The lessons of the war were not lost on the women of this nation;
through varied forms of suffering and humiliation, they learned
that they had an equal interest with men in the administration
of the government, alike enjoying its blessings or enduring its
miseries. When in the enfranchisement of the black man they saw
another ignorant class of voters placed above their heads, and
beheld the danger of a distinctively ”male" government, forever
involving the nations of the earth in war and violence: and de-
manded for the protection of themselves and children, that
woman's voice should be heard and her opinions in public affairs
be expressed by the ballot, they were coolly told that the black
man had earned the right to vote, that he had fought and bled
and died for his country.40
While the women were losing the suffrage question on the federal level,
state gains were being made. So in 1867, Miss Anthony and Mrs.
Stanton went to Kansas, where the questions of Negro and woman suffrage
were being voted on in a referendum. It was in this campaign that
George Francis Train and The Revolution came into the suffrage move-

ment.

 

401b1d.. pp. 239-40.

66

The post-war period was a trying one for the suffragists.

The ranks were split between those who believed women should wait
their turn in asking for suffrage and those, like Miss Anthony and
Mrs. Stanton, who would not be put off by political expediency. It
would seen that most suffrage supporters were in the former group,
according to this letter written by Mrs. Stanton:

I have just read your letter, and it would have been a wet

blanket to Susan and me were we not sure that we are right.

With three bills before Congress to exclude us from all hope

of representation in the future, I thank God that two women

of the nation felt the insult and decided to reuse-Ehe rest

to use the only right we have in the government--the right of

petition. If the petition goes with our names alone, ours be

the glory, and the disgrace to all the rest! When your grand-

daughters hear that against such insults you made us protest,

they will blush for their ancestry.41
The split among suffragists, started by disagreement over the question
of Negro versus woman suffrage, was aggravated by a series of events.
First. the alliance between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony and George Francis Train annoyed many of the conservative
suffragists. Second, the conservatives were dismayed over the
liberal interpretation Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton gave to "woman's
rights." The fact that the two radicals would discuss divorce laws
at suffrage meetings dismayed the women who wanted to restrict their
activities to suffrage alone. Finally, Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton

were less willing than many suffragists to entrust positions of power

in the movement to men.

 

4'Stanton and Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Vol. II, p. 111.

67

The split became one between the women of Boston and the
women of New York, the conservative Bostonians being headed by Lucy
Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell and the radical New Yorkers
including Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright,
and Ernestine Rose. The formal break between the two groups came in
May, 1869, when the Boston group formed the American Woman Suffrage
Association, and the New York women formed the National Woman Suf-
frage Association.

As each group developed, a major difference in tactics
also occurred, with the American striving to achieve woman suffrage
on a state to state basis and the National working toward passage of
a Federal suffrage amendment. I'The division in suffrage ranks was
unfortunate; but it was inevitable during the 18705 and 18805, a
period of intense economic development and change during which social
forces polarized in the midst of widespread unrest. The break would
continue until one trend or the other--respectability or radicalism--
became dominant."42 The two organizations did merge in 1890, much
of the respectability coming from the fact that the radical suffragists
were by then in their seventies.

Despite the loss of many suffrage workers, Miss Anthony \vTI'
and Mrs. Stanton were kept busy with The Revolution in the years
1868 to 1870. The women poured their lives into keeping the news-

paper alive, calling on friends and family to donate money to pay

 

42Flexner, Century of Struggle, pp. 154-55.

68

for printing costs. The salaries the women received from the paper
were negligible, a factor that finally forced Mrs. Stanton to begin
a lecture tour with the New York Lyceum Bureau.

Meanwhile, Miss Anthony's involvement in the publishing
business brought her into contact with women printers. When she
learned that the women were excluded from most union locals, Miss
Anthony helped the women organize themselves. To aid the cause, Miss

Anthony made sure that some printers working on The Revolution were

 

women.

In spite of the heroic efforts to save The Revolution, its
financial situation finally became too much of a burden, and in May,
1870, Miss Anthony sold the paper to Laura Curtis Bullard. Sale of
the paper left Miss Anthony with a $10,000 debt, which she vowed to
repay, ignoring those advising her to declare bankruptcy. To earn
the money, she too joined with the Lyceum Bureau. In 1871, the two
friends managed to make a lecture tour together, but for most of the
next five years, the paths of the two suffragists crossed only at
conferences and annual meetings.ZfFor Miss Anthony, who had spent the
past twenty years arranging for lecture halls, planning programs,
printing handbills, and making other preliminary arrangements so that
Mrs. Stanton could have the spotlight, the separation brought with it
some pleasant surprises. She wrote to her parents:

I miss Mrs. Stanton, still I can not but enjoy the feeling that
the people call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity
to sharpen my wits a little by answering questions and doing the

chatting, instead of merely sitting a lay figure and listening
to the brilliant scintillations as they emanate from her

/

69

never-exhausted magazine. There is no alternative--whoever goes ‘\
into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at \
the cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid \

1

for the last ten years, and that cheerfully, because I felt that 1
our cause was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my
best work was making the way clear for her.43

In 1872, Miss Anthony voted in Rochester, N.Y., an action
that led to a conviction and a $100 fine that she refused to pay.

In 1876, the two friends, along with Lucretia Mott, set up
a woman's exhibition at the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia
and took advantage of the festivities to distribute copies of the
Woman's Declaration of Rights, an adaptation of the Declaration of
Independence. This also was a year of independence for Miss Anthony--
she paid the last of her debts from The Revolution.

‘TM. The suffrage amendment that eventually would be passed was
first proposed in Congress in 1878. Although it would take more than
forty years to secure passage by Congress and ratification by the
states, the proposal was at least treated with more respect than
women suffrage proposals in the earlier days of the movement. The
suffragists themselves found that the public looked upon them with
more respect. Theodore Tilton, who had opposed the two on the Fifteenth
Amendment issue in the 18605, wrote in 1878:

These two women, sitting together in their parlors, have for

the last thirty years been diligent forgers of all manner of

projectiles, from fireworks to thunderbolts, and have hurled

them with unexpected explosion into the midst of all manner of
educational, reformatory, religious, and political assemblies,

 

43Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. I, p. 369.

70

sometimes to the pleasant surprise and half welcome of the
members; more often to the bewilderment and protestations of
numerous victims; and in a few signal instances, to the gnash-
ing of angry men's teeth. I know of no two more pertinacious
incendiaries in the whole country; nor will they themselves
deny the charge. In fact, this noise-making twain are the two
sticks of a drum that kee up what Daniel Webster called “the
rub-a-dub of agitation."4
The adulation continued; each woman's birthday was celebrated by
hundreds of followers, suffrage meetings were marked by testimonials
and gifts of flowers to one or the other, and finally, in 1890, the
American and National Woman Suffrage Associations reunited and elected
Elizabeth Cady Stanton president--a position she held for two terms,
after which Miss Anthony was president.

The last major joint undertaking of the Anthony-Stanton
team was the compilationof the first three volumes of the History
of Woman Suffrage, an invaluable collection of documents and letters
of the United States woman suffrage movement. (Miss Anthony and
Matilda J. Gage worked together on Volume IV, and the last two volumes
were edited by Ida Husted Harper.)

After this, the two women seem to have gone their separate
ways. Miss Anthony, encouraged by the enthusiasm of young suffrage
workers, the new suffrage states, and the results in resubmission of
the federal suffrage amendment, turned all her energy to advancing

the cause of votes for women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the other

hand, became more involved in questioning the role religion played

 

44Ibid.. pp. 388-89.

71

in the oppression of women. She continued to arouse controversy,
especially with the Woman's Bible, published in 1898.

Despite their professional separation, the two women remained
lifelong friends. Mrs. Stanton died in 1902, the night after writing
President Roosevelt a letter urging him to support a suffrage amend-
ment. Miss Anthony died four years later. //,

The effect of these two women on the suffrage movement is )6
immeasurable. Their dedication to the cause and their ability to
endure hardships and unpopularity enabled Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony to succeed in areas where weaker persons, men and
women, had failed. Their success was undoubtedly due to the support
each was able to give the other. As Mrs. Stanton described it:

It is often said, by those who know Miss Anthony best, that
she has been my good angel, always pushing and goading me to
work, and that but for her pertinacity I should never have
accomplished the little I have. 0n the other hand it has been
said that I forged the tunderbolts and she fired them. Per-
haps all this is, in a measure, true. With the cares of a large
family I might, in time, like too many women, have become wholly
absorbed in a narrow family selfishness, had not my friend been
continually exploring new fields for missionary labor. Her
description of a body of men on any platform, complacently
deciding questions in which woman had an equal interest, with-
out an equal voice, readily roused me to a determination to
throw a firebrand into the midst of their assembly.

Thus, whenever I saw that stately Quaker girl coming
across my lawn, I knew that some happy convocation of the sons
of Adam was to be set by the ears, by one of our appeals or
resolutions.45

The joint effort described by Mrs. Stanton certainly was an

important aspect of The Revolution. Susan B. Anthony was the business

 

45$tanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 165.

72

manager, responsible for such mundane matters as advertising, print-
ing, circulation, paying bills and salaries, and, as was so often
necessary, searching out contributions. Mrs. Stanton did not get as
involved in the day to day operations, but expended her energy in
finding new arguments to answer the latest suffrage opponent. The
fact that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was able to take on a lecture tour
during the publication of The Revolution is evidence that she devoted
less than fulltime effort to the paper--nor did she assume any of the
debt when the paper folded. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton had her family
to think of; as 1870 approached, many of her seven children were
approaching college age.

Furthermore, the amount of time she was able to devote to
the paper is not a true measure of Mrs. Stanton's contribution. Her
fiery language and controversial ideas were largely responsible for
the popularity The Revolution enjoyed. She provided the creativity
and Susan B. Anthony provided the technical and business ability
necessary to keep the paper running. Although the partnership did
not prodUce a long-lived publication, it did provide the impetus for
a number of woman's publications and served as a forum for the radi-
cal wing of the suffragists at a very crucial time in their history.

l-For Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton held unpopular views
//in the late 18605 and early l8705--views that future events would
show to be valid. The women opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, advo-
cated extension of married women's property laws, insisted that suffrage
must come at the federal level, and argued for economical parity for
women. Without The Revolution these ideas would have been lost--to

their contemporaries and to future generations.

CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTION: FORMAT AND CONTENTS

Overview

"All the old friends, with scarce an exception, are sure
we are wrong. Only time can tell, but I believe we are right and
hence bound to succeed,“ Susan B. Anthony began her 1868 diary.1 By
this time she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had alienated most of their
former co-workers. Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell, Wendell Phillips,
and William Lloyd Garrison had been upset enough that Miss Anthony
and Mrs. Stanton had just completed campaigning throughout Kansas
in support of a woman suffrage referendum. At the beginning of the
campaign, all reform workers had been working for passage of the
referendum-~Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell had spent most of the
Spring campaigning in support of this issue and the referendum en-
franchising black men. But when the Radical Republicans began to
predict that advocacy of woman suffrage would cause the defeat of
the Negro suffrage issue, most of the workers in the field dropped

the women's cause. Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, believing that

the suffrage question was one of principle rather than political

 

1Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony,
Vol. I (Indianapolis: The Hollenbeck Press, 1898), p. 295.

73

74

strategy, refused to separate the two issues and continued their
campaign for the enfranchisement of women. Finding little support
among their former allies, the Republicans, the women had accepted
the services of the Democrats, including George Francis Train.
This transgression was enough to dismay the other reformers, but when
the two women agreed to become Train's partners in launching a news-
paper--with the title of The Revolution!--the old friends did all
they could to dissociate themselves from the venture. As Lucy
Stone said: "Train's presence as an advocate of woman suffrage was
enough to condemn it."2

Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were
unhappy about the rift, apparently did not have time to worry too
much about the opposition to their latest step. In the two months
between Election Day and the new year, the editor and proprietor
had to rent office space, confer with Parker Pillsbury, the co-editor,
contract with a printer, solicit advertisements and subscriptions,
write news reports and editorials--in short, attend to the countless
steps involved in publishing a newspaper.

The first issue of The Revolution appeared Jan. 8, 1868.
Its motto was "Principles, not policy; justice, not favor; men, their
rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less." The

introductory editorial promised that The Revolution would advocate

 

2Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of SenecafiFalls (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1974), p. 224.

75

educated suffrage (suffrage based on literacy rather than on race
6r sex qualifications), equal pay for equal work, the eight-hour
day, morality and reform, temperance, and greenbacks and that no
quack medicine advertisements would be accepted. The editors ex-
plained their reasons for choosing such a militant title: “Seeing
in its [woman suffrage] realization, the many necessary changes in

our modes of life, we think The Revolution a fitting name for a

 

paper that will advocate so radical a reform as this involves in our
political, religious and social world."3
The Revolution was a handsome paper, a sixteen-page
quarto printed on high quality rag stock. Each page had three
columns of six and eight point type with headlines in boldface
italic, usually ten or twelve point. The quality of the printing
was good, and there were few instances of broken letters or wrong
fonts. Each issue was saddle stitched, and readers were encouraged
to have the signatures sews together to keep each six-month volume

bound. The mechanical quality of the newspaper was praised even by

those who were against The Revolution's philosophy: "The Revolution,

 

edited by two old and ugly ladies' men, Mr. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Mrs. Parker Pillsbury, and published by Mr. Susan B. Anthony, is,

as its name indicates, bent on inaugurating a bloodless Revolution. . . .

The Revolution is no one-horse concern. It is got up in an attractive

manner, in a convenient form, and is as smart as they make them--full

 

3The Revolution, I (Jan. 8, 1868), p. 8.

76

of life, vigor, energy and snap, and all that sort of thing. Its
contents are mainly original, and its articles are always readable."4
A letter from a reader implies that the mechanical quality of The_
Revolution was rare for the 18605: “[There is] no cooling your en-
thusiasm, after you sit down to peruse it, by jumping up for work-
basket, with needles, thread, scissors, thimble and paper cutter,
or what is no less annoying, instead folding and refolding. It re-
mained for a woman to show the world how an Octavo paper should be

"5

made. Another reader said that the size and layout of The Revolution

made it the most convenient publication to read while nursing a
baby.6
Train filled much of the first ten issues, with discussions
ranging from the Fenian movement to the Credit Mobiler financial ven-
ture, of which he was co-founder. Soon after the first issue was

published, Train left for England, where he was arrested shortly

after his arrival. Thereafter he sent The Revolution long letters

 

from prison, letters that the editors faithfully published.
Each issue of The Revolution had a financial section, which

covered Wall Street and the U.S. Treasury Department and discussed

 

4Revolution, II (July 30, 1868), p. 52.

5Revolution, III (Jan. 28, 1869), p. 64.

6Revolution, IV (Nov. 16, 1869), p. 372.

77

the relative merits of gold and paper money. The financial section
was first edited by David Melliss, a reporter for the New York
(Herald, then by Parker Pillsbury, and finally by an unnamed woman
correspondent.

The two or three pages of advertisements in each issue in-
cluded notices from department stores, insurance companies, book
publishers, homeopathic medical facilities, attorneys, jewelers,
banks, railroad companies, and pattern companies. The only illus-
trations that ever appeared in the paper were those in advertisements.

. Beginning with the second issue The Revolution contained
a column entitled ”What the Press Says of Us," which included posi-
tive and negative comments from around the country on The Revolution
itself or the suffrage movement in general, "as a matter of history,
for the women of the next generation to see the crude notions that

n7

the men of our day have on women. This editorial from the Sunday

New York Times is representative of early negative comments toward

The Revolution:

If Mrs. Stanton would attend a little more to her domestic

duties and a little less to those of the great public, perhaps
she would exalt her sex quite as mudh as she does by Quixotically
fighting windmills in their gratuitous behalf, and she might
possibly set a notable example of domestic felicity. No married
woman can convert herself into a feminine Knight of the Rueful
Visage and ride about the country attempting to redress imaginary
wrongs, without leaving her household in a neglected condition
that must be an eloquent witness against her. As for the spin-
sters, we have often said that every woman has a natural and

 

7Revolution, I (June 18, 1868), p. 371

78

unalienable right to a good husband and a pretty baby. When,
by proper "agitation" she had secured this right, she best
honor herself and her sex by leaving public affairs behind her,
and by endeavoring to show how happy she can make the little
world of which she has just become the brilliant centre.

Gradually, however, more and more favorable comments were printed.

ML The editors and proprietor of The Revolution put into

 

practice their belief in woman's right to work. In New York City,
,knswsgirls sold the paper, a step toward the day, the editors pre-
8...... naen‘rtn. RevoTution will have a magnificent building, owned
by women, with women in every department--writing editorials, setting
type, working the press, cutting, folding--and with little girls sell-
ing in every city in the Union, young and old alike in comfortable
costume, a happy, healthy class of self-supporting, educated en-

franchised citizens."9

Several woman typesetters were employed by
R. J. Johnston, printer of The Revolution. I
Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton had a number of talented
individuals contributing to The Revolution. Parker Pillsbury, who
was co-editor from the start of the newspaper until July, 1869, was
of immeasurable importance in keeping The Revolution functioning.
He wrote many of the editorials, even after he relinquished his co-
editor position. His self-effacing nature made him willing to publish

the newspaper during the frequent absences of Miss Anthony and Mrs.

Stanton without receiving much recognition for his work. Paulina

 

8Revoiution, I (Jan. 22, 1868), p. 38.

9Revolution, I (Jan. 29, 1868), p. 54.

 

79

Wright Davis was a frequent contributor to The Revolution and became
corresponding editor in 1870. Rebecca Moore, the paper's English
correspondent, sent weekly reports about suffrage and woman's rights
activity in Great Britain, including a number of interviews with John
Stuart Mill, whose Subjection of Women was published in 1869. Laura
Curtis Bullard, who eventually bought The Revolution, was European
correspondent for most of 1869. Beginning with the ninth issue, many
issues of The Revolution included one or two poems. This poetry
column was edited by Elizabeth Tilton, who chose poems by contempor-
aries such as Alice and Phoebe Cary, John Greenleaf Whittier, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning and Julia Ward Howe as well as poems of Milton,
Shakespeare, and Mercy Otis Warren.

The Revolution serialized fiction and historical writings,
most notably A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstone-
craft, which, at the time, was out of print. Biographical sketches
of famous women including Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and
George Eliot appeared frequently.

At first, the subscription price of The Revolution was two
dollars a year. Beginning with Volume IV, the price was raised to
three dollars. Advertising rates, according to the Prospectus for
1870, ranged from twenty cents a line, for one to four insertions,
to fourteen cents a line, for twenty-six insertions.

Products advertised in The Revolution occasionally received
endorsements or other notice in the editorial columns of the news-

paper. For example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton once tied in a new

80

clothes-washing powder to the woman suffrage issue: "With Blanchir
we shall always have the washing done early on election day (when it
chances to come on Monday), that all the heroines of the suds will be
able to reach the polls in season to vote, for a general cleaning
out of the muddy pool of politics."10
The Revolution also allowed criticism of products it adver-
tised. One frequent advertiser in the paper was Hosford's Self-
Raising Bread Preparation, which was supposed to be good "even when
eaten hot" for invalids and those suffering from dyspepsia. The
product was criticized in a letter_from a physician, who wrote: "The
declarations of all the chemists in the world cannot compel nature
to reverse her laws and submit to a chemical, phosphated food, when

she has prepared a better food. . . ."11

Such controversy was not
feared by the editors of The Revolution, for as they wrote: "Ihe_
Revolution is open to free thought and speech, and would rather the
right were at times abused than that it should be denied, or

abridged."12

This belief extended to allow the editors to disagree
in public with each other. In 1869, Parker Pillsbury wrote “Mrs.

Lincoln Begging Again," an article critical of the President's widow:

 

1ORevoiution, IV (July 22,11869), p. 42.

1'Revo1ution, III (May 27, 1869), p. 331.

12Revoiution, III (April 4, 1869), p. 220

81

"The newspapers are very severe, but not too severe, on Mrs. Lincoln
for appealing to Congress to grant her a pension. Much poorer women

than she is live reputably and happily, and move in the best American

n13

society, on half her income. Four weeks later, Mrs. Stanton

commented unfavorably on Pillsbury's stand:

Taking up a copy of The Revolution in Milwaukee, I was sorry

to see some criticism on Mrs. Lincoln. I am sorry that article
found a place in a woman's paper, for I despise a woman who
joins in any hue and cry against her own sex. . . .Mrs. Lincoln
should call out our sympathies, rather than our denunciation.
Her unhappy organization, a tendency to insanity (for which she
is not responsible) increased and aggravated by the great sadness
of her husband. . .furnish[es] a sufficient excuse for many of
her idiosyncracies of character. People know so little of the
domestic trials of each other that it behooves all to be merci-
ful in their judgments. . .For the sake of the husband, his
character, and position, Americans should shield rather than
expose the wife of a President who was sacrificed for the free
principles he represented.14

Parker Pillsbury not only printed Mrs. Stanton's argument, but also

reiterated his own beliefs,15

clearly indicating to readers that the
two editors disagreed on this question.

The Revolution and its editors also generated their own
publicity. For example, in 1869 Susan B. Anthony received a letter
from Harvard Divinity School, requesting a free subscription of the

newspaper for the School's reading room. Miss Anthony honored the

request, but replied in a letter filled with irony over the idea that

 

13Revo1ution, 111 (Feb. 11, 1869), p. 92.

14Revoiution, III (March 11, 1869), p. 145.

15Revoiution, III (March 11, 1869), p. 146.

82

poor women, publishing to make their living, were being asked to
contribute their newspaper to a well-endowed institution that was

closed to women. The request and reply were published in The Revolu-
l6

 

tion, Many major newspapers picked up the story and commented on
the incident. The editorial comment in the New York Worlg_was repre-
sentative of popular opinion: ". . .[W]ould it not be more seemly,
on the whole, for the members of one of the most richly endowed
divinity schools in the country, if they find themselves unable to
pursue their studies without The Revolution, to have it supplied as

a textbook at the charge of the school? A struggling paper, con-
ducted by a few women and advocating what its apostles admit to be

an infant cause, cannot be supposed to be overburdened with money or
able to give itself illimitably away."17 And a Cambridge, Mass.,

man who read about Harvard's plight, donated the three dollars needed
for the subscription. His generosity was not appreciated; Harvard
wrote to discontinue the subscription--a letter that was reprinted

in The Revolution.18

 

Readers of The Revolution quickly became acquainted with
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her views. She wrote many editorials and

columns, and when she was traveling, she sent lengthy letters to

 

16Revo1ution, IV (Oct. 7, 1869), p. 217.

17Revolution, IV (Oct. 14, 1869), p. 233.

 

18Revoiution, IV (Nov. 4, 1869), p. 280.

83

Parker Pillsbury to be reprinted in the paper. Agusan B. Anthony was
the less visible partner; however, Mrs. Stanton and Pillsbury
occasionally included reprints from other journals about their cohort.
An example is this article by Jennie June, which first appeared in
the October, 1869 issue of Demorest's Magazine:

American women can never do too much for Susan B. Anthony. . . .
There are plenty of enthusiastic soldiers in the field, but she
is the only general. She can call her forces at will, marshal
them together and make them do her bidding. She possesses that
great, essential, and rare quality in men or women, impersonal-
ity. She does not care whether your opinions chime with hers
or not. She does not care whether you like her personality or
not. . . .Moreover, no personal feeling prevents her from do-
ing an opponent justice, or giving them a chance. She has
women of greater talent in some directions, of more refinement,
of larger culture, of more liberal education, at work with her,
but she overshadows them all by her honesty, her directness,
her oneness of purpose, her singleness of heart, her freedom
from pettiness of spirit.

But there are few women who could do what Miss Anthony has
done, what she will yet do, to gain her point. . . .She has
been the subject of scorn, of ridicule, of contempt, yet she
is to-day the recognized leader of a host, gathered from the
remotest parts of the country, and from every class in society,
and more an object of curiosity and sgeculation when she goes
abroad than President Grant himself. .

February 15, 1870 brought another occasion to spotlight
Susan B. Anthony; her fiftieth birthday was cOmmemorated with a re-
ception at the Women's Bureau in New York City, which was covered by
the metropolitan press. The Revolution reprinted long excerpts from
other papers, including this account, from the New York Marla, of

Miss Anthony's speech:

 

19Revo1ution, IV (Sept. 23, 1869), p. 182.

84

Miss Anthony came forward and was received with loud applause.
She said if this were an assembled mob or a convention which
declared that woman should not vote and speak, my tongue would
be loosed, and I should know what to say. I never made a speech
except to set people to worke So soon as cultivated women come
up and are ready to do the speaking, I shall fall back My
work is that of subsoil-piow1ng . .With the tide thu5 rising
in favor of the equal rights of women, I can only stand dumb be-
fore you. Yet still I will ask you to work heartily for the
cause. . . .I ask you, then, as your best testimony to my ser-
vices on this the twentieth anniver5ary of my public work, to
join me in making a demand on Congress for a Sixteenth Amendment
giving women the right to vote. And then to go with me before
the State Legislatures to secure its ratification, and when the
Secretary of State proclaims that that amendment has been rati-
fied by twenty-eight states then Susan B. Anthony will stop
work--not before. 0

In addition to the news reports, The Revolution printed more than four
pages of odes and letters honoring Miss Anthony on this occasion, in-
cluding two tributes from her closest friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
"Through all these years Miss Anthony was the connecting link between
me and the outer world--the reform scout who went to see what was
going on in the enemy's camp, and returning with maps and observa-
tions to plan the mode of attack. . . .[ellipses, The Revolution]
Whenever we saw a work to be done, we would together forge our
thunderbolts in the form of resolutions, petitions, appeals, and
speeches on every subject--uniformly accepting every invitation to

112]

go everywhere and at everything. "She has been for many years

the missionary, visiting us, one and all, in our homes, keeping alive

 

20Revoiution, v (Feb. 24, 1870), p. 116.

2‘Revoiution, v (Feb. 24, 1870), p. 117.

85

the fires of rebellion, urging us to write, to speak, to petition,
shaming some who felt satisfied in their chains, and making the
discontent of others healthy by rousing it to action."22
The Revolution, besides performing its major task of pro-
viding its readers with news about the advancement of woman, stood
as proof that women could edit and publish a newspaper and that
woman's issues could generate enough copy to fill a sixteen-page
weekly--without including fashion plates, recipes, or other tradi-
tionally feminine-oriented artiCles that were found in most ladies'

magazines of the day.

Frank Luther Mott included a discussion of The Revolution

 

in his history of American magazines:

The Revolution turned out to be more energetic and belligerent
than brilliant and original. It was a well-printed sixteen-
page quarto at $2.00 a year, containing detailed reports of

the various woman suffrage gatherings, correspondence from
home and abroad telling of the progress of the cause of woman's
rights, some literary miscellany (often including verse and
sprightly character sketches) also dealing with advertising.
For the most part, it was lively and readable; it was less con-
cerned with developing a connected and consistent philosophy of
woman's place in the world than it was with presenting the

news of an active rsform movement and calling unsympathetic
critics to account. 3

Major Themes in the Revolution

Although their overriding interest was woman suffrage, Susan

B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw the question of woman's

 

22Revoiution, v (March 3, l870), p. l38.

23Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. III
(New York: D. Appleton and Co., T938), p. 39l.

86

rights as a multi-faceted one. The diversity of interests of the
two women is evident in the contents of The Revolution.:flMuch of

the material, however, can be subsumed under seven major themes:
suffrage, woman's rights and wrongs, marriage, women in religion,
“what are women doing," workingwomen, and personal and public health.
Concentrating on these themes, in news report, editorial, or

fiction, the editors o TThe.Revolution left the reader with a view
of woman as a rational, intelligent being, often wronged by society's
mores and customs, who was capable not only of attaining equality
with man, but of assuming her own vital place in public society-~a

place beyond the realm of the home and hearth traditionally seen as

the limits of "woman's sphere."

SUFFRAGE

Suffrage activism was growing in the l8605. Advocates of
woman suffrage, encouraged by the gains made by black men after the
Civil War, began engaging in the political processes--petitioning,
referenda, organizing national and local suffrage associations-~that
would continue until l920}%%ihe Revolution's role in forwarding this
work had two phases. First, the newspaper worked to get women to
participate in this activismi‘ Sample petitions were printed in the
paper, suffrage meeting announcements were published, news of the
formation of suffrage associations was reported. Because such news was
often overlooked by editors of daily newspapers, The Revolution often
provided women with more news about their own local suffrage activity

4""

than they could get in any other publication.f(

87

But The Revolution was, after all, a national newspaper;
thus it is not likely that such news was included solely for the
sake of the few readers directly affected by the event. It is more
likely that the extensive coverage given to local suffrage activities
was included to give women throughout the country a sense of solidar-
ity and a feeling that their own local activities were indeed part
of a larger movement. Furthermore, publication of constitutions
and resolutions were educational materials, examples of protocol for
women who had no training in legal terminology or Robert's Rules of
9.193:-

Readers of The Revolution were also given some less tradi-
tional ways of effecting change. One tactic described, employed by
women in Vineland, N. J., and Hyde Park, Mass., was the suffrage
"rehearsal." 0n election day, a group of women would go to the polls
and deposit their ballots in a separate box. The votes did not
count, but the women were proving that they could go to the polls
without being disgraced or degraded by the experience.24

As early as l868, women were voting in a few local elections
throughout the country. Women in Passaic, N.J., voted on whether to
install sidewalks in the town's main street,25 women in Schenectady,

N.Y., helped defeat a proposal to introduce a public water works,26

 

24Revo1ution, v (Feb. 24, l870), p. 117.

25Revolution, I (May 2l, l868), p. 307.

26Revo1ution, I (May 28, l868), p. 331.

88

women in Sturgis, Mich., voted in a school board election.27 Less
direct ways for women to choose elected officials also were presented
in the pages of The Revolution: an example is in this letter from
Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

We met again with Mrs. Worden, a sister of Mrs. Seward. She

is a woman of great originality, and has an inexhaustible fund

of conversation. Discussing with her the question of suffrage,

she told us that since she has been a widow, she has always

selected her man servant with reference to his politics. After

inquiring as to his qualifications as gardner, coachman, etc.,

she asks if he is a good republican and will vote precisely as

she wishes him to, as among his other duties, the most important

will be the responsibility of representing her at the polls.28

Theseiyears saw a great deal of legislative activity on the
suffrage question, including the passage of woman's suffrage bills
in the territories of Wyoming (1869) and Utah (l870) and the sub-
mission of a woman suffrage amendment to the federal constitution
(l868). Woman suffrage bills were submitted but defeated in states
and territories including Tennessee. Massachusetts, Minnesota (where
the bill lost by one vote), and Wisconsin. All victories and defeats
were chronicled in The Revolution.
Underlying the political activity had to be a philosophical

basis for the demand for woman suffrage. The Revolution provided its

readers with arguments supporting both the need for and the right of

women to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote:

 

27Revo1ution, I (May 7, l868), p. 281.

28Revo1ution, II (Aug. 20, l868), p. 98.

.-‘

89

"We see something more in the ballot 'than a slip of paper,
dropped into a box once a year, to choose a county sheriff.‘
It has a deeper significance. It is the recognition of the
civil, political and social equality of the citizen. It is
the throwing aside the badge of degradation for the shield of2
sovereignty, an unknown signature for the seal of the state."

9
The Revolution columns often included arguments made in §T£:n\
favor of Negro suffrage, attempting to show that the same arguments
applied equally to women. Parker Pillsbury wrote: "If the ballot
is invaluable, indispensible to the security of the freed man in the
full enjoyment of his freedom and pursuit of happiness, it must be
equally so to the freed woman who is to live under the same govern-
ment, be taxed equally for its support, obey the same laws, or suffer
the same penalties. And what is true of the colored woman in this
respect, is alike true of every woman in the nation."30 Robert
Purvis, who unlike most black men, refused to separate the question
of black and woman suffrage, wrote: "As a colored man, and a victim
to the terrible tyranny, inflicted by the injustice and prejudice of
the nation, I ask no right that I will not give to every other human
being, without regard to sex or color. I cannot ask white women to
give their efforts and influence in behalf of my race, and then meanly
and selfishly withhold countenance of a movement tending to their en-

franchisement."3]

 

29Revo1ution, III (May 13, l869), p. 292.

30Revolution, v (April 21, 1870), p. 248.

3lRevolution, V (Jan. l3, l870), p. 30.

90

A number of articles indicated that the time for woman
suffrage had arrived. In an early editorial, Parker Pillsbury wrote:
It is time for Revolution. The ten commandments were not made
for white male citizens. The statute book of the moral universe
makes no distinction of color or sex, either in its demands or
penalties. . . .If a white male be eligible for suffrage at
twenty-one under proper regulations, then let the black man be
eligible under the same regulations.. If all men may thus be
citizens, so also may all women. Anything short of that is
not democracy but despotism; and is as sure to fail as the
throne of God is to stand.32
An unsigned editorial included a similar sentiment: “With the
abolition of color aristocracy must come also the abolition of sexual
aristocracy, when woman, freed from the unrighteous proscription
which binds and fetters her within a specified routine, surrounding
her by laws and obligations which she has had no voice in making,
and the impact of which she has scarcely been allowed to comprehend,
will be permitted the untrammelled exercise of her natural and un-
alienable endowments."33
The founders of The.Revolution believed suffrage was needed
to legitimize women in more than just the political sphere. Thus
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writing on the efficacy of disenfranchised
women as social service workers, stated:
"We are to make bricks without straw, learn to swim without
going near the water, regulate public abuses without a voice

in the laws, being supernaturally endowed, we are to do with-
out the ballot what man is wholly unable to do with it. . . .

 

32Revolution, I (Feb. 27, 1868), p. 114.

33Revolution, I (Feb. 19, 1868), p. 101.

91

Say less about our rights, and think more of our duties. We
cannot do our duties until we secure our rights. We are bound
hand and foot by your laws and constitutions. But when we can
back what we talk and write with our vgfies, we have an added
power that none can gainsay or resist.

As suffrage activism and sentiment spread, opposition to
the movement grew-—opposition that was welcomed by The Revolution
columnists. One writer, describing an anti-suffrage protest by l00
Ohio women, concluded: "I am glad these ladies made this protest,
not only because this is a country where honest views ought to be
expressed, but because agitation pushes forward reform."35 Another
writer commented on the illogical position of women who lectured
publicly against expanding the public domain of women:

One of the most promising features of the woman's movement at
present, is the open opposition from the women themselves.
There are several ladies in different parts of the country now
lecturing against the extension of suffrage to women. They
probably do not see that taking the rostrum is a fatal step in
that direction.

When a woman so far oversteps her prescribed sphere as to
express her opinion in a mixed assembly of men and women, it
will not be very different for her quietly to slip it into
the ballot-box in the presence of four inspectors.35

The Revolution did more than take note of anti-suffrage“””8”

 

agitation; the paper presented all opposing views, rational or
irrational, based on moral, religious, or political grounds, by men

and women alike, and refuted these arguments.

 

34Revo1ution, I (May 21, l868), p. 315.

 

35Revolution, v (April 21, l870), pp. 245-46.

36Revolution, IV (Oct. 14, l869), p. 235.

 

92

In reply to the contention that women themselves did not
want the vote, The Revolution countered that that very fact was
proof of the second-class position of American women. According to

Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

That American women do not realize their political degradation
does not make it less a fact to-day. The true woman sees it,
feels it in the very air she breathes, in the words of every
man she meets, in every book and newspaper she reads, in the
public sentiment of contempt for woman she hears at every turn,
in the stereotyped sneers, "there's woman's work for you,"
"that's a woman's judgment," "that's a woman's way," “that's

a woman's blunder,“ as if all incapacity and inefficiency were
of the female gender. Male dolts, mules and cowards and uni-
formly called "Dame Parringtons," "Miss Nancys," and "Old
Crannys," as if nothing ignoble, narrow or weak could be of the
masculine gender! . . .Ah! when women have the power to vote
men in their places, they'll learn new phrases for their peers,
just as they learned to spell nnegro" with one "g," as soon as
black men were free and held the ballot. . . .Woman has never
yet enjoyed the right of trial by a jury of her own peers. . . .
The laws for married women today in many of the States run
parallel with the old slave codes of the South.37

The argument that women didn't want the vote was refuted in this way
by another writer: "No oppressed class ever yet emancipated itself.
We did not wait for the negro to plead his own cause. The mass of
the freedmen do not appreciate the ballot, yet republicans and
abolitionists keep up the cry of 'negro suffrage." Why not 'Woman's
Suffrage?‘ Why should women be expected to do more for themselves

e?"38

than stalwart Africans have don This simple refutation

 

37Revolution, I (Jan. 15, l868), p. 25.

38Revolution, I (May l4, l868), p. 294.

93

of the same anti-suffrage argument appeared two weeks later: ”A
woman who says she does not want her rights, is like a child who
does not want an education; neither knows their values."39
Another anti-suffrage argument was that the right to vote
was just one part of the struggle of women to attain their rights--
that education, equal pay for equal work, or other advancements
would do more for women than the ballot would. Mrs. Catharine
Beecher, a noted educator, was one anti-suffragist who argued that

women should fight for "Something Better Than the Ballot," namely

education. Mrs. Beecher was answered by two writers in The Revolu-

 

tion, Paulina Wright Davis wrote: "There are many things better

for man and woman than the ballot, a high, virtuous pure life is
better; education and bread are better, but to'obtain these latter
there are intermediate steps to be taken, to reach the desired end
both for man and woman."40 Julia Carpenter insisted that woman was
demanding the vote because of the advances women like Mrs. Beech had
made in gaining educational opportunities for women: "Woman are ask-
ing for the ballot, not as a rash venture, but because by being better
educated, they have learned to think for themselves. Women cannot

be taught to think, and then be willing to let men do all their

thinking for them."41

 

39Revolution, I (May 28, l868), p. 331.

 

40Revolution, IV (Oct. 14, l869), p. 226.

 

Ibid.

94

The largest opposition to the woman suffrage movement in
the late l860$ came not from those opposed to the principle of
woman suffrage, but from those who wished the women to delay asking
for their rights until the Negro had been enfranchised. This group,
which included the famous Massachusetts reformers--Lucy Stone, Henry
Blackwell, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips--opposed the
efforts of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on behalf of
woman suffrage. The two women, on the other hand, felt abandoned
by their former co-workers and colleagues.

The difference between the two groups was most evident in
the stand each took on the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution, which gave black men the right to vote. The New
Englanders strongly urged passage of the amendment; Susan B. Anthony

and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in the columns Of The Revolution were as

 

forceful in opposing the amendment's passage:

Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith and Wendell
Phillips, with one consent, bid the women of the nation stand
aside and behold the solution of the negro. Wendell Phillips
says, "one idea for a generation," to come up in the order of
their importance. First negro suffrage, then temperance, then
the eight hour movement, then woman's suffrage. In 1958, three
generations hence, thirty years to a generation, Phillips and
Providence permitting, woman's suffrage will be in order.42

Susan B. Anthony wrote:
"The Revolution criticizes, 'opposes,' the Fifteenth Amendment,

not for what it is, but for what it is not. Not because it '
enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise

 

42Revolution, I (Jan. l5, l868), p. 24.

 

95

all women, black and white. It is not the little good it

proposes, but the greater evil it perpetuates that we

deprecate. . . .Our protest is not that all men are lifted

out of the degradatign of disenfranchisement, but that all

women are left in."4

One argument frequently advanced by those in favor of the

Fifteenth Amendment was that women who demanded their own enfranchise-
ment were being selfish, that fighting for the rights of others,
like the abolitionists were doing, was more honorable. Wendell
Phillips wrote:

The Women's Rights movement is essentially a self-service one;

not disinterested as the Anti-Slavery cause was. It is women

contending for their own rights; the Abolitionists toiled for

the rights of others. When women emphasize this selfishness,

by turning aside to oppose the rights of others, it is, in

truth, no generous spectacle.44

This discussion among reformers placed many abolitionists

and suffragists in difficult positions, as all were forced to take
sides in the battle. Even Lucy Stone, who became strongly identified
with the supporters of the Fifteenth Amendment, was unhappy and
puzzled that her male co-workers could not see the urgency of the
woman's cause. In a speech at the l869 American Equal Rights Associa-
tion anniversary, Mrs. Stone affirmed the importance of woman suffrage;
only at the end of her speech did she offer to stand back until black
men were enfranchised. Reacting to Frederick Douglass's assertion

that the issue of woman suffrage was less urgent than that of Negro

suffrage, Lucy Stone said:

 

43Revolution, IV (Oct. 7, l869), p. 217.

44Revolution, IV (July l5, l869), p. 24.

96

But the Woman Suffrage is more imperative than his own; and
I want to remind the audience that when he says what the Ku—
Kluxers did all over the south, the Ku-Kluxers here in the
north in the shape of men, take away the children from the
mother, and separate them as completely as if done on the
block of the auctioneer. . . .

The woman has an ocean of wrong too deep for any plummer,
and the negro, too, has an ocean of wrong that cannot be
fathomed. There are two great oceans; in the one is the black
man, and in the other is the woman. But I thank God for the
Fifteenth Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every
state. I will be thankful in my soul if any_body can get out
of the terrible pit, and if the other party can succeed better
than we, let them do it.45

This conference marked the final split in the suffrage
ranks--a division fully chronicled in The Revolution. It was at this
conference that Stephen Foster objected to the nomination of Elizabeth

Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony for office, insisting that the two

"46

had "publicly repudiated the principles of the society; here that

Susan B. Anthony's handling of the association's finances was

criticized;47 here that Frederick Douglass, who had been one of the

few to support the woman suffrage resolution at the Seneca Falls Con-
vention in 1848, now said:

I must say that I do not see how anyone can pretend that there

is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the
negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death

. . . .When women, because they are women. . .are objects of
insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of hav-
ing their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children
are not allowed to enter school; then they will have an urgency
to obtain the ballot equal to our own.48

 

45Revolution, III (May 20, 1869). p. 307.

46Revo1ution, III (May 20, l869), p. 306.

47

Q.

I i

U’

48I

U”

id.

97

With the belief that the American Equal Rights Association
no longer was the best means of achieving woman suffrage, a group of
women representing fifteen states formed the National Woman Suffrage
Association, electing Elizabeth Cady Stanton president and designat-
ing The Revolution as the official publication for the society.

The division was deplored by most suffrage supporters. At
this point, however, the differences between the two groups seemed
to be irreconcilable. To counter the organization of the National
Woman Suffrage Association by Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, the
conservatives formed the American Woman Suffrage Association,
eliciting this response from Elizabeth Cady Stanton: "In the present
stage of the Woman's Suffrage movement in this country a division
in our ranks is rather to be deplored, for when friends disagree
new-comers hesitate as to which side to join; . . .still more deplor-
able is the result to the old friends themselves, when, instead of
fighting the common enemy, prejudice, custom, unjust laws and a false
public sentiment, they turn, as the old Abolitionists in their division

"49 Mrs. Stanton said she had offered to

did, and rend each other.
step down as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association,
if this would have appeased the New Englanders and led to reconcilia-
tion; her offer, apparently, was not accepted. She concluded:

That the division is one simply of leadership and personalities

is well known to all behind the scenes, for the American Woman
Suffrage Association proposes no new or different principles

 

49Revo1ution, IV (Oct. 28, l869), p. 264.

98

from those accepted in the Association already formed. But
still, in closing, I would say if there are people who cannot
come up to our broad, catholic ground, and demand,suffrage for
ALL--even negro suffragea'without distinction of Sex, why let
them have another association until they are edhcated for the
higher platform the present Association ocCupies. I have said
this much to let our friends generally understand the situation.

50

The Revolution published reports of the American Woman
Suffrage Association's activities, even commenting favorably on the
announcement that the organization would have its own newspaper,
the Women's Journal.

It soon became apparent, however, that the American Woman
Suffrage Association was not ready for reconciliation with the
National. In February, l870, Mrs. Stanton went to Boston; the chilly
reception she received from suffragists there angered her and was
noted in her letter to The Revolution. "We did not at first perceive
the cold, sidelong glances shot at us fromshining beavers and nod-
ding plumes, the stately sideling off, the sudden turning round, the
mysterious whisperings and shakings of the head, all portending a

"51

coming storm. In the next issue, a letter from a Boston woman

was printed, objecting to the treatment Mrs. Stanton received:

My spirit is stirred to indignation by the very shabby reception
that Boston has given her [Elizabeth Cady Stanton]. . . .When
such a woman appears at a meeting called to promote that cause
for which she has toiled early and late while some of us have
been preserving our cherished dignity and self-righteous decorum
in this atmosphere of classic conventionalism--shall we not

 

501bid.

51Revolution, v (Feb. 3, 1870), p. 72.

99

welcome her as one to whom we are all indebted, and give a

respectful and patient hearing to hgr_views of duty and ex-

pediency in the promotion of this, the great interest we all

have at heart? By no means. We will sit by and "make believe

very large" that we don't see her. . . .At least one would

think there was room for all to work in their own way, and

if there could not be co-operation, there might be mental

recognition of right aims and motives, and a spiritual hospital-

ity expressed by, at least, common courtesy toward strangers

and guests.52
The two groups would remain separated until l890, long after Ihg_
Revolution ceased publication--an end brought about, in part, by the
paper's inability to survive the competition of the Women's Journal.
The split also took its toll on the contents of The Revolution, as
much of the suffrage news began to be concerned with the differences
between the two suffragist factions. This change detracted from the
philosophical arguments favoring suffrage, interspersed as these argu-
ments became, with gossip, innuendo, and bickering aimed at discredit-
ing the American Woman Suffrage Association.

From 1868 to l870 The Revolution served a number of

functions in its role as suffrage agitator. First, it ihformed
women of contemporary suffrage activity, providing news and publicity
and creating a sense of common purpose among many suffragists. Second,
it educated women in the politics of protest, explaining how to peti-
tion, conduct public meetings, and hold different kinds of protests.
Third, it presented a philosophical basis for woman sUffrage. Finally,
the newspaper countered the arguments of a host of anti-suffragists,

demonstrating the legitimacy of the claim of women for their right to

vote.

 

52Revolution, V (Feb. 10, l870), p. 84.

100

WOMAN"S RIGHTS AND WRONGS

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton realized that
suffrage was only one phase of the overall struggle to gain equal
rights for women. Many of the inequalities woman suffered were not
the direct result of her political or legal status; the wrongs were
based on cultural conditioning, superstition, religion, or personal
belief. The Revolution waged continuous warfare against prominent
contemporary beliefs that helped keep women ingan inferior position:
that woman had the benefit of the protection and chivalry of man;
that in marriage, "husband and wife are one, and that one, the hus-
band;“ that the inferior position of woman was ordained by God. In
addition to arguing against these commonly held ideas, The Revolution
presented numerous examples of women actively engaged in the struggle
for their own rights, thus providing documentation to disprove the
notion that woman must, by her nature, be dependent of man.

"Man's gallantry! what is it, but a boast of his own
superiority and an insolent fling at woman's weakness?"53

One objection raised (usually by men) to extending equal
rights to women was that women did not have to fight their own battles--

husband, father, or brother could and would protect his woman. A

lawyer wrote to The Revolution on this point, objecting to the idea

 

that woman needed to be admitted to the professions or the polls. He

concluded his letter:

 

53Revolution, IV (Sept. 16, l869), p. 168.

101

Now, the writer is a possessor of a young and charming wife of
twenty-two years of age. Two years of married life has reall

made them one. She has borne him one child. They live pleasantly
and happily in an up-town house, on $7,000 a year. Do you think
that he could think of permitting that pure young creature,

whose world is her husband and their child, to venture out to cast
a piece of paper into a box, after having waited one or two hours
in a long line of low-born, ill-bred, insolent ruffians, who care
little for God, fear not man, and whose words would make the ears
tingle, especially of one so pure, young, tender woman?

My chief end in life is to ward off all storms, all ruffle
and all discomfort from her I love; yes, far too well to change
into a man in manners, looks, words and dress, in fact every- 54
thing but the natural and physical differences between the sexes.

The editors' reply was characteristic of their stand on this question:

In denying us a right to enter all the colleges and seminaries,
of law, medicine and theology, you prevent us from fitting our-
selves for those professions. . . . By denying us a right of
suffrage you destroy our self-respect, and that of the ruling
classes for us. Disenfranchised classes are always degraded
classes, hence we are crowded out of honorable and profitable
employment.

We do not know any benefits that a generous government has
allowed us that will in any way compensate for all the wrongs, in
denying us a voice in the government, the rights of property and
wages, the right of trial by a jury of our peers, and the right
to our own children. . . . We will willingly change places and 55
give all the immunities to man, and take the rights for ourselves.

Another fear frequently expressed was that liberating women would signal
an end to polite society, as men would not feel the need to practice
the social graces around women once the two sexes were equal. This
argument was dismissed as specious by Mary L. Clough, in an article en-

titled "Gallantry Versus Humanity."

 

54Revolution, I (June 25, 1868(, pp. 387-88.

55Revolution, I (June 25, l868), p. 388.

102

We hear much small talk in social circles, and also frequently
obtruding itself into the public journals, of a time when . . .
little acts of courtesy shall cease; "when women vote, and run
for office, and forsake the 'holy spheres of home,‘ then," says
the social small talk, "what man will offer his seat in the
crowded car to a woman, or assist her to any little convenience
as he so willingly does now, if she stands on the same footing
as he why shall she not 'shirk for herself?'" All this is very
shallow, and yet how much harm such frivolous remarks and super-
ficial reasoning make upon the young, surface-seeing public?

How many never pause to consider that the innate courtesy prompt-
ing a man to assist a lady to enter a carriage or find a seat
will just as readily and tenderly protect a child or steady the
feeble steps of an old man who “votes?" Mere superficial polite-
ness we do not desire. A true woman scorns the "gallantry" that
refuses aid to the poor and indigent. It is humanity we want.
We wish first to know if good manners are skin—deep, before we
venture to price them, or fear their loss. Furthermore--paying
women half of what men get is hardly gallantry. "Perish the
hypocrisy, that while wheedling half the world out of their
natural rights, smilingly bows and simpers of 'home sanctity'
and 'angelic influence!‘" Women are not "angels," but rational
human beings, and as such requiring food, clothing and lodging.
So we will barter high-sounding politeness and flattery for the
"right" to live and labor on an equal footing in the fields
naturally open alike to men and women.55

In an even more radical refutation of the value of man's gallantry
toward woman, a reader wrote: I'Woman is a slave, and must feel so
every day of her life, unless her sensibilities are already blunted
and benumbed by her condition. Of what use is it to be called an
'angel' and then to be endowed with nothing but 'instincts' in common
with the brute creation?"57

For those who remained unconvinced by such abstract reason-
ing, The Revolution contained examples demonstrating the degree to

which men actually did protect women. A chilling incident was reported:

 

56Revolution, IV (Aug. 26, 1869), p. 114.

57Revolution, IV (Nov. 16, 1869), p. 380.

103

A Paris newspaper describes a recent occurrence in this way,
illustrating, not only its own, but a very common estimate of
woman in many places: “On Saturday, an accident, which might
have been attended with sad results, took place in this city
(Paris). A bricklayer, having lost his balance, fell from the
sixth story of a house to the street. Fortunately, two women
who were chatting on the sidewalk, received the falling man on
their heads and broke his fall. The bricklayer was taken up
safe and sound. The bystanders shuddered to think that but
for a lucky chance the accident might have cost him his life.
The two women were killed instantly."58
The paper also took pains to point out the economic inequalities
women suffered--inequalities that could not necessarily be ameliorated
by the protection of a man. It was pointed out, for example, that
although a man's purchase of a train ticket included in the ticket
price insurance against death or disability, women passengers, pay-
ing the same ticket price, were insured by the railroad companies
against death alone.59 Furthermore, it appeared that institutions
traditionally seen as protective of women and children did not always
provide the expected protection. According to an excerpt from a
Canadian newspaper: "Twelve years ago, Dr. Low of Bowmanville,
Canada, mortgaged all his private property to pay off the indebted-
ness of his Church, under solemn promise of repayment. He died two
years ago, and now the mortgages are being foreclosed, and his wife
and children turned out to starve, the church refusing to make good

their claims."60

 

 

 

58Revolution, III (Feb. 25, l869), p. 124.
59Revolution, II (Oct. 1, 1868), p. 203.
60 '

Revolution, III (May 6, 1869), p. 283.

104

The Revolution demonstrated that men were not successfully
protecting women from violent assault. Examples of rape and seduction

were frequently cited in the paper; one letter that urged making rape

a capital crime, argued that men were unable to appreciate the gravity

of crimes against women:

The objection [apparently raised frequently] that the evidence
obtainable in such cases would not warrant a death sentence,
would hold equally against every other punishment; a judge has
not more right to commit a man to jail for a year on insuffi-
cient evidence, than he would have to sentence him to be hanged.
The real difficulty lies in the fact that men do not consider
this crime worthy of death, and it should be our duty, for our
own sakes and that of others, to impress on the country that it
j§_worthy of death, that the man who commits such an outrage on
a woman, does her an injury incalculablg greater than if he had
murdered her in any most brutal manner. 1

Rather than have women dependent on men's protection, Ihg_
Revolution suggested several self-protection measures. Some writers
proposed that women adopt male costume (although this practice was
illegal in many states). Fanny Fern, a writer, advised that women
simply leave their fashionable clothes at home when they wished to
take a walk: "A woman by taking a big market basket in her hand,
and leaving her hoop at home, and pinning an old shawl over her head,
and tying a calico apron around her waist, may walk unmolested. I
know, because I have tried it when I felt like having a 'prowl' all
alone, without any puppy saying at every step: 'A pleasant evening,

.662

Miss. A more militant columnist wrote: "We would suggest that

 

61Revolution, IV (July 22, 1869), p. 35.

 

62Revolution, III (June 10, 1869), p. 359.

105

every young girl should be taught the use of firearms, and always

carry a small pistol for her defence."63

Many stories in The Revolution dealt with the role men

 

played in the moral downfall of girls and women. The tone of most

articles about fallen women was sympathetic, and although The Revolu-

 

tjgn_was against all forms of abortion, stories about this subject
were as likely to condemn the father as the mother.

One case that the paper covered extensively was that of
Hester Vaughan, an Englishwoman. Miss Vaughan had been brought to
Philadelphia by a man who had a sham wedding ceremony performed.
Within a few months, he left Miss Vaughan, who by this time was
pregnant. She gave birth, alone in a deserted attic, to a daughter,
who was dead by the time police arrived. Miss Vaughan said the
child had been stillborn, but authorities did not believe her, and
she was arrested, brought to trial, and convicted of infanticide.
The Revolution urged its readers to appeal to the governor of Pennsyl-
vania for Miss Vaughan's pardon and to raise money to enable the
woman to return to her parents in England. They succeeded in both
campaigns, amid much publicity. The Hester Vaughan case was another
example, The Revolution insisted, of the inherent evil of forcing
women to depend on men's good graces: "Depriving woman of the right

to protect herself--making her the creature of man's protection--

 

63Revolution, 111 (June 10, 1869), p. 362.

 

64Revolution, II (Sept. 17, 1868), p. 169.

 

106

makes her a victim to his powers, and the cries of feminine weakness
and masculine 'protection' are the upper and nether millstones between
which the working women are being ground to powder.“64
The flaws in the system of man's protection of woman were

numerous. The columns of The Revolution were used to document these
deficiencies, not to encourage men to improve their defense systems,
but to spur women on to assuming responsibility for their own pro-
tection. Marie A. Brown wrote: "No human being is endowed with the
power, right or privilege to protect another. Protection is inherent,
and every individual removed from childhood and imbecility is sheathed

in a natural defence--self-protection."65

MARRIAGE

The Revolution called for a massive overhaul of the insti-
tution of marriage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: "Woman as woman,
asks nothing to-day but the elective franchise; it is only as wife
that these infamous laws affect her. When a wife has a civil and
political existence, we may talk of a dignified legal marriage rela-
tion, but no one, fresh from the reading of even our revised statutes
of to-day, can feel a very profound respect for an institution in
which woman is a 'femme couvert,‘ 'subgpotestate viri."66 Many of

the laws governing marriage were not favorable to women; in most

 

65Revolution, III (June 10, 1869), p. 355.

66Revolution, III (April 8, 1869), pp. 217-18.

107

states a wife had limited or no right to inherit, own, or will
property, to her children, to her name, or to her choice of domicile.
Although in marriages in which true affection existed, husbands might
not abuse their rights and powers, many women saw the need to change
the laws to prevent such abuses by any husband. Dr. Esther H. Hawks
wrote: "All men are not brutes, but irresponsible power in the hands
of such as are disposed to abuse it, is an unsafe thing. The ad-
vanced civilization demands emancipation for women from the slavery
of the marriage relation."67
Married women, according to The Revolution, suffered in a
number of ways. First, the amount of work involved in conducting a
household forced women to work long hours. "A man has his work hours,
and his definite tasks; a woman has work at all hours, and incessant

"68

confusion of tasks, the Rev. Thomas Beecher wrote. The Revolution

 

presented this fictional "Family Portrait," comparing the work day of
a wife and husband:

A professional man enters his house, just come in from his
office (a five minutes walk). "Oh, dear, I am so tired. Wife
couldn't you fix me a hot gin sling? Seems to me that would
touch the right spot." Said gentleman went to his office at

9 a.m., where he has written a little, read the papers, and
cracked jokes with a crowd of hangers on to his and their in-
finite satisfaction. The wife was up an hour or two before

her husband, built the fire, dressed the babies, cooked break-
fast for him and his numerous progeny. (They are his, not hers.
They are hers to feed and care for, and work for, tFaa morning
till night, but they are his legally). Since that, she has been

 

67Revolution, v (Feb. 10, l870), p. 94.

68Revolution, II (Aug. 27, 1868), p. 120.

 

l08
scrubbing, baking, ironing, or whatever else fills up the 69
programme for the day, but it is something, be sure of that.
\.; More serious than overwork, however, was the problem of a

husband's‘unfaithfulness. Writers in The Revolution were particularly

 

harsh on this matter. Eleanor Kirk wrote: "A wife's duty ceases the
moment a man is abusive--the moment she discovers him to be untrue,
and it is a sin against God, against self-respect, against the
community to bear children for such a scamp, to place herself in a
position to be enfeebled by disease and sent to an untimely grave as
hosts of pure, noble women have been."70

The McFarland-Richardson affair brought much public comment
on the marriage and divorce question. Mrs. McFarland, after being
granted a divorce from her husband, fell in love with Mr. Richardson.
Her ex-husband, jealous over the attachment, shot Richardson, fatally
wounding him. Before Richardson died, though, ministers including
Henry Ward Beecher officiated at the marriage of the two lovers.
McFarland not only was acquitted; he was allowed to retain custody
of his children.

The story of the love triangle was widely reported in the
press, with commentators disagreeing on (l) the justification of
McFarland's action, (2) the moral character of Mrs. McFarland Richard-
son, and (3) the wisdom and propriety of the ministers' marrying the

two lovers. As the question of marriage and divorce was one of her

 

69Revolution, v (April 28, l870), p. 260.

70Revolution, II (Aug. 27, 1868), p. 118.

109

pet causes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote extensively on the affair,
insisting that women had every right to be married to men they loved.

(Mrs. Stanton had written in an earlier issue of The Revolution that

71

loveless marriages were "legalized prostitution", and should be

free to divorce unsuitable husbands). Regarding this case, she wrote
to Parker Pillsbury:

You ask what I think of the Richardson affair. I rejoice over
every slave that escapes from a discordant marriage. With the
education and elevation of women we shall have a mighty sunder-
ing of the unholy ties that hold men and women together who
loathe and despise each other. . . . The wholesale divorce and
infanticide that mark this transition period of woman's awaken-
ing are Nature's protests against these unions of the flesh
alone. It is humiliating to any proud woman to see how completely
the woman is ignored in all the discussions of the press on this
affair. One would really suppose that a man owned his wife as
the master the slave, and that this was simply an affair between
Richardson and McFarland, fighting like two dogs over one bone.
My opinion is that a woman has a right to choose between a base,
petty tyrant and a noble, magnanimous.man, and if a husband
proves himself unworthy of love, and incapable of loving, it

is no proof that a woman's heart always stands open as a board-
ing-hogse door if, in the process of time, she loves somebody
else.

The editors saw customs governing married women's names as
symptomatic of the enslaved condition of wives:

As men are liable to disgrace their names, and run away from
their clinging vines, it is better for every woman to maintain
an individual existence and a lifelong name to represent it.
There is not more reason in every wife taking a husband's name
than in his taking hers.

 

7'Revo1ution, III (Feb. 4, 1869), p. 69.

72Revo1ution, IV (Nov. 23, 1869), p. 385.

 

110

In slavery, the black man was Cuffy Davis, or Cuffy Lee,
just whose Cuffy he might chance to be, but the moment he
reached the land of freedom, he took a name of his own, and
maintains it.73

The marriage ceremony itself, with woman vowing to obey her husband
and the ritual of an adult male giving away the bride was criticized
not only as humiliating for women, but also, by one writer, as

unconstitutional:

We think that all these reverend gentlemen who insist on these
humiliating ceremonies; that place all wives in the light of
slaves, should be impeached in the Supreme Court Of the~United
States, for a direct and positive violation of thé,Thirteenth
Amendment of the Federal Constitution, which says,‘“there shall
be no slavery or involuntary servitude in the Unitedistates."
In the meantime, let all brides who have any true dignity
or self-respect, repudiate "obey" and the giving away scene, as
unworthy of the higher civilization we boast to-day. 4

One tactic used to show the inequities of much of the
customary relationship between wife and husband was to take an article
about marriage and replace the word "woman" or "wife" where the word
"man" or "husband" appeared and "man" or "husband" where “woman" or
"wife" appeared. In the following example, The Revolution printed
only the revised version. This writer has taken the liberty of in-
cluding first the original, as it must have appeared:

When a man gives wrong counsel, never make him feel that he has
done so, but lead him on by degrees to what is rational, with
mildness and gentleness; when he is convinced, leave him all
the merit of having found out what was just and reasonable.

Seem always to obtain information from him, especially be-

fore company, though you may pass yourself for a simpleton.

Never forget that a wife owes her importance to that of her
husband; if she degrades him she injures herself.

 

73Revolution, III (April 1, 1869), p. 202.

74Revolution, v (March 24, 1870), p. 184.

111

The revision:

When a woman gives wrong counsel, never make her feel that she
has done so, but lead her on by degrees to what is rational,
with mildness and gentleness; when she is convinced, leave her
all the merit of having found out what was just and reasonable.

Seem always to obtain information from her, especially be-
fore company, though you may pass yourself for a simpleton.
Never forget that a husband owes his importayge to that of his
wife; if he degrades her he injures himself.

Those opposed to expansion of the public duties of women
often expressed concern that performance of these duties might prove
incompatible with woman's role as wife and mother. This notion was
dispelled by The Revolution:

Voting will not end all division labor, nor the natural affections
of women for men and children. One would really think to hear
these men ask questions that sex, love, our intellectual, moral
and social sentiments were all the result of their puny legisla-
tion. Men will be men, and women will be women, after all these
barriers to human progress are taken down.76

One editorial, in a more playful spirit, stated:

We wish to say once and forever, that motherhood is compatible
with voting and holding office. When the relations of the

sexes are regulated by the enlightened conscience and sound
judgment of woman, and not by the morbid appetites of man, her
whole life will not be devoted to one animal function, at the
expense of all other enjoyments. . . . As to holding office,

the public life of most men begins about forty years of age,
after which period most women might be relieved from all domestic
cares, as at that time their children are grown up and married,
or in school.

We never hear men say that washing, ironing, cooking, black-
ing their boots, splitting kindling wood, building fires, or any
other menial service conflicts with maternity. Then why should
they always start up with alarm lest the honors and privileges

 

75Revo1ution, II (Aug. 13, 1868), p. 90.

76Revolution, II (Oct. 22, 1868), p. 248.

112

of life should be detrimental to such relations? There is
something very suspicious, to say the least, in all the tender
anxiety men express on this point. We think its germ lies in
selfishness rather than generosity, something like the solici-
tude the slaveholder felt lest the negro could not take care of
himself in freedom.77
In reality, the law prevented married women from exercising certain
public functions. An Illinois attorney-~a woman--who had petitioned
the governor for the right to be a notary public received this reply,
which The Revolution printed: "I need not say to you that, being a
married woman, you are legally incapable of exacting the bond re-
quired by the statute, nor could you, if appointed, be held responsible,
in a common lawsuit, to any person who might be damnified by your
official neglect of duty, or for any malfeasance in office."78
For many wives, the question of becoming a notary public
would never even arise, as financial dependence precluded assumption
of any public duties or advocacy of any views not approved by their
husbands: "She [the wife] owns nothing--all is his [the husband's];
she controls nothing, for the reins of power are held by another, and
she is driven with the rest of the chattels; she can change nothing,
for a word of protest endangers the threadbare support she endures."79

The Revolution insisted that control of finances would put women and

 

men in an egalitarian position, making them better marriage partners:

 

77Revo1ution, v (Feb. 10, 1870), p. 88.

78Revolution, v (Jan. 13, 1870), p. 28.

79Revolution, III (June 10, 1869), p. 355.

113

'7"When women have their own property and business, they will choose
and not be chosen; they will marry the men they love, or not at all;
and where there is love between the parents, children will ever find

care and protection."80

The paper contained many optimistic articles
on the future of partnership marriages. Dr. Esther H. Hawks wrote:
"With the growing educational powers and opportunities accorded to
women, must come a more enlightened marriage code, an equal co-
partnership must be, and the pernicious idea that marriage makes two

d."8] Accord-

people into one, and that one the man, must be abandone
ing to Lita Barney Sayles: "Marriage will become sanctified, when

there are two parties to the ratification of it, where now there is

but one, for it will cease to be merely a bread and butter affair,

but shall arise from an attraction of our inner and purer natures,

an affinity of our loves, and trusts, and aspirations, that seeks

each as a companion to help the other over eternity's ever-ascending
highways."82 And Lucretia Mott, the abolitionist and suffragist,

whose egalitarian marriage with John Mott was legendary among reformers,
was quoted as saying: "In the marriage relation, the independence

of the husband and wife should be equal, their dependence mutual, and

their obligations reciprocal."83

 

80Revolution, I (Jan. 29, 1868), p. 57.

81Revolution, V (Feb. 10, 1870), p. 94.

82Revolution, V, (Feb. 17, 1870), p. 100.

83Revolution, IV (Oct. 7, 1869), p. 215.

114

The Revolution portrayed the condition of married woman
as a clear demonstration of the position she occupied in society.
By making these connections, the paper showed that voting, holding
office, receiving education, and working outside the home were as
essential for woman's domestic tranquility as they were for her
legitimation in the public sphere. This message apparently was too
radical for many, who hoped to press a single cause--suffrage or
education for women, for example--without making changes in the more

fundamental phases of women's and men's lives.

WOMEN IN RELIGION
Besides having radical ideas on marriage and divorce,

Elizabeth Cady Stanton had an untraditional approach to religion.
She believed that although Christ had equally valued women and men,
contemporary Christian doctrine and practices often contributed to
woman's subjugation. One attempt to re-educate the public was a
series, "Strong-Minded Women of the Bible," which appeared continu-
ally in The Revolution.t Also appearing in the newspaper were
examples of the more extraordinary diatribes made against women by
male ministers. Prof. Bartlett, a congregationalist minister from
Chicago, was quoted:

In [the] division of duties and functions both Providence and

scripture clearly indicate the rule, that the public and social

representative, or official head of the family, should be, and

is, the husband. . . . Female suffrage in the church accomplishes

no good end; female suffrage, so far as any effect is to come
from it, tends to introduce an element of trouble. Female

115

suffrage lays an additional burden on our sisters, which they

can ill afford to bear, and which very many shirk wholly from

assuming.84
Religious writers for the paper were careful to avoid getting en-
tangled in arguments based on quoting specific passages from the
Bible, preferring the approach recommended by E. Leets: "We must
judge Woman's Rights, and all other reforms for which the world was
not ready when our Savior visited it, by their conformity to the
spirit of the whole teaching of the New Testament, even though we
cannot quote a single chapter or verse as proof that they are
right."85 This point was raised on the question of the fall of Eve
and Adam: ”While all admit that before the fall our first parents
were equal; yet by some somerset of the moral laws of the universe,
it is assumed that woman fell the farthest, became an inferior be-
ing, and has been in subjection ever since to man, and must be to
the end."86

The place woman held in contemporary church activities was

a reflection of her second-class position in theological interpreta-
tion, according to Mrs. Stanton: "Women have been so long and so
thoroughly imbued with the idea that self-sacrifice was their great

duty and glory, that they have devoted themselves, body and soul,

purses and prayers, to the redemption of the heathen, the conversion

 

84Revolution, I (March 19, l868), p. 162.

85Revolution, III (Feb. 18, 1869), p. 101.

86Revolution, I (April 30, 1868), p. 265.

116

of the Jews, the decoration of churches, the education of 'poor but
pious young men' for the ministry, and the sensuous appetites of their
own households 'forever suckling fools and chronicling small beer,‘
so entirely neglecting their own health and happiness, growth and
development that we would really think that woman's individual wel-
fare and enjoyment had not part of place in the grand, eternal plan."87
Some advances were being made by churchwomen, however, and
these steps were noted in The Revolution. Some women were becoming
ministers, mainly in Universalist Societies, Methodist churches

were eliminating the word "obey“ from the marriage ceremony, and more

and more women were allowed to vote in church elections.

"WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING"

Not only in the church were individual women and small
groups of women advancing. Women throughout the world were moving
into areas that had previously been solely male domains. The editors
of The Revolution were very aware of the usefulness of such women as
role models for their more timid or less adventuresome sisters and,
often in the column "What Women are Doing,“ printed a wealth of items
showing the intelligence, strength, versatility, and resourcefulness
women exhibited.

A tactic used by some women who wished to call attention

to the inequities of society was the refusal to pay taxes or the

 

87Revolution, V (April 28, 1870), P. 264.

 

117

payment of taxes under protest, with the assertion that "taxation

without representation is tyranny." The Revolution reported on the

 

women, including Susan B. Anthony, the newspaper proprietor, who

engaged in this form of protest.88

Women who stepped outside "woman's sphere" were cited--

such as the woman who won first prize at a shooting match in

89

Switzerland, the woman rower who competed in the Columbia Boat

Club Regatta in New York City,90

or the woman in Red Wing, Minn.,
who "became disgusted at the inefficiency of the carpenters who
were building her home, discharged them, and has nearly finished
the work herself."9]
One report told of a man who, while beating his wife, was
set upon by more than twelve women, who were tired of witnessing
his treatment of his wife.92 1
The Revolution attempted to educate women about the herit-
age of their sex. Matilda E. J. Gage wrote about women inventors,

including Catharine Greene, the real inventor of the cotton gin:

 

88Revolution, III (June 3, 1869(, p. 343.

89Revolution, I (Jan. 22, 1868), p. 39.

90Revo1ution, II (August 27, 1868), p. 124.

9'Revo1ution, II (Sept. 3, 1868), p. 134.

921b1d.

118

The invention of the cotton gin, one of the greatest mechanical
triumphs of modern times, is due to a woman. Although the work
on the model was done by the hands of Eli Whitney, yet Mrs.
Greene originated the idea, and knowing Whitney to be a practi-
cal mechanic, she suggested his doing the work. . . . It may be
asked why Mrs. Greene did not take out the patent in her own
name. To have done so would have exposed her to the contumely
and ridicule of her friends. . . .Had the patent of the cotton
gin been taken in her own name, either singly or in union with
Whitney, what a wide-spread benefit her example would have been
to others of her sex.93

A column, "Brief Biographies of Celebrated Women, Ancient and Modern,‘I
appeared frequently, describing women such as Maria Gaetena, a mathe-

matician who lived from 1718 to l799.94

For women who believed that
learning was unfeminine, "What Women Are Doing" provided these facts:
"Mary, Queen of Scots when very young, delivered an oration in Latin,
before the French court, to prove that there was nothing unfeminine
in the pursuit of letters," "Queen Elizabeth early read Greek and was
familiar also with French, Spanish, Latin and Italian," and "Lady
Jane Grey wrote in Greek "95

(r,;ggueuchL§}

Such stories of women of ability were an important part of
The Revolution's support for the expansion of woman's rights. It was
necessary to demonstrate that women could function independently in

society. By pointing out women who actually were doing so, the news-

paper left readers with the impression that women were capable of

 

93Revolution, I (April 30, 1868), p. 259.

94Revo1ution, I (June 11, 1868), p. 365.

95Revolution, II (Aug. 6, 1868), p. 83.

119

exercising those rights. This type of proof, combined with argu-
ments in favor of expanding woman's role in society, gave many
woman's rights advocates the information they needed to refute the

arguments of those standing in the way of the movement.‘ 56

' v

WORKINGWOMEN

Woman, whether maid, wife or widow, as an individualized being,
endowed with soul and intellect as well as body, must have
some aim in life adequate to the employment and consequent
development of these powers, if she would not be a cipher, in-
deed, false to the design of her creation. The world, catering
to external conventionalisms and smothering its instinctive
recognition of this truth, has continued to despise woman for
being what it compels her to be. That man was made something,
it has always been admitted, but for woman, aside from physical
motherhood, it is just beginning to concede the possibility of
such a fact.95

Many women did work outside the home in the 18605, some
because they needed the money and some few others because they wanted
to work, but according to popular sentiment, woman's sphere was home
and family. The situation in this post-war period was, on a smaller
scale, similar to that of the post-World War II era. During the war,
women had served in jobs traditionally held by men. Describing the
Civil War, one woman wrote: "It was found that women could keep
accounts, set type, write for the press, practice medicine, and do a

97

thousand and one things requiring address, brains, energy. But then

 

96Revolution, II (Aug. 20, 1868), p. 102.

97Revolution, 1 (Feb. 19, 1868), p. 99.

120

the war was over , the men returned to their jobs, and women were

directed to step aside. This editorial from the New York Times

 

describes the roles prescribed for men and women in the Reconstruction

era: "The proper condition for a woman in all civilized countries

is undoubtedly that of dependence upon somebody else for support.

It is the office of mgn_to earn a living by work; and in a perfect

state of society men who earn all that is needed for the support of

both sexes."98

The wartime experience, however, had educated some people,

and they disagreed with the narrow limits of the point of view ex-

pressed by the Iimgg, An editorial in the Sharon (Wis.) fifllggy;

stated: "We take the broad ground that a woman has the right to do

whatever is becoming a man to do. And if she does the work of a man

she is entitled to a man's wage.“99 AccOrding to the Philadelphia

Post; "If experience has taught us nothing else, we ought at least

to know now that we cannot draw a line between any of the occupations

of life, and say this is fit for a man and this for a woman, for

surely as we do, a woman will arise and prove our theory idle talk."100
11.8,1’The Revolution advocated the right of women to work, to have

free choice of occupations, and to be remunerated fairly for her work.

One obstacle facing women seeking entrance into the world of employment

 

98Revolution, III (Feb. 25, 1869), p. 120.

99Revoiution, II (Aug. 20, 1868), p. 106.

100Revolution, IV (Nov. 2, 1869), p. 339.

121

was the belief that women were suited for certain jobs, and that,
given the choice, most women would prefer to care for their own
households. This idea was refuted: "There is no better reason why
all women should be housekeepers, than all men shop-keepers; there
is the same diversity of tastes in one sex as the other, and the
same necessity for a division of labor more in harmony with individual
taste and attraction."]01
The Revolution also deplored the fact that most women who
chose to work were not supported in their decision by family or
friends. An article, describing a woman who, against the wishes of
her father, became a working girl, described the opposition such a
woman could expect to face:
It required as great strength of purpose for this young girl to
leave the life of frivolity and idleness and become a true
woman, as it would require in an average man to become a Congress-
man. She had no encouragement except from her own conscience,
while the young man who takes a standpoint of firmness and in-
dependence, receives encouragement at every step. It is not
strange that there are no deep-thinking women; it is wonderful
that there are any, that women try to be anything but dolls and
playthings. . . . If men would consider rationally they would
see how cowardly it is in them to think about woman's inferiority
when for thousands of years she has been in a kind of slavery,
and the power has been all their own. 02
The issue of work for women really had two facets. First was
the issue of woman's right to work for personal fulfillment. This

idea appealed to women of the middle and upper classes, whose husbands,

 

10'Revo1ution, IV (July 10, 1869), p. 11.

102Revolution, III (Feb. 11, l869), p. 83.

 

122

fathers, or other male relatives were willing and able to provide
decent standards of living. Women in this situation, who often
were educated and had servants to care for the household, wanted to
have the right to express themselves through a career: "The need
of the soul to give itself outward expression, to stamp its likeness
upon a creation of its own, is an incentive to labor immeasureably
greater than material compensation. For it is the inborn, God-given

purpose 0f 1Ife, however vaguely revealed."103

The second aspect of
women and work involved women who depended on themselves for support.
These women--single, widowed, divorced, or married to men whose
salaries were inadequate--were, more often than not, poorly paid
seamstresses, department store clerks, or domestics.

Middle and upper class working women often had professional
or white collar jobs. They were doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers,
journalists, librarians. The Revolution carried news on women in all
these occupational categories, pointing out the good and bad news.

On the positive side, the paper reported that 300 women
graduates of medical schools were in practice in the United States

104 that the American

105

in l869, some earning more than $l5,000 a year,

Dental Association had voted to admit women into the profession,

 

103Revo1ution, v (Jan. 20, 1870), p. 37.

104Revo1ution, 111 (March 18, 1869), p. 166.

105Revolution, IV (Aug, 12, 1869), p. 92.

123

and that some states were beginning to allow women to practice law.106

On the negative side were: the report that the Pennsylvania Medical
Association had voted 45-37 against having women admitted as physicians107
and almost all news about the salaries paid to women teachers.

Women in education suffered from a malady that has recently

been described as "double vision."108

Women were the teachers; men
were the administrators. Girls were better students than boys, but
parents sent their sons, not their daughters, to college.

Susan B. Anthony had once been a teacher; she had taken a
position formerly held by a man, at half the salary he had been paid.
This situation had not changed over the years, and The Revolution
often ran stories like this report from the Lowell, Mass., School
Committee:

The high school is in very satisfactory condition. . . . The
vacancy caused by the resignation of a male teacher, has been
filled, and well filled,_too, by the appointment of a female

assistant. From the amount thus saved the salary of the new

FrenCh teacher is taken, and 450 dollars are left to the city.109

 

106Revo1ution, I (March 19, 1868), p. 171, I (Feb. 19, 1868),
p. loo, I (March l2, l868), p. l48.

107Revo1ut1on, I (June 25, 1868), p. 396.

108Women Historians of the Midwest, "Double Vision” (film),
St. Paul, Minn., 1975.

109Revo1ut1on, III (Nov. 1, 1869), p. 202.

124

It was reported that in New Hampshire, the average monthly wages for

women teachers were $16, for men, $34.110

The paper also reported
examples of women educators who resisted against this discrimination,
like the woman principal in Philadelphia who took her demand for equal
pay to the courts and won.111
Women teachers not only had to endure low wages; school
boards could discriminate against women because of marital status or
simply because of their sex. These two examples are typical of the
attitudes of school board members in cities throughout the United
States: “The Baltimore §un_says, in noticing the action of the Public
School Trustees of that city in dispensing with the service of married
female teachers, that the custom in Baltimore and other cities is to

"1'2 "The Philadelphia

consider marriage in the light of a resignation.
Board of Controllers of Public Schools are endeavoring to make a law
that hereafter, no woman shall be eligible to the office of Principal
of a boys Grammar School."“3
These practices against women teachers were widespread be-
cause the profession was dominated by young women; school boards could
offer teachers low wages, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later

someone would accept the salary.

 

noRevo1ut1on, III (Feb. 18, 1869), p. 108.
111

112
113

Revolution, I (June 4, 1868), p. 342.
Revolution, II ( Sept. l7, 1868), p. l74.
Revolution, II (July 23, 1868), p. 42.

125

This was not a problem for woman journalists, who, whether
as publishers, editors, or reporters, were practicing in a male-
dominated field. The 1860s and l870s saw women working in more and
more newspaper offices. The western states and territories seem tp
have supported a large number of woman editors and publishers.114
In the East, women were entering the field as reporters for the

metropolitan dailies.”5

The trend of women entering journalism
was not limited to the United States; The Revolution reported of
women in Turkey, Mexico City, Lisbon, Portugal, and Paris who had
started newspapers.H6
These white collar jobs, although not paying wages equal
to those of men, did provide women with enough money to live decently.
The same was not true of jobs held by working class women. Women,
working as seamstresses, compositors, and factory workers, working
twelve to fourteen hours a day, earned wages that barely covered the
cost of room and board. These women had different interests from
those of the white collar and professional women.

The Revolution championed the cause of the workingwoman.

Susan B. Anthony organized two unions for workingwomen, one for

 

'14Revo1ut1on, II (Aug. 20, 1868), p. 106, II (July 17, 1868),
p. 27, v (Feb—T'T“‘. 1 , 870), p. 106, v (Jan. 20, 1870), p. 42.

115Revolution, IV (Nov. 18, 1859). P- 308: IV (Sept. 30’
1869). P. 204.

'15Revo1ut1on. IV (Oct. 7. 1869). p. 219. I (June 18, 1858):

p. 380.

126

typesetters and one for sewing women, and printed notices and minutes
from the meetings of these groups in the paper. Miss Anthony tried
to show these women that the vote was the most efficient way to im-
prove their working conditions, but they never were convinced. The
unions were mildly successful at getting higher pay for their members
and were diligent about collecting from employers women's wages that
had been fraudulently withheld.H7
Much was written in the paper about the plight of the
sewing women, who were paid very low wages for very hard work. A
woman might be paid fifty cents for making a dozen men's shirts.
Although many middle class women (including the New England suffrag-
ists) did not get involved with the problems of these women, Ihg_
Revolution even did some of the personal reporting for which the
Hearst papers would become famous. Miss H. M. Shepard, a "gentle
lady," became a seamstress to see for herself the difficulty and
time-consuming nature of the job. She reported: "I found that on
no kind of sewing could I earn more than fifty cents for ten hours'
labor. I worked faithfully, saying to myself: '00 not lose a
minute; work as if you had starving children to feed; remember the

rent is to be paid, the coal is out, the babies are almost naked."'H8

 

H7Revo1ut1on, III (May 15. 1869). p. 269. 1V (Oct- 7:
1869), p. 219.

118Revolution, I (April 23, 1868), pp. 245—46.

l27

The Revolution did not offer sewing women any positive suggestions
for improving conditions in their craft. Instead, they advocated
that women should enter male professions: "Working women, throw
yOur needles to the winds; press yourselves into employments where
you can get better pay; dress yourselves in costumes, like daughters
of the regiment, and be conductors in our cars and railroads, drive
hacks. If your petticoats stand in the way of bread, virtue and
freedom, cut them off."n9

EjWhether professional woman or factory worker, single or
married, woman should be capable of supporting herself, The Revolution
said. According to Susan B. Anthony: "There is not the woman born
who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be
from the hand of father, husband or brother; for any one who does so
eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom

7120

she takes it." The paper predicted that when women had the chance

towork, men, too, would benefit:‘ "Men will have an easier time of

it when all women are self-supporting, and a pleasanter time when the
presiding genius of every household is.a strong, healthy, common-sense
philosopher. No complaining of backaches, toothaches, headaches, or

an empty-purse ache."]2]

 

1'9Revo1ut1on, I (Feb. 5, 1868), p. 65.

120Revolution, III (May 20, 1869), p. 306.

L ’r— «Mn

'Z'Revo1utionIWI (April 16, l868), p. 227.

128
PERSONAL AND PUBLIC HEALTH

The Revolution crusaded for measures designed to improve
health. Personal health advice was offered to women, because
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony both strongly believed
that cofitghpgtaFy styles of dress, lack of exercise and fresh air,
and confinement in urban areas all wer combining to create a very
weak generation of American women. As The Revolution was telling
the world that women were ready to assume responsibilities such as
voting and working outside the home, the paper also worked to en-
courage women to prepare themselves physically for the challenges
of the world.

Women were told that it was their obligation to be healthy:
"The acquiring of all the physical strength in her power is certainly
as much a woman's duty as a man's, and it is simply idiotic for
her to talk of coping with man, in even the lightest employment,
until she attends to this duty. Until she can walk a mile or so in
stormy weather as in fair, let her not ask for herself the lighter

"122 Unfortunately, however, it was considered

kinds of manual labor.
fashionable to be weak, as this excerpt from a story by Eliza Archard
shows: "It is their [American women's] religious conviction that the

crowning glory of womankind is physical degeneracy. Their chief

 

122Revolution, I (April 2, 1868), p. 194.

129

delight is to believe themselves born to cling to whatever is nearest
in a droopy, like the ivy-to-the-oak way, and be viney and twiney,
and whiney throughout."123

Woman's dress was a major consideration in discussions of
health. Corsets, hoops, and layer upon layer of heavy skirts were
part of a fashionable woman's costume. Critics found little that
was commendable in such an outfit. Readers were told about women

124 women were told that it was their

125

who had died from tight lacing,
Christian duty to stop wearing corsets, and Oliver Wendall Holmes
was quoted as saying that long skirts were unhealthy, in that they
forced women to drag the dust and grim of the street indoors with
them.126
Both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had worn
the Bloomer costume for a while, and both had suffered from the
ridicule of friends and strangers alike. After their own experience,
the two women were not quick to recommend unusual modes of dress to
others. Instead, they published articles enumerating the disadvant-

ages of fashionable dress, going so far as to say that such dress'

would reduce woman's effectiveness as a thinking human being: “A

 

123Revolution, I (Jan. 15, l868), p. 17.

124
l869), p. 2l.

125

Revolution, I (Feb. 27, l868), p. 125, IV (July l5,

Revolution, I (March 26, 1868), p. l8l.

 

126Revolution, II (July 30, 1868), p. 59.

130

woman whose lungs are choked by corsets, whose liver is congested,
whose stomach is taken possession of by dyspepsia, whose head throbs
with pain, or whose nerves have run away with her will and self-
possession and peace of mind, cannot comprehend or appreciate the
meaning of truth, justice, liberty and Woman's Suffrage, or impress
it upon others with anything like the clearness and force that she
could if her body could be an efficient aid, instead of a deplorable
clog."127

One of the few cases in which writers in The Revolution
stressed the nurturing, instinctive qualities of women was in dis-
cussing questions of public health. It was pointed out in such
instances that women were peculiarly suited for work involving the
welfare and health of the nation.

Women conducted campaigns againSt health hazards such as
liquor and tobacco. Local temperance organizations were especially
original in devising schemes to discourage saloon keepers and
patrons alike from engaging in liquor traffic. The Knitting Machine,
a group of temperance women in Clyde, Ohio, for example, would march
into a saloon, sit down at the tables, and each woman would begin

128

knitting. Another group of Ohio women apparently became more

militant. The Revolution reported: "The twenty-one women who emptied

 

127Revolution, V (March 3l, 1870), p. l95.

128Revo1ut1on, III (March 25, 1869), p. 124.

131

all the liquor in a bar room in Perryville, Ohio, have had their

129

trial and been acquitted." Young women in a town in Indiana were

reported to have pledged not to keep company with men who used liquor,

130

tobacco, or profane language. The paper applauded the announce-

ment that a woman had been appointed town liquor agent in Pittsfield,

Mass.]3]

Although tobacco did not pose as dramatic a health problem
as drinking did, awareness of the hazard of smoking was increasing.
The Revolution quoted a member of the French Academy of Medicine:
"Statistics Show that in exact proportion with the increased con-
sumption of tobacco is the increase of disease in the nervous

"132

centres . . . and certain cancerous affections. The paper was

encouraged by news of the formation of men's anti—smoking societies

133

like the one founded in Burlington, Iowa. That The Revolution

 

perceived tobacco as a hazard to the user as much as a nuisance to
the public is evident in this note: "The Boston Commonwealth says

no gentleman will smoke in the crowded streets of our city while the

 

129Revolution, III (March 4, 1868), p. l4l.

130Revo1ut1on, III (March 4, 1869), p. 137.

131Revolution, I (Feb. 27, l868), p. l25.

132Revoiution, I (March 19, 1868), p. 170.

133Revo1ut1on, I (March 26, 1868), p. 189.

132

promenade is covered with ladies. The time is coming when no mgfl_
will smoke anywhere, not out of respect to "ladies" or women but to

himse1f."'34

If women were unable to do anything to halt the use
of liquor and tobacco by men, The Revolution preached a separatist
philosophy: "The woman who fails to reform a man of the habit of
drinking while engaged to him, will have a mighty task to do so
after marriage. Think of this, young women. Better remain single
than marry a man who loves liquor or tobacco either."135
Concern over smoking was a result of the general recogni-

tion of the importance of good ventilation to health.136

113;
Revolution expressed concern over the impure air of the city and
often recommended that urban women remove their families to farms
or the suburbs.137
\%§ The Revolution touched briefly on a variety of other public
health problems. Concern about institutional environmental health
was evident in an article, "Our Jails and Prisons," that described
"narrow, unventilated cells, infested with rats, mice, and vermin,"

"filthy beds of straw," and "sour bread, tainted meat. and unsavory

 

134Revolution, III (March 4, l868), p. l4l.

 

135Revolution, I (Feb. 27, l868), p. l25.

136Revoiution, 1 (June 11, 1868), p. 354.

137Revo1ution, 11 (Aug. 6, 1868), p. 74.

133

soup."138

Awareness of environmental and food toxicology is demon-
strated in these two reports: "There is a fact about the rubber
toys and nipple sheath which I have become convinced of. . . .The
white lead used in its manufacture affects the bones of children

biting on It. or sucking food through it."139

"A scientific gentle-
man of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, whose wife used tea pretty freely,
and for the last few years had suffered much from a nervous affection,
recently made an analysis of her beverage and found that the color-
ing material was gypsum and Prussian Blue, and that the amount in a
pound of tea administered at once, would produce instant death."140
Infant mortality was a problem, particularly among working
women, who were likely to work long hours in unvented rooms, eat
high carbohydrate, low protein diets, and live in unsanitary surround-
ings. The Revolution offered this story as one possible solution to
the problem. A French manufacturer, realizing that the women working
in his plant lost 40 per cent of their babies at birth, compared to
an 18 per cent figure for women in the rest of the country, began
giving his pregnant workers six weeks' leave with pay. "This cut the

infant death rate by twenty-five to forty percent in three years."141

 

138Revoiution. 11 (July 23, 1868), p. 40.

13912evo1ution. III (May 6, 1869), p. 283.

 

'40Revo1ution. II (Sept. 10, 1868), p. 149.

141Revolution, 11 (Oct. 1, 1868), p. 207.

134

Food additives were coming into use as more and more foods
began to be mass produced. The Revolution was suspicious of the
value of additives and processed food, warning mothers, for example,
to check the list of artificial ingredients that went into chewing

um.]42

g Bleached flour was also disdained:

One of the evils of the day is in eating too much fine bread.
Unbolted flour possesses the entire qualities of the wheat,
such as the system absolutely needs. What is gained in color

is lost in quality. Dark flour is far more palatable and
sweet than the white. 3

The Revolution was concerned about the health of its readers,
and stories designated to educate people about staying healthy were

an important part of the paper.

 

142Revo1ut1on, I (April 9, 1868), p. 221.

143Revolution, I (March 5, 1868), p. 133.

CHAPTER IV
THE REVOLUTION: ITS DEMISE AND LEGACY

End of The Revolution

On New Year's Day, 1870, Susan B. Anthony wrote to a friend:
"The year opens splendidly. December brought the largest number of
subscriptions of any month since we began, and yesterday the largest
of any day. So the little "rebel Revolution' doesn't feel anything
but the happiest sort of a New Year."1 Even as she wrote such an
optimistic letter, however§MMiss Anthony was beginning to realize
that she might not be able to sustain the financial burden the paper
was placing on her.

From a pecuniary point of view things looked very dark for Ihg_
Revolution. Every newspaper, in its early days, swallows up
money like a bottomless well. The Revolution had started on
an expensive basis; its office rent was $1,300 per annum; it
was printed on the best of paper, which at that time was very
costly; typesetting commanded the highest priCes. Partly as

a matter of pride and partly for the interest of the paper,
Miss Anthony was not willing to reduce expenses. At the end
of the first year The Revolution had 2,000, and at the end of
the second year 3,000 bona fide, paying subscribers, but these
could not sustain it without plenty of advertising, and adver-
tisers never lavish money on a reform paper. . . . [Susan B.
Anthony's] letters to friends and relatives at this time,
appealing for funds to carry on the paper, are heart-breaking.
[An example:] "My paper must not, shall not, go down. I am

 

1Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony,
Vol. I (Indianapolis: The Hollenbeck Press, 1898), p. 356.

135

\.

. i

136

sure you believe in me, and in my honesty of purpose, and also
in the grand work which The Revolution seeks to do, and there-
fore you will not allow me to ask you in vain to come to the
rescue. Yesterday's mail brought forty-three subscribers from
Illinois and twenty from California. We only need time to win
financial success. I know you will save me from giving the
world a chance to say, 'There is a woman's rights failure; even
the best of women can't manage business.‘ If I could only die,
and thereby fail honorably, I would say 'amen,' but to live

and fai1--it would be too terrible to bear."2

,/The appearance of the Woman's Journal on the second anniversary of

the founding of The Revolution marked the beginning of the end for
the already struggling newspaper. The Woman's Journal was launched
with a $10,000 gift given to Lucy Stone and was edited by more
moderate suffragists such as Mrs. Stone, Henry Blackwell, and William
Lloyd Garrison.

[The Woman's Journal] drew around it as contributors and readers
the rapidly growing numbers of women emerging into the greater
social freedom and multiple activity of the '70's--c1ub women,
professionals, and writers. The Woman's Journal spoke for this
group, many of whom were not yet ready to espouse the cause of
woman suffrage, just as The Revolution spoke for and to the ex-
ploited woman worker or social outcast.

0f the two, there could be no question which would survive.
For almost two and a half years Miss Anthony had kept her paper
going, despite rising monumental debts, fighting every inch of
the way for advertisers, subscribers, and backers. But the field
was too small for more than one such paper. . . .3

 

In the early months of 1870, some women suggested that a
moderation of the tone of The Revolution might give the paper a better
chance to survive. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Isabella Beecher Hooker

generously offered their services to The Revolution, but under

 

2Ibid., p. 354.

3Eleanor Flexner, Centurygof Struggle (New York: Atheniun,
1974), pp. 152-53.

137

conditions that Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton could not agree to.
The two sisters proposed: "We will give our names as corresponding
editors for your paper for one year and agree to furnish at least
six articles apiece and also to secure an original article from some
friend every other week during the year. We agree to do this with-
out promised compensation, but on the condition that you will change
the name of the paper to The True Republic, or {Omething equally
satsifactory to us; and that you will pay us equally for this service
according to your ability, you yourself being sole judge of that."4
Mrs. Stanton's uncompromising reply showed that she and Miss Anthony
would rather give up the paper than change its tone or focus:
As for changing the name of The Revolution, I should consider it
a great mistake. We are thoroughly advertised under the present
title. There is no other like it, never Was, and never will be.
The establishing of a woman on her rightful throne is the greatest
of revolutions. It is no child's play. You and I know the con-
flict of the last twenty years; the ridicule, persecution,
denunciation, detraction, the unmixed bitterness of our cup for
the last two, when even friends have crucified us. . . . A
journal called "The Rose-bud" might answer for those who come
with kid gloves and perfumes to lay immortelle wreaths on the
monuments which in sweat and tears we have hewn and built; but
for us, and that great blacksmith of ours who forges such redhot
thunderbolts for Pharisegs, hypocrites, and sinners, there is no
name but The Revolution.
In addition to lacking money and support, the editor and
proprietor of The Revolution did not have time to devote to the paper.

Mrs. Stanton, needing money for her children's college education, had

 

4Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. I, p. 357.

51bid.

138

begun lecturing with.the Lyceum Bureau and was traveling throughout
the United Statesgé]Miss Anthony was involved in organizational
activities for the National Woman Suffrage Association at the same
time that she was soliciting much-needed donations and advertisements
and writing copy for the newspaper:

The strain upon Miss Anthony, who alone was carrying the whole

burden, was terrible beyond description. Never was there a

longer, harder, more persistent struggle against the malice

of enemies, the urgent advice of friends, against all hope,

than was made by this heroic woman. As the inevitable end

approached she wrote of it to Mrs. Stanton, who answered:

"Make any arrangements you can to roll that awful load off your

shoulders. . . . Leave me to my individual work, the quiet of

my home for the summer and the lyceum for the winter."5

Susan B. Anthony finally took her friend's advice, and on

May 26, 1870 The Revolution carried the farewell columns of the two
women. Neither woman admitted that financial problems were the
reason for their relinquishing control of the paper; each insisted
that she could better serve the suffrage cause by lecturing, agitat-
ing, and organizing. Mrs. Stanton, in an article entitled "Who
Shall Fill Our Places," wrote that The Revolution would continue to
agitate for the same reforms:

Born on a stormy sea, it [The Revolution] has bravely struggled

against wind and tide for nearly three years, to be brought by

the good ship Independent [the publishing venture that was buy-

ing The RevolutiOfi] into a safe habor at last. . . .

Our good friend Susan, writing from Chicago, says of the

transfer of The Revolution, "I feel a great, calm sadness like
that of a mother binding out a pet child she could not support."

 

 

Ibid., p. 361.

139

No! no! not so. It is rather like giving up the society
of a much loved daughter to new and brilliant prospects,

superior education, foreign travel, or a desirable matrimonial
alliance.7

And according to Susan B. Anthony: "In view of the active demand for
conventions, lecutres and discussions on Woman Suffrage, I have con-

cluded that so far as my own personal efforts are concerned, I can

be more useful on the platform than in a newspaper."8

The paper was transferred to a joint stock company, and
Laura Curtis Bullard, who had been foreign correspondent for the
paper, became editor-in-chief. Mrs. Stanton would later tell this

anecdote about the transfer:

There is something humorously pathetic in the death of The
Revolution-~that firstborn of Miss Anthony. Mrs. Laura Curtis
Bullard generously assumed the care of the troublesom child,
and, in order to make the adoption legal, gave the usual con-
sideration-~one dollar. The very night of the transfer Miss
Anthony went to Rachester with the dollar in her pocket, and
the little change left after purchasing her ticket. She
arrived safely with her debts, but nothing more--her pocket
had been picked! Oh, thief, could you but know the value of
faithful work you purloined!9

Susan B. Anthony did not stay in Rochester very long. She
decided a lecture tour with the Lyceum Bureau would help her repay

her debts, while allowing her to speak out on the suffrage question.

 

7The Revolution, v (May 26, 1870), 328.

81bid.

9Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (London:
T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 182.

140

By maintaining a rigorous lecture schedule and with the
support of her family and friends, Miss Anthony paid off the last
of the $10,000 by May 1, 1876--six years, to the month, after she
had relinquished control of The Revolution. By that time, the paper
had been dead for four years. Laura Curtis Bullard had edited it
for one year; in 1872, it was sold to J. N. Hallock, who merged it
with The Liberal Christian.

Both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw IE2.
Revolution as a major force in the post-war suffrage movement and
as a major episode in their own lives. Reminiscing about the toll
the paper took on her time and finances, Miss Anthony later wrote:

My financial recklessness has been much talked of. Let me

tell you in what this recklessness consists: When there was
eneed of greater outlay, I never thought of curtailing the
amount of work to lessen the amount of cash demanded, but
always doubled and quadrupled the efforts to raise the necessary
sum; rushing for contributions to everyone who had professed
love or interest for the cause. If it were 20,000 tracts for
Kansas, the thought never entered my head to stint the number--
only to tramp up and down Broadway for advertisements to pay
for them. If to meet expenses of The Revolution, it was not

to pinch clerks or printers, but to make a fOray upon some
moneykind. None but the Good Father can ever begin to know

the terrible struggle of those years. I am not complaining,
for mine is but the fate of almost every originator or pioneer
who ever has opened up a way. I have the joy of knowing that

I showed it to be possible to publish an out-and-out woman's
paper, and taught other women to enter in and reap where I had
sown. . . .

If you today should ask me to choose between the possession
of $25,000 and the immense work accomplished by my Revolution
during the time in which I sank that amount, I should choose
the work done--not the cash in hand. So, you see, I don't groan
or murmur--not a bit of it; but for the good name of humanity, I
would have liked 80 see the moneyed men and women rally around
the seed-sowers.1

 

10Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. I, pp. 362-63.

141

Legacy of The Revolution

 

,K/r The Revolution was important to the woman's rights move-
ment for two reasons. First, its publication marked the beginning
of a long line of suffragist newspapers. Second, it served as a
propaganda organ for the woman's rights ideology of Susan B. Anthony

03ME;O:ETi:abeth Cady Stanton--radical ideology not espoused by the
more conservative feminists who gradually took over the nineteenth
century woman's rights movement.

"From the advent of The Revolution can be dated a new era
in the woman suffrage movement. Its brilliant, aggressive columns
attract the comments of the press, and drew attention of the country
to the reform so ably advocated. Many other papers devoted to the

"11

discussion of woman's enfranchisement soon arose. Between 1868,

when The Revolution was first published, and 1920, when the Nineteenth
Amendment, granting woman suffrage, was ratified, the suffrage press

was a viable and active medium for suffragists throughout the United
W——\LM.M r ,m . _ ~ _ ‘

States. A researcher in the 1970s has found evidence of more than
sixty suffrage newspapers:

The suffrage press was an amalgam of journals with their own
distinct characteristics. These newspapers ranged from the

radical to the conservative, from The Revolution, which supported
legalized prostitution, abortion, and'easy divorce, to the

Woman's Journal, which deplored the "social evil," "infanticide,"
and the dissolution of the marriage bond. They ranged from the
nationally oriented Woman's National Weekly to the locally oriented

 

 

1Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda
Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. I (New York:
Fowler and Wells, 1881), p. 46.

142

Wisconsin Citizen. There were long-lived suffrage publications,
such as the Woman's Tribune, which ran for twenty-six years,

and short-lived'suffrage publications, such as the Agitator,
which ran for six months. They were as short as the four-page
Woman's Column and as long as the forty-two-page Everywoman.
Some, like the New Northwest, printed poems, recipes, and

others, like The Suffragist, published only information con-
cerned with the enfranchisement struggle. Suffrage newspapers
came from all parts of the country, from New York to Des Moines,
Portland to New Orleans, and they came in all the journalistic 12
forms, from sloppy weekly broadsheet to slick monthly magazine.

 

The suffrage press was important in carrying the woman's rights message
to women throughout the United States:

The need for enfranchisement news and propaganda was felt at all
levels of suffrage activity and met by all levels of the suffrage
press. The press also served other requirements of the feminist
movement. Those newspapers enunciated the goals of the movement
and suggested the ways in which those goals might be attained.

It provided information for the political socialization and edu-
cation of its readers. It trumpeted the accomplishments of
women, deeds that ranged from simple bravery to major education-
a1 achievements. Feminist journals helped bring the movement
together and keep it together. They made their readers laugh over
humorous short stories and cry over tragic tales of female in-
equality. They further made feminists aware of the arguments
used against them and the counterarguments that could be used

for them. In enunciating these theses, in performing these
functions, the woman suffrage press, therefore, made a valuable
contribution to the nation's women and to their struggle for
equality of status.13

The woman suffrage press has traditionally been overlooked

by journalism historians, although historians studying the suffrage

 

12Lynn Masel-Walters, "Their Rights and Nothing Less: The
Functions of the American Woman Suffrage Press, 1868-1920" (Paper
presented at the Fall, 1975, conference of Women Historians of the
Midwest, St. Paul, Minn.), n.p.

'3Ibid.

143

movement have used extant suffrage periodicals as primary research
sources. Recent interest in woman's history, however, had lead
scholars to investigate and analyze the suffrage press for its own
sake. It is hoped that publication of such research will provide
information on the suffrage press and its influence on the movement,
on the general public, and on other media.14

Because suffragists newspapers are part of the intellectual
history of the woman's movement, study of these publications can
enhance our knowledge of the ideology of feminism. In assessing the
content of The RevolutiOn, for example, one is impressed with the
radical nature of the woman's rights arguments contained therein.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were adamant in their
insistence that women should be denied none of the rights and
privileges men enjoyed. Suffrage was one of these rights and
privileges, but political autonomy for women was just one of the
goals of the two women. Thus discussions of the inequities suffered
by women in religion, education, and marriage formed an integral
part of The Revolution.

One can discern ideological similarities between the argu-

ments of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony and the rhetoric of women in

 

14Two developments in the study of the history of women in
journalism should be noted. Lynn Masel-Walters is writing a doctoral
dissertation for the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism on
the woman suffrage press. A book about women journalists, U From
the Footnotes, by Marion Marzolf of the University of Michigan ana
Ramona Rush of the University of Florida, Gainesville, is about to
be published by Hastings House.

144

g>77the new wave of feminism of the 1960s and 19705. When the modern
I women began raising these issues, however, they did not know that

they were part of an ideological heritage. For most of the radical
ideas of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony were not espoused by the
later suffragists. Radical ideas like those appearing in The Revolu-
tjgg_were too strong for many liberals who simply thought women
should have the bote, and during the 18705 and 1880s, new leaders,
in the National Woman Suffrage Association as well as in the conserva-
tive American Woman Suffrage Association, began to modify and moderate
-the tone of their pro-suffrage argumentsgl In was during this period,
for example, that the argument that women had a natural right to the
franchise was replaced with the expediency argument, which held that
women voters would help clean up politics.

At the time when the men of their group were taking new cogni-
zance of the ways in which men differed from each other, new
arguments for suffrage evolved, emphasizing the ways in which
women differed from men. If the hustice of the claim to politi-
cal equality could no longer suffice, then the women's task was
to show that expedience required it. The claim of women to

the vote as a natural right never disappeared from the suffragist
rationale, but the meaning of natural right changed in response
to the new realities, and new arguments enumerating the reforms
that women voters could effect took their places alongside the
natural right principle that had been the staple of the plea of
the suffragists in the early days of the movement. . . . Some
suffragists used the expediency argument because social reform
was their principal goal and suffrage the means. Other suffragists
used the expedience argument because the link of woman suffrage
to reform seemed to be the best way to secure support for their
principal goal: the vote.15

 

15Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrave Move-
ment (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1971), p. 39.

145

A major problem one faces in studying the history of the woman
suffrage movement is that many of the histories and biographies of
the early suffragists were written in the period from 1890 to 1920
when the movement was dominated by conservative women. Thus many of
the authors of these books emphasized the "womanly qualities" of
suffrage leaders, pointing out, for example, that Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott were good housekeepers,
or that Susan B. Anthony had been an excellent teacher, had attracted
suitors, and had been interested in wearing attractive clothing.
Study of The Revolution, however, enables one to recapture the radi-
cal woman's rights arguments raised during the Reconstruction period.
Gayle Graham Yates's What Women Want: The Ideas of the
Movement contains an example of the inaccuracy that can result from
accepting the attitudes of the later suffragists as representative
of the entire movement. Dr. Yates's book is not primarily concerned
with the suffragist movement; it is an intellectual history of the
feminist movement of the 19605 and 1970s. According to her, there
are three models, or paradigms, of woman's rights ideology: the
feminist (in which women strive to be equal to men), the woman's
liberationist (in which woman strives to achieve her rights by
separating herself, either physically or psychologically, from men),
and the androgynous (in which men and women strive together to con-
struct a new society in which men and women are equal to each other).
In showing the historical roots for the modern resurgence of the

woman's rights movement, Ms. Yates places the entire suffragist

146

movement in the feminist paradigm, insisting that a movement de-
signed simply to give women the vote, a right that men possessed,

was not a movement interested in any radical reconstruction of
society. Although this description applies to American Woman Suffrage
Association members such as Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell and to
later members and leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association, it seems to be an inadequate ideological model to en-

compass the woman's rights philosophy that appeared in The Revolution.

 

Ms. Yates describes the early woman's rights advocates:

The women who wrote, spoke, and acted for change in women's
role in American society from the colonial period to 1920 had
a masculine model or paradigm for the change they sought. The
women wanted to be like men. They wanted the rights and oppor-
tunities men had. They did not ask for a bold reconstruction
of society. Rather, they asked that they, the dispossessed,

be allowed to participate on an equal basis in already estab-
lished institutions and opportunities. They wanted to be equal
with men in what men had already demonstrated as valued modes
“of living. They accepted as good men's values of holding
property, obtaining education, participating in professional
life or factory work, and voting in a democratic political
system, and they wanted a share in these values. They defined
their oppression in relation to what men had and saw the male
controllers of society as their oppressors. 5

These beliefs were indeed part of the woman's rights propaganda con-
tained in The Revolution, but there was much more Susan B. Anthony
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not see the vote, equal opportunity,
reformed marriage laws, and coeducation as ends in themselves, that

is, of areas in which women should be equal to men. Rather, they

 

16Gayle Graham Yates, What Women Want: The Ideas of the
Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,71975), p. 33.

147

saw these reforms as a necessary first step women would have to take
to have the power to restructure society in a way that would accomo-
date women's needs. In dress reform, for example, women wanted the
freedom men had to walk, run, and play without being encumbered by
hoops and heavy skirts and without having tight stays restricting
their breathing. But The Revolution did not advocate that women
adopt men's clothes; the paper asked that a new, more comfortable
style of dress be designed for women.
Although Ms. Yates is probably oversimplifying the suffragist
movement's ideology, her assessment of the inadequacy of the feminist
mode (the mode that includes the expediency arguments of the later
suffragists) demonstrates the reason that contemporary feminists have
not turned to suffragist history for inspiration:
Although the equalitarian view did have the effect of planting
the seeds of revolution, of pointing toward radical change by
stating the problem of women's oppression and opposing it, it
was almost always limited by the unquestioned assumption that
the masculinist way of doing things was the right way. The
early feminists' achievements were piecemeal, though constructive.
It was a good thing for women to begin to become educated like
men, to become professionals, to gain the vote. But the equali-
tarian mode had within it an unspoken acceptance of the
masculinist framework; it was a masculine-equalitarian unit.
Herein lies its failure to be revolutionary. If women's goal
is to be like men, they tacitly accept the very premise they
claim to reject--that women are inferior to men. 7

That the feminist paradigm was rejected by Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton

can be seen in this description of a speech Mrs. Stanton made in 1892:

 

148

The responsibilities of life, Mrs. Stanton declared, rest
equally on men and women. It would be a mockery to talk of
sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life, for they

beat upon her from every point of the compass and with more
fatal results, for man has been educated to protect himself,

to resist, and to conquer. Who, she asked, dared take on him-
self the rights, the duties, or the responsibilities of another
human soul? . . . Mrs. Stanton was demanding for woman not the
right to manifest her equality but the right to become equa1.18

SuSan Hartmann has described the differences between the early and
later suffragists, making the distinction between those arguments
based on principle and those based on expediency:

The early feminist platform was based on abstract principles of
natural law, justice, and equality, stressing the identity of
(rather than the differences between) men and women as members
of the human race and demanding self-determination and equality
of rights and responsibilities.

Although a substantial number of these demands were won in
the seventy years following the Seneca Falls convention, they
were not achieved on the terms established by the first femin-
ists. Many changes were promoted by men and women unsympathetic
to the organized women's movement and to the universal principles
expressed in the [Seneca Falls] declaration. Those with the
power to effect the reforms were moved less by a commitment to
these general principles than by expediency, and women's
interests were subordinated to the interests of the larger
society. Finally, most of the advances rested on assumptions
which emphasized innate differences between men and women.19

ngSusan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not believe that men
and women had innate differences. Thus the woman's rights philosophy
of these two pioneers is more in keeping with the andrgynous ideal of

many modern feminists than it was with the egalitarian beliefs of

 

18Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, p. 41.

19Susan M. Hartmann, "The Paradox of Women's Progress 1820-1920"
(St. Charles, Mo.: Forum Press, 1974), p. 4.

149

many of their contemporaries. According to Hartmann: tRecapturing
the principles of 1848 sustained in the following years by only a
small minority of women activists, today's feminists seek liberation
from institutional and ideological barriers on the basis of justice
and of the equality and identity of men and women as human beings.“20
The Revolution was the propaganda organ for that "small
minority of women activists" whose ideas were too radical for their
contemporaries: "Susan B. Anthony had properly called her periodical
The Revolution, for she and her friends wanted to revolutionize the
American domestic system. Not only did they propose to get at the
roots of woman's oppressed condition, but they also had that narrow
dedication to the interests of one's own group, and that willingness
to sacrifice the interests of others, that distinguishes revolutionary

leaders."2]

 

201mm, p. 14.

21William O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of
Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), p. 352.

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Krichmar, Albert. The Women's Rights Movement in the United States
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Pillsbury, Parker. Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles. Concord,
N. H.: n.p., 1883.

Riegel, Robert E. American Feminists. Lawrence, Kansas: University
of Kansas Press, 1963.

Rose, Ishbel. Ladies of the Press. New York: Harper and Brothers,
1936.

Sinclair, Andres. The Better Half: The Emancipation of the
American Woman. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Spruill, Julia Cherry. Women's Life and Work in the Southern
Colonies. New York: N. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1972.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton. London: 7T. Fisher Unwin, 1898.

Anthony, Susan B., and Gage, Matilda Joslyn, eds. Histor
of Woman's Suffrage, Vol. I and II. New York: Fowler ana
NeTls, 1881.

Stanton, Theodore and Blatch, Harriot Stanton, eds. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton As Revealed in her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences.
2 vols. New York: Harper andPBrothers, 1922.

Taylor, Kathryn. Generations of Denial. New York: Times Change
Press, 1971.

Train, George F. My Life in Many States and Foreign Lands. New
York: 0. Appleton and Co., 1902.

Willis, Thornton. The Nine Lives of Citizen Train. New York:
Greenburg, 1948.

153
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New
York: W. W. Norton andTCo., 1967.
Yates, Gayle Graham. What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Monographs and Periodicals

Dorr, Rheta. "The Eternal Question." Collier's, Oct. 30, 1920.

Hartmann, Susan M. "The Paradox of Women's Progress, 1820 to 1920."
St. Charles, Mo.: Forum Press, 1974.

Lerner, Gerda. "Women's Rights and American Feminism." American
Scholar, XL (Spring, 1971), pp. 235-48.

Mather, Anne. "A History of Feminist Periodicals." Journalism
History, I (Autumn, 1974), pp. 82-85.

New York Dai1y_Tribune, Jan. 8, 1868.

 

New York Times, 1868 to 1906.

Nichols, John Wesley, ed. The People's Candidate [George Train].
New York: n.p., 1872.

The Revolution. Jan. 8, 1868 to May 26, 1870.

Riegel, Robert E. "Women's Clothes and Women's Rights." American
Quarterly, XV (Fall, 1963), pp. 390-401.

Rosenberg, Carroll Smith. "Beauty, the Beast and the Militant
Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in
Jacksonian America." American Quarterly, XXIII (October,
1971), pp. 562-84.

Rossi, Alice S. "A Feminist Friendship." M§,, January, 1974,
pp. 70-73+.

Somerlott, Robert. "Anne Royall: Common Scold." Ms, March, 1974,
pp. 14-16.

Stearns, Bertha. "Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers." American
Historical Review, XXXVII (July, 1932), pp. 678-99.

Train, George F. "The Great Epigram Campaign of Kansas." Leavenworth,
Kansas: Prescott and Hume, 1867.

154

"Women: An Issue.“ Journalism History, I (Winter, 1974).

Wyman, Lillie B. C. "Reminiscences of Two Abolitionists." hhyv
England Magazine. January, 1903, pp. 539-47.

Unpublished Materials

Masel-Walters, Lynn. "Their Rights and Nothing Less: The Functions
of the American Woman Suffrage Press, 1868 to 1920," pre-
sented at the Fall, 1975 conference of Women Historians of
the Midwest, St. Paul, Minn., 1975.

Women Historian of the Midwest. "Double Vision: Women in Minnesota
Education." St. Paul, Minn., 1975. (Film)

Yates, Dorothy Langdon. “Belles of Freedom: Three Women Antislavery
Editors." Unpublished M.A. thesis, Michigan State University,
1969.

APPENDIX

The woman suffrage press in general has not been the sub-
ject of methodical study, and The Revolution has fared only slightly
better than many of the less well-known suffragist periodicals.

Brief accounts of the newspaper are included in the many biographies
of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton available today.

The Revolution has served as a primary source for historians
studying the early days of the organized movement for woman suffrage
in the United States, but until now no major published work has con-
centrated on this periodical alone or as a representative of the
woman suffrage press.

Feminist historians are changing this situation; a history
of women journalists in the United States is scheduled for publication
‘this year. Ungrom the Footnotes, by Marion Marzolf of the University
of Michigan and Ramona Rush of the University of Florida, Gainesville,
will include a section on nineteenth and early twenties century
suffrage publications.

Lynn Masel-Walters is now working on a doctoral dissertation
at the University of Wisconsin. She is conducting a thematic content
assessment of twenty-two suffrage newspapers. Ms. Masel-Walters has
found evidence of more than sixty suffrage publications, including

newsletters of local and regional suffrage organizations. Her list

155

156

was not available to this writer. Following is a list of thirty-nine
suffrage journals, compiled from sources including National Union
List of Serials, History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, and A History
of American Magazines by Frank Luther Mott. Individuals interested
in compiling a more complete list would be encouraged to check with

state and local historical societies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ae is New Southern Citizen Woman Citizen
gitator N. Y. Suffrage Woman Patriot
American Suffragette Newsletter Woman Rebel
Ballot Box Pacific Empire Woman Voter
Equal Rights PiOneer Woman's Advocate
Everywoman Pro ress Woman's Campaign
Michigan Suffragjst Queen Bee Woman's Co1umn
National Citizen and e Revo ution WOman‘s Era
Ballot Box Sorosis Woman's Journal
National Suffrage ihe Suffragist WOman‘s National
Bulletin The Vote Weekly
New American Woman Votes for Women Woman s Standard
New Citizen Western Woman Voter WOman's Tribune
New Era Wisconsin Citizen Woodhull and Claflin's

 

 

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