N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , MARPRIL 2004
In 1825 Scottish-born 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
up 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
persuasion that the ignorance of women, by favoring their
subordination, 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 threatened
by a mob when it scheduled abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
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 who
attended, at least 20 were black, and Grace Douglass (wife 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, which 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 is 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
nominated to the business committee. Several women, including
Lucretia Mott, were sent as delegates to an international slavery
conference in London but the British refused to accept any of
them. They were allowed to attend as spectators only, which
outraged Elizabeth Cady Stanton, attending with her husband, a
U S. delegate (she had the word obey deleted from her wedding
vows earlier that year). Stanton and Mott soon became friends
and decided "to hold a convention and form a society to advance
the rights of women."
In the meantime Angelina Grimk6 published An Appeal
to the Women of the Nominally Free States in 1837. Grimkd said
in a lecture she and her sister Sarah organized, one of many
to large mixed audiences, "I believe it is a woman's right to have
a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be
governed, whether in Church or State: and that the present
arrangements of society, on these points, are a violation of
human rights." She added that a woman had as much right as
a man “to sit. . . in the Presidential Chair o f the United States."
(That same year Sarah Grimk6 published her Letters on
the Equality o f the Sexes, and the Condition o f Women, originally
written to Mary S. Parker, president of the Boston Female Anti-
Slavery Society in response to a Congregational ministers'
Pastoral Letter condemning the Grimk6 sisters' speeches: "Men
and women are created equal...All I ask our brethren is that they
take theii feet off our necks and permit us to stand on the ground
which God destined for us to occupy ")
Margaret Fuller, a writer and highly regarded intellectual,
published her seminal work Women in the 19th Century in 1845. ■
She insisted on woman's need "as a soul to live freely and
unimpeded" and called for an end to "even well-meant restrict
ions." "We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down,"
Fuller wrote. 'We would have every path laid open to Woman
as freely as to Man."
And in 1848, forty-four women sent a petition demanding
that the New York state legislature repeal its laws affecting
women. They argued that the Declaration of Independence
stated "that governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed. And as women have never consented
to, been represented in, or recognized by this government, it is
evident that in justice no allegiance can be claimed from them."
In the summer of 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention,
perhaps the most famous gathering of American women in the
19th century, was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Jane Hunt
and Mary Ann McClintock were the principal organizers and
were surprised that almost 300 people, mostly women, attended
One of them, Charlotte Woodward (later Pierce), said, "As we
reached different crossroads, we saw wagons coming from every
part of the country, and long before we reached Seneca Falls,
we were a procession."
A "Declaration of Sentiments" was drafted by Stanton at
the convention modeled after the Declaration of Independence.
It condemned women's disenfranchisement, their lack of a voice
in the laws they were compelled to obey, restrictions on their
education and employment opportunities, their subordination by
the church, the use of a moral double standard, and the theft of
married women's full property rights. The group then passed a
series of general resolutions that called for women's equal rights.
A proposal to secure the vote for women narrowly passed after
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arguments by Stanton and Frederick Douglass, but took more
than 70 years to be fulfilled; only one woman who signed the
resolution, Charlotte Woodward, lived to cast her ballot.
Two weeks after Seneca Falls another meeting in near
by Rochester called for women's enfranchisement, revision of
existing property laws and delegates pledged to help raise work
ing women's wages.
Abolitionist women held a women's rights conference in
Salem, Ohio in April 1850. Men were not allowed to speak or
vote at the two-day meeting (women had requested James Mott
preside at Seneca Falls) Men who attempted to voice opinions
were ruled out of order. Resolved to claim their rights as "human
beings," the women sent a petition to the Ohio Constitutional
Convention demanding suffrage and "all other rights extended
to men" in the new state constitution.
Abolitionist Lucy Stone, criticized for discussing general
women's issues in her lectures, helped organize yet another
national convention for women's rights in Worcester (Mass) in
October 1850. Women from nine states attended, including
Susan Brownell Anthony, Antoinette Louisa Brown (later
Blackwell), Sojourner Truth and Lecretia Mott. They drafted a
resolution demanding suffrage and equality, "without distinction
of sex or color."
Throughout the 1850s black women encouraged white
women and men with words and actions, in particular the
dauntless Harriet Tubman who continuously risked her life to
lead southern slaves to freedom in the north and Canada. "I had
crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming," she said
after escaping slavery in 1849. "I was free; but there was no one
to welcome me to the land of freedom." (William Still described
Tubman in his 1872 book about the Underground Railroad as "a
woman of no pretensions...(but) in point of courage, shrewdness
and disinterested exertions to rescue herfellowmen...she was
without her equal.") Sarah Parker Redmond lectured for the
American Anti-Slave Society in the United States and Europe.
Ann Wood, a fugitive slave, drove a wagonload of armed young
blacks out of Virginia on Christmas Eve 1855. When stopped
they threatened to keep shooting until they were all dead, and
were allowed to escape to Philadelphia. And of course Sojourner
Truth, who quieted male hecklers at an Ohio women's rights
convention in 1851 with her soon very famous "And Ain't I a
Woman” speech: "I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered
into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?...
I have borne 13 chilern, and seen 'em most all sold off to slavery,
and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus
heard me! And ain't I a woman?"
PERPETUAL POLITICS
BY BUNNY DOAR
Thinking about politics?
The North Coast Women’s Political Caucus, of which
I am a long time member, thinks about politics a//the time.
Who is going to be the next county commissioner? Are
there any openings on the boards and commissions of Clatsop
County, or the cities of Astoria, Seaside, Warrenton, Knappa,
Cannon Beach?
The purpose of the local caucus, as of caucuses
throughout the United States, is to involve women in politics,
from the local school board to the White House
The caucus does not care whether they are Repub
licans, Democrats or Independents...or if they are Libertarians,
followers of Ross Perot or members of a Green Party.
They are not concerned with age, nationality, race,
ethnic background or marital status — except to try to reach
every segment of the population. As long as they are feminist
women, the caucus wants to recruit them, train them, support
and elect them.
Feminist women? Yes Meaning those who believe
in equality for women — economic, social, political, and in
women's right to be heard. As a member of the state steering
committee of the Oregon Women's Political Caucus, I can point
out some touchstones for women (and some men) supported by
the group. They must be pro-choice, without reservations. They
must believe in the worth of an Equal Rights Amendment And
they must support measures to provide child care, even if it
means government subsidies are required
The North Coast Caucus meeis on the third Wednes
day of each month at 5:30pm at the Flag Room of the Astor
Library Guests are always welcome.
Bunny Doar wrote this article for the Times Eagle in the
summer of 1997 She died in 1998 after a long life of newspaper-
ing and political organizing
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Women served as nurses, spies and a few posed as
men to enlist as regular soldiers on both sides in the Civil War
Foreshadowing the World Wars of the next century, women
worked in factories to supply the war effort for both the Union
and Confederacy. Women also raised money for both armies,
organized relief work for wounded and prisoners of war, and
helped established nursing as a profession
When the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only
in the Confederacy and not in slaveholding Union states during
the Civil War, Ernestine Rose, Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, and others, formed the National Woman's Loyal
League. They sent bundles of petitions calling for an end to
slavery to abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachu
setts, who introduced the 13th Amendment By August 1864
they collected 400,000 signatures.
After the war northern women went south as teachers for
freed black slaves; later southern women taught in newly estab
lished public schools. By the beginning of the 20th century the
majority of the nation's teachers were women. At the end of the
Civil War women were also firmly entrenched in office work,
government service and retail trade.
The Civil War, as it did every facet of American society,
altered the structure and goals of the feminist movement which
began to concentrate primarily on women's suffrage as the
process through which every other form of equality would be
certified.
In May 1866 men and women from the American Anti-
Slavery Society and women's rights groups joined forces to
form the American Equal Rights Association in New York With
Lucretia Mott as president and Susan B. Anthony as correspond
ing secretary, the group began a campaign for suffrage for all
African-Americans and all women. Thousands of women signed
a petition drafted by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that
demanded Congress initiate a constitutional amendment to
"prohibit the several States from disenfranchising any of their
citizens on the grounds of sex." (Congress passed the 14th
Amendment in 1866, and it was ratified in 1868. It stated that
all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens
and guaranteed due process and equal protection under the
laws. However another section referred to voting rights in terms
of male citizens — the first time this qualification appeared in the
Constitution.) Stanton ran for Congress that year though she was
not allowed to vote, and although she received only 24 votes of
12,000 cast, she proved women had the right to campaign for
public office.
Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman
Suffrage Association (NWSA) to push for a constitutional
amendment guaranteeing women the vote in 1869. Later that
year Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and others established a
counter group, the American Woman Suffrage Association
(AWSA). The two groups were rivals for 20 years. The NWSA
was generally the more radical organization, advocating not just
the vote but also reforms in women's wages, working conditions,
and property and divorce laws. The AWSA focused on women's
suffrage, working at the state rather than federal level.
In December 1869 Wyoming territory granted women's
suffrage in its new constitution. The legislature also guaranteed
married women rights to their own property and approved equal
pay for male and female teachers. The following year Utah
territory gave the vote to women, took it away in 1887 and
restored it in 1896. Colorado's women got the vote in 1893 after
prominent local socialites joined the state's suffrage movement.
By 1896, four contiguous states — Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado
and Utah — had full suffrage, but no other state would for 14
more years.
(In 1890 Congress attempted to deny Wyoming's
application for statehood because it allowed women to vote;
but in a close vote admitted it as the only state in which women
could vote in a federal election.)
Women pushed for their rights to vote in elections all
over the country in the late 19th century, and Victoria Woodhull
became the first woman to campaign for the Presidency in 1872,
forming her own Equal Rights Party. Susan B. Anthony and 16
other women were arrested in Rochester, New York that year
when they tried to vote in the Presidential elections Anthony
declared. "It is we, the people, not we, the white male citizens,
nor we the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed
this Union. We formed it not to give the blessings o f liberty but
to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half o f our
posterity, but to the whole people — women as well as men
It is downright mockery to talk to women o f their enjoyment of
the blessings o f liberty while they are denied the only means of
securing them provided by the democratic-republican govern
ment — the b a llo t"
Anthony and Stanton managed to get Congress to vote
on a constitutional suffrage amendment in 1878 Called the
‘Anthony Amendment’, it was reintroduced every year for the
next 41years until it finally became the 19th Amendment. It
states simply:
"The right o f citizens of the United States to vote shall
not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on
account o f sex."
The Senate waited nine years to debate and vote on the
Anthony Amendment, with 16 for, 34 against, and 26 absent in
1887. The Senate did nothing more until March 1914, when for
the first time in 27 years the amendment was brought out of
committee, to vote on it again, with 35 for and 34 against That
same year activist teacher Harriet Rodman formed the Feminist
Alliance which demanded "the removal of all social, political and
other discriminations which are based on sex, and the ward of all
rights and duties in all fields on the basis of individual capacity
alone."
After President Woodrow Wilson spoke out in favor of
the Stanton Amendment in January 1918, the House passed
the measure for the first time, 274 for, 136 against — just the
two-thirds required majority; despite a direct plea by Wilson,
the Senate defeated it by two votes
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