The Rights of Women in the Civil War Era (1849-1877)
A Woman's Legal Rights
In nineteenth century America, a woman's marital status was the primary determinant of her legal standing. A married woman was not recognized as having legal rights and obligations distinct from those of her husband in most respects. One of the few legal advantages of marriage for a woman was that her husband was obligated to support her and be responsible for her debts.
In the 19th century, after a woman married:
• She could not control property that was hers before the marriage.
• She could not keep or control her own wages.
• She could not acquire property while married.
• She could not transfer or sell property.
• She could not bring any lawsuit.
• She could not make a contract.
American law was based upon English common law, and the doctrine of coverture stated that a woman's legal rights were incorporated into those of her husband when she married. Under the law of coverture, the ownership of a woman's property passed to her husband the moment she said, "I do."
Technically, a husband could do anything he wished with his wife's material possessions. He could sell them, give them away or simply destroy them, while a wife was forbidden to convey (sell, give, or will) her own property. How strictly this was adhered to depended upon the couple. Each was different and, and decision-making was shared to varying degrees.
To me, the sun in the heavens at noonday is not more visible than is the right of women, equally with man, to participate in all that concerns human welfare...First Women's Rights Convention
~Frederick Douglass, 1866
The seed for the first Women's Rights Convention was planted in 1840, when social reformers and abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, England. Stanton was the young bride of antislavery agent Henry Stanton, and Mott was a Quaker preacher and a veteran of reform movements.
The two women became allies when the male delegates attending the convention voted that women should be denied participation in the proceedings because of their gender. They talked then of calling a convention in the United States to address the condition of women. Eight years later, it came about as a spontaneous event.
After Quaker service on Sunday July 9, 1848, a social visit brought Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott together again. Mott was visiting her sister Martha Coffin Wright in Auburn, New York, and Stanton was then living in nearby Seneca Falls. Stanton, Mott and Wright joined Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt for tea at the Hunt home in nearby Waterloo. All except Stanton were Quakers, a sect that afforded women some measure of equality, and all five were well acquainted with the anti-slavery and temperance movements.
Fresh in their minds was the April passage of the long-deliberated New York Married Woman's Property Rights Act, a significant but far from comprehensive piece of legislation. The time had come, Stanton argued, for women's wrongs to be laid before the public, and women themselves must shoulder the responsibility. Before the afternoon was out, the women decided on a call for a convention "to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman."
To Stanton fell the task of drawing up the Declaration of Sentiments that would define the meeting. Using the Declaration of Independence as her guide, Stanton submitted that "all men and women had been created equal" and went on to list eighteen "injuries and usurpations" - the same number of charges leveled against the King of England - "on the part of man toward woman."
The convention took place on July 19 and 20 at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, and was publicized only by a small, unsigned notice placed in the Seneca County Courier. A crowd of about three hundred people, including forty men, came from five miles round. No woman felt capable of presiding; the task was undertaken by Lucretia's husband, James Mott. All of the resolutions were passed unanimously except for women's suffrage (the right to vote).
The eloquent Frederick Douglass, a former slave and now editor of the Rochester North Star, however, swayed the gathering into agreeing to the resolution. At the closing session, Lucretia Mott won approval of a final resolve "for the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce." One hundred women and men signed the Seneca Falls Declaration - although subsequent criticism caused some of them to remove their names.
The proceedings in Seneca Falls, followed a few days later by a meeting in Rochester, brought forth a torrent of sarcasm and ridicule from the press and pulpit. Noted Frederick Douglass in the North Star:
A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of woman."Although somewhat discomforted by the widespread misrepresentation, Elizabeth Cady Stanton understood the value of attention in the press. "Just what I wanted," Stanton exclaimed when she saw that James Gordon Bennett, motivated by derision, printed the entire Declaration of Sentiments in the New York Herald.
Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken.Stanton, thirty-two years old at the time of the Seneca Falls Convention, went gray for the cause. In 1851 she met temperance worker Susan B. Anthony, and soon the two would be joined in the long struggle to secure the vote for women. When national victory came in 1920, seventy-two years after the first organized demand in 1848, only one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration - Charlotte Woodward, a young worker in a glove factory - had lived long enough to cast her ballot.
Timeline of Significant Events in the Women's Movement:
• 1850: The first National Women's Rights Convention was held at Worcester, Massachusetts, attracting more than 1,000 participants. Paulina Wright Davis, Abby Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth attended.
• 1851: The second National Women's Rights Convention was held again in Worcester, Massachusetts. Participants included Horace Mann, New York Tribune columnist Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.
• 1853: Women delegates Antoinette Brown and Susan B. Anthony were not allowed to speak at The World's Temperance Convention held in New York City.
• 1861-1865: With the coming of the Civil War, the women's movement came to a halt. While women put their energies toward the war effort, however, they gained important organizational and occupational skills they would later use in the postbellum women's movement.
• 1866: The 14th Amendment was passed by Congress (ratified by the states in 1868), the first time "citizens" and "voters" are defined as "male" in the Constitution.
• 1866: The American Equal Rights Association was founded, the first organization in the US to advocate women's suffrage.
• 1868: The National Labor Union supported equal pay for equal work.
• 1868: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony began publishing The Revolution, an important women's movement periodical.
• 1870: For the first time in the history of jurisprudence, women served on juries in the Wyoming Territory.
• 1870: Iowa was the first state to admit a woman to the bar: Arabella Mansfield.
• 1870: The 15th Amendment received final ratification. By its text, women were not specifically excluded from the vote. During the next two years, approximately 150 women attempted to vote in almost a dozen different jurisdictions from Delaware to California.
• 1872: Through the efforts of lawyer Belva Lockwood, Congress passed a law to give women federal employees equal pay for equal work.
• 1872: Charlotte Ray, Howard University law school graduate, became the first African American woman admitted to the US bar.
• 1873 In Bradwell v. Illinois, the Supreme Court affirmed that states could restrict women from the practice of any profession to uphold the law of the Creator.
• 1873: Congress passed the Comstock Law, defining contraceptive information as "obscene material."
• 1877: Helen Magill is the first woman to receive a Ph.D. at a US school, a doctorate in Greek from Boston University.
SOURCES
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Seneca Falls Convention
The First Women's Rights Convention
