The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 1997, Page 13, Image 13

PAGE 13
MS. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
"Women must get into the political game and stay in it. "
-ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Despite the fact that the binary political party system
seems determined to stick with two (vtfiite) males for the nation's
highest office, a woman elected President of the United States
in the year 2000 would be a proper beginning to the new millen­
nium.
American women have had the vote for 77 years, an
almost equal amount of time women spent fighting to attain it.
For most of those years women rather passively voted the way
their husbands or boyfriends voted. Women voted for the first
time in equal numbers as men in 1980, and in 1982 more
women voted than men; though women voted differently than
men that year and succeeding years, they did not necessarily
vote for women.
A significant change was made in 1992 vtfien women
campaigned in unprecedented numbers for every conceivable
office in the country, local, state and federal — including at least
one woman for President. Women entered politics backed by
other women, finally using their majority power to elect women
to public office.
Women and supportive men of the two major political
parties could successfully put forward prominent and well quali­
fied women as candidates for the Presidency of each party in
2000 if they start working at it now.
It is not an impossible idea. It is a much better idea than
the knee-jerk assumptions that only two (white) males — speci­
fically Al Gore and Jack Kemp at this point of discussion, wth
herd noises being made by a group of Bush-era has-beens —
are the only reasonable choices, a form of gender apartheid by a
status quo unwilling to see beyond its owi shriveled genitals.
There is certainly precedence. Liberals and leftists have
periodically fronted women for President, more often as Veep in
third parties, and once in the Democratic Party with Geraldine
Ferraro in 1980.
Women have contributed hugely to American history,
but as it is with blacks and others who have helped build this
nation, their contributions have been ignored and under valued.
Even before Europeans settled the Americas, American
women were powerful forces in their separate communities and
tribal councils. Iroquois women owned the land and controlled
the economy by supervising the distribution of food. The Chero­
kee Women's Council helped select male leaders, declared war
and determined the fate of captives. In 1540 Spanish explorer
Hernando de Soto was welcomed in present day Georgia by a
woman chieftain who gave him a string of pearls.
Perhaps the beginning of the present day women's
movement was in 1640 when Ann Hibbens of Boston insisted
she had the right to complain about male carpenters she had
hired. Church elders attacked her for thinking she could handle
such affairs better than her husband, "which is a plain breach of
the rule of Christ." She was excommunicated, and was hanged
for witchcraft 16 years later.
Women agitated for equality long before the American
Revolution. A group of women complained in a letter to the New
York Journal in 1733: 'We are housekeepers, pay our taxes,
carry on trade, and most of us are she merchants, and as we in
some measure contribute to the support of government, we
ought to be entitled to some of the sweets of it."
As the result of a successful case by a Virginia slave in
1655 that she was a free woman because her father was w4iite,
southern colonies (including Virginia) declared that all newborn
African Americans were slaves regardless of the parents' status.
(A century later another woman won her freedom in Massachu­
setts after arguing that she was illegally enslaved because her
mother was wrfiite which meant she was bom free.)
In 1701 six men and six women were selected for an
Mbany N.Y. jury, vtfiich was an exception. During much of
American history women were kept off juries; not until 1975 did
he U.S. Supreme Court rule that woman's automatic exemption
rom jury duty is unconstitutional.
Many other instances of women defying religious and
oyalist male authority occurred before the Revolution. Hopes
were high among many women that the Revolution would be
ruly revolutionary and allow them equal status. But "Liberty for
Ml" was selective and left out women and slaves of both sexes
and as it turned out, working class people as well).
"In the new Code of Laws wrfiich I suppose it wall be
lecessary for you to make I desire you would remember the
HENRIK DRESCHER
Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your
ancestors," Abigail Adams wrote in a 1776 letter to her husband
John, a delegate to the rebel Congress in Philadelphia. "Do not
put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Re­
member all Men would be tyrants if they could If particular care
and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to
foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any
laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."
(She scolded her husband for not taking her advice in a
letter two months later: "I cannot say that I think you very gener­
ous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good
will to Men...you insist upon retaining an absolute power over
Wives. But you must remember that Arbitrary power is like most
other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken ")
During the Revolution women served on battle lines,
manned cannon (such as the famous "Molly Pitcher" who took
over a cannon when her husband was shot), nursed wounded
and cooked for the militias and regular troops. City women
raised money for food and clothes for Washington’s ragtag
army. In the meantime frontier women fought Indians unleashed
on western settlements by the British
In 1777 several Daughters of Liberty stripped a man
w4io criticized the Revolution, covered him with molasses and
stuck on dozens of flower petals. Philadelphia women in 1780
called for action in a broadside titled The Sentiments of Ameri­
can Women. They described themselves as "Bom for liberty,
disdaining to bear the irons of a tyrannic government."
In 1787 the new United States Constitution left the
determination of who was eligible to vote to the states, but did
not specifically bar women from holding federal office. States
rights meant then as now limited participation or none by those
outside the white male status quo. New Jersey's state constitu­
tion gave the vote to all property owners worth a certain amount,
vtfiich left wives as well as unmarried women ineligible; however
the state's election law was briefly revised in 1790 and referred
to voters as "he or she." New York specifically denied voting
rights to women in its constitution in 1777, and other states
quickly followed suit.
Thomas Jefferson, principle author of the Declaration of
Independence which the month of July is annually obliged to
celebrate, said as President in response to a suggestion in 1807
by Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, 'The appointment
of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not
prepared, nor ami."
"Is the needle sufficient?" Judith Sargent Murray wrote
in her essay "On the Equality of the Sexes" which appeared in
Massachusetts Magazine in 1790 Writing under the name
"Constantia", she argued that women's and men's mental
abilities were equal and proposed full education for women
"Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years is, is
more sage than that of a female's of the same age? I believe the
reverse is generally observed to be true. But from that period,
what partiality! how is the one exalted and the other depressed,
by the contrary modes of education which are adopted! . Grant
that their minds are by nature equal, yet who shall wonder at the
apparent superiority"
The 19th century began wth women voting in substan­
tial numbers in the 1800 Presidential election, but in 1807
New Jersey changed its election law once more by inserting
the words "w4iite" and "male" into its voting requirements, and
women were not permitted to hold office in any of the states.
In a manner similar to the civil rights movement of the
1960s producing w4iite anti-Vietnam War activists, the women's
rights movement of the 19th century converged from the pre-
Civil War abolitionist movement Men initially controlled abolit­
ionist groups but frustrated women broke off and formed their
owi abolitionist societies wrfiich generally included black as well
as w4iite women.
In 1825 Scottish-bom Frances (Fanny) Wright attempted
to abolish slavery with a plan for allowing slaves to work on
public land and buy their freedom with the profits. Her attempt at
setting up a model plantation failed but four years later she set a
"Hall of Science" in a New York City church and lectured on
women's rights. "Until women assume the place in society which
good sense and good feeling alike assign to them,"she declared,
"human improvement must advance but feebly. It is in vain that
we would circumscribe the power of one-half of our race and
that by far the most important and influential."
(Fanny Wright wrote in 1829, 'There is a vulgar persua­
sion that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordina­
tion, insures their utility. (It's) the same argument employed by
the ruling few against the subject many: by the rich against the
poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the
people in all countries ")
The newly formed American Anti-Slavery Society
refused to admit woman members in 1833, but 20 white and
black women formed the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. In
their constitution they underlined that slavery and prejudice
violated the laws of God and the Declaration of Independence.
Charter members included Lucretia Coffin Mott, Esther Moore,
Rebecca Buffum, Grace Bustill Douglass, and Charlotte Forten
and her three daughters, Margaretta, Sarah Louise and Harriet.
The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was threaten­
ed by a mob when it scheduled abolitionist William Lloyd Gam-
son as speaker in 1835. When the mayor ordered the women to
leave, Maria Weston Chapman replied,"If this is the last bulwark
of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.” The women,
white and black, joined hands and walked through the mob to
Chapman's home.
The first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women
was held in New York in May 1837 Of the 200 women v4io
attended, at least 20 were black, and Grace Douglass (wfe of
escaped slave Frederick Douglass) was elected vice president.
The women declared that it was time to move out of their
"circumscribed limits" and to use their "pens, purses and
influence to end slavery ."
The second convention of the women's antislavery
group held in Philadelphia the following year was met by an
angry rock throwing mob, vtfiich burned down the hall they met
in. Lucretia Mott, a convention leader that year, was threatened.
But the next day the women declared "the prejudice against
color the very spirit of slavery" and urged all abolitionists to "sit
with African Americans in their places of worship, walk with them
on the street, and invite them into their homes "
The American Anti-Slavery Society finally gave women
voting rights in 1839, and the next year Abigail Foster was
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