Womans Suffrage - Essay Example

1 Woman’s Suffrage The American feminist movement, if reduced to the bare essentialswas comprised of two major branches, one specifically geared to upgrade the woman’s domestic role, the other no less daunting was to guarantee the woman’s role and voice in the public sphere. In America both groups originated in the ideals of American democracy and Protestant individualism. But these ideals when applied to women were everywhere met with contradictory economic and social institutions which subjected women to traditional male authority or questioned their capacity for independence and initiative. “With the flood of post-civil war suffragist rhetoric came an equally full and passionate cry from the anti-suffragists, or antis as the suffragists called them. Threatened by the suffragists new conception of modern government”(Oates 1991) Religion profoundly helped to legitimize woman’s quest for equality. Of the five women who planned the Seneca Falls convention in the summer of 1848, four were Quakers. Historian Margaret Bacon has asked why the tiny Religious Society of Friends contributed such a disproportionate number of leaders to the feminist cause. It turns out that Quakerism was a veritable seedbed for the new feminism. As early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Quaker women had served as traveling ministers, on occasion leaving behind husbands and children, so strongly did they feel called to the Lord’s work. Well before the Revolution the American Friends had also established a tradition of separate women’s business meetings of the monthly meeting. In addition, Quaker women who felt moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in meetings were expected to do so. 2 From a broad perspective, one might be interest in knowing why religion was so closely related to the activities of the early feminists—visible in both the religious affiliations of the early leaders and the religious tenor of their work. The women met in churches; they opened their meeting with prayer; they received support from certain members of the clergy and from larger bodies of church people. While the early feminists were basking in their religious beliefs and strengthening themselves as time and towns passed, the anti-suffragists did not rely on one vague, all-encompassing rationale in their protest. Rather, they appealed to society’s already solid conceptions of women, men and the relationship between the two sexes. The “antis” asserted that woman suffrage would violate the cherished cult of domesticity dominant in both Europe and America during this period. It would also give power to the undesirable portions of society, a complaint stemming from the bourgeois tone of the movement. Besides simply existing beyond the scope of womanly intelligence, “antis” asserted suffrage would sever the chivalric ties between men and women, as well as go against the word of God, as written in the Bible. As if they had seen it coming the new feminists had long since anchored and aligned themselves with the church and met much of this convoluted reasoning head on. The one outlet for independent thought and action which early nineteenth century women had open to them was religious expression. While St. Paul had said tat the wives should be subject to their husbands, it was also written in the Book of Galatians that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ”(Holy Bible) Another strong theme in the anti-suffragist movement had to do with a traditional, 3 biblical argument. According to anti-suffragists, women’s suffrage would not only wreak havoc on woman’s domestic sphere, but it would go against god’s will as well. “Those who seek to protect the older order of things as they relate to woman reverently appeal to the division of Divine Purpose”(Crocker), herein linking the domestic sphere with the ostensibly anti-suffragist implications of Genesis. Reverting to the old Puritan saying, “Our ribs were not ordained to be our rulers, bone of one bone and flesh of one flesh”, implying that only the husband need and should vote”( Oates) Francis Parkman fully understood this side of the anti-suffragist argument and fully exploited it. “Progress, to be genuine, must be in accordance with natural law,”(Parkman). Playing on the double meaning of “natural law”, that is the Biblical connotation as well as the Lockean idea of “natural right”, Parkman thereby suggested that woman’s suffrage went against both God’s plan and Mankind’s. Leading suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt complained of this kind of militant male “anti” by calling the group “modern Joshuas who command the sun to stand still and believe that it will obey(Catt)”. Nancy Cott discovered a preoccupation with religious matter in the letters and diaries of one hundred women who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. She quotes the English traveler Harriet Martineau who had observed that women “pursue religion as an occupation” because they were constrained from exercising their full range of moral, intellectual, and physical powers in other ways. Religious activity thus seems to have served a function parallel to an occupation for men: it helped women to define their identity at the same time that it helped them to overcome isolation and form bonds with others in the community 4 Religion in nineteenth century America offered women a solution to the conflict in their daily lives between having heavy responsibility and little power. The religious revivals of the era helped to bridge the conflict between independence and submission by emphasizing the importance of women’s self-reflection and self-improvement and their influences over their families and the life of the community around the,. Transcendentalism, a radical movement among New England Congregationalists and Unitarians called for just this sort of inner reflection and social reform. But the most important and lasting legacy of women’s religious activity, as well as of Transcendentalism, was a reorientation of popular culture which began to give a larger place to the values and influence of women. Women’s intuition and emotional insight were especially valued by the new religious leaders of the era. No longer were people expected to prostrate themselves before an angry God. They valued instead the capacity to understand the universe and the creator. In “Women of the Nineteenth Century (1843), Margaret Fuller links women’s strength to their inner strength of truth and right: “Women who speak in public, if they have a motal power…, that is, if they speak for conscience’ sake ,..invariably subdue the prejudices of their hearers…”At the same time each sex is the better if it shares the strengths of the other: “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman”.(Fuller). As Goethe said, “The excellent woman is she, who, if the husband dies, can be a father to the children”. Thus Quakerism, the new Evangelism, and Transcendentalism equipped women in the early nineteenth century for challenging the existing social order. Women from these religious traditions especially would question their confined and subordinate roles with a confidence and fervor born of inner conviction. 5 Why should women have been so responsive to this religious ferment? Whitney Cross shows in the “Burned Over District, that the great social movements which swept across upstate New York prior to the civil war (the anti-Masonic movement, temperance, Mormonism, suffrage, and the utopian Oneida Community) found a fertile field among the Erie Canal. The growing towns which bordered the canal had experienced rapid social change, in-migration, and consequent ferment in their community life. The women who responded to the evangelists, were especially likely to be the wives of entrepreneurs, not the poorest of the community, but members of families who had some leisure. The religious tone of the anti-suffragist resistance thus pervaded both sides of the movement. However. “antis” deemed woman’s separation from politics as a moral positive, not a social negative. Almira Seymour, anti-suffragist pamphleteer. Claimed woman’s enclosure in the home was created in recognition of the essential divinity of her nature”( Seymour). Anti suffragist rhetoric often likened the idea of the housewife to the priestly service for a temple. Senator Peter Frelinghuyson of New Jersey agreed when he said, “Women have a higher and holier function than to engage in the turmoil of public life” (Frelinghuyson) This moral specialization of women succeeded in furthering their separation from men in public life. The “Restorer of lost Eden” had no business voting or participating in city government”(Seymour). Often using Biblical imagety, antis- suffragists pleaded to the public and Congress as God’s children attempting to save America from the evil of woman’s suffrage.”Let us labor earnestly, preached one ‘anti’, “to save women from the barren perturbations of American politics…Let us pray for deliverance from female suffrage”(Parkman) Works Cited Catt, Carrie, Chapman, presidential address delivered to the 6th convention of the international suffrage alliance at Stockholm ( London International Wimans Suffrage Alliance, 1911) p.1 Crocker, George, C. Argument at the hearing before the committee on woman suffrage (Washington: 1884,n.p.)p7. Cross, Whitney Burned out District Holy Bible, King James Version Kraditor, Aileen, The ideas of woman suffrage Movement 1890-1920 (Garden City, New York: Double day and Co., Inc., 1971) p 13 Oats, Stephen, B., Portrait of America 5th Edition vol. 2 (Boston Houghton Mifflin Co. 1991) p 138 – 139 Parkman, Francis, “Some of the Reason Against Woman Suffrage, printed at the request of an association of women (n.p., nd.) ps. p 10 Seymour, Almira, Home the Basis of the State” ( Boston: A. Williams, 1869) p 13 Read More