Men in the American Women’s Rights Movement, 1830–1890 2020026732, 2020026733, 9780367343781, 9780367630096, 9780429325380, 9781000226737, 9781000226751, 9781000226744

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Abbreviations used in notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
“Feebler voices?”
A women’s movement?
Intersections
Notes
Chapter 1 William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips: The “man question”
The “father” and the “mother” of abolitionism
Abolitionist friendships
The “woman question”
Abolitionist marriages
The London convention
Notes
Chapter 2 Frederick Douglass and James Mott: Women’s rights partners
From abolitionism to women’s rights: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color”
Marriage: Divisions of labor
“Manly, not mannish”
The Seneca Falls and Rochester conventions: Women’s rights with and without men
Women’s rights challenges
Notes
Chapter 3 Stephen S. Foster and Henry B. Blackwell: Women’s rights as men’s rights
Reform as family business
The test of courtship
Marriage, divorce, and free love
“The comparison of opinions”
“I am the son of a woman, and the brother of a woman”
The plurality of “woman’s rights marriages”
Notes
Chapter 4 Robert Purvis and Henry Ward Beecher: Men v. women’s rights
Families of power
“Woman’s rights” v. “man’s rights”
The Beecher-Tilton scandal: Women’s victimization in the hands of men
Divergent woman’s rights masculinities
Notes
Chapter 5 Frederick Douglass and Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The “back benches” of the women’s rights movement
Woman’s rights man Higginson
“With unusual diffidence”
Marriages and remarriages
“Who and what is woman?”
“Who and what is man?”
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Men in the American Women’s Rights Movement, 1830–1890

This book studies male activists in American feminism from the 1830s to the late 19th century, using archival work on personal papers as well as public sources to demonstrate their diverse and often contradictory advocacy of women’s rights, as important but also cumbersome allies. Focussing mainly on nine men—William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James Mott, Frederick Douglass, Henry B. Blackwell, Stephen S. Foster, Henry Ward Beecher, Robert Purvis, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the book demonstrates how their interactions infuenced debates within and outside the movement, marriages and friendships as well as the evolution of (self-)defnitions of masculinity throughout the 19th century. Re-evaluating the historical evolution of feminisms as movements for and by women, as well as the meanings of identity politics before and after the Civil War, this is a crucial text for the history of both American feminisms and American politics and society. This is an important scholarly intervention that would be of interest to scholars in the felds of gender history, women’s history, gender studies and modern American history. Hélène Quanquin is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Lille (France). She studies 19th-century reform movements and activists. She is primarily interested in the mutual infuence between the personal and the political and the different sites where political work is done and ideas are produced. She has published essays in European and American journals and books. She has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Schlesinger Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Sophia Smith Collection and the Association Française d’Etudes Américaines.

Global Gender

The Global Gender series provides original research from across the humanities and social sciences, casting light on a range of topics from international authors examining the diverse and shifting issues of gender and sexuality on the world stage. Utilising a range of approaches and interventions, these texts are a lively and accessible resource for both scholars and upper-level students from a wide array of felds including Gender and Women’s Studies, Sociology, Politics, Communication, Cultural Studies and Literature. Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity Grisel Y. Acosta Early Motherhood in Digital Societies Ideals, Anxieties and Ties of the Perinatal Ranjana Das Nordic Gender Equality Policy in a Europeanisation Perspective Edited by Knut Dørum Gender-Based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas Edited by Rebeca Maseda García, María José Gámez Fuentes, and Barbara Zecchi Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema Edited by James S. Williams Bisexuality in Europe Sexual Citizenship, Romantic Relationships, and Bi+ Identities Edited by Emiel Maliepaard and Renate Baumgartner Men in the American Women’s Rights Movement 1830–1890 Cumbersome Allies Hélène Quanquin www.routledge.com/Global-Gender/book-series/RGG

Men in the American Women’s Rights Movement, 1830–1890 Cumbersome Allies

Hélène Quanquin

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Hélène Quanquin The right of Hélène Quanquin to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Quanquin, Helene, author. Title: Men in the American women’s rights movement, 1830–1890: cumbersome allies/Helene Quanquin. Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book studies male activists in American feminism from the 1830s to the late 19th century, using archival work on personal papers as well as public sources to demonstrate their diverse and often contradictory advocacy of women’s rights, as important but also cumbersome allies. Focussing mainly on nine men - William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Philips, James Mott, Frederick Douglass, Henry B. Blackwell, Stephen S. Foster, Henry Ward Beecher, Robert Purvis, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the book demonstrates how their interactions infuenced debates within and outside the movement, marriages and friendships as well as the evolution of (self-)defnitions of masculinity throughout the 19th century. Re-evaluating the historical evolution of feminisms as movements for and by women, as well as the meanings of identity politics before and after the Civil War, this is a crucial text for the history of both American feminisms and American politics and society This is an important scholarly intervention that would be of interest to scholars in the felds of gender history, women’s history, gender studies and modern American history”–Provided by publisher. Identifers: LCCN 2020026732 (print) | LCCN 2020026733 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367343781 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367630096 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429325380 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000226737 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781000226751 (epub) | ISBN 9781000226744 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism–United States–History–19th century. | Women’s rights–United States–History–19th century. | Men–United States– Attitudes–History–19th century. Classifcation: LCC HQ1426 .Q36 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1426 (ebook) | DDC 305.420973/09034–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026732 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026733 ISBN: 978-0-367-34378-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32538-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Abbreviations used in notes Acknowledgments Introduction

vi viii 1

1

William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips: The “man question” 14

2

Frederick Douglass and James Mott: Women’s rights partners

48

3

Stephen S. Foster and Henry B. Blackwell: Women’s rights as men’s rights

77

4

Robert Purvis and Henry Ward Beecher: Men v. women’s rights

109

5

Frederick Douglass and Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The “back benches” of the women’s rights movement

141

Bibliography Index

169 188

Abbreviations used in notes

PEOPLE SBA HWB HBB FD AKF SSF HBG WLG TWH JM LM AGP WP ECS LS

Susan B. Anthony Henry Ward Beecher Henry B. Blackwell Frederick Douglass Abby Kelley Foster Stephen S. Foster Helen Benson Garrison William Lloyd Garrison Thomas Wentworth Higginson James Mott Lucretia Mott Ann Greene Phillips Wendell Phillips Elizabeth Cady Stanton Lucy Stone

REPOSITORIES AND COLLECTIONS AKFP/AAS AKFP/WHM AAS BFP/LOC BFP/SL BPL FDP/LOC GFP/HL GFP/SCSC

Abigail Kelley Foster Papers, American Antiquarian Society Abigail Kelley Foster Papers, Worcester Historical Museum American Antiquarian Society Blackwell Family Papers, Library of Congress Blackwell Family Papers, Schlesinger Library Boston Public Library Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress Garrison Family Papers, Houghton Library Garrison Family Papers, Smith College Special Collections

Abbreviations used in notes Houghton Library Library of Congress MHS SSC WPP

HL LOC Massachusetts Historical Society Sophia Smith Collection Wendell Phillips Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University

vii

Acknowledgments

I started thinking about this book a long time ago, which means it is the result of many conversations and it was completed thanks to the support of many people. The frst time I talked about “woman’s rights men” was at an American Studies conference organized at Brown University in 2004. It was the frst of many with the same group over the years. I was very lucky to meet such brilliant and engaged scholars, who encouraged me to undertake this project at a time when I was uncertain about my future in academia and made me see that friendship, collegiality, and radical thinking are integral to good intellectual work. I am grateful to all the participants of the Bologna conference, more particularly Didier Aubert, Vincent Balbarin, Paul Groth, Beverly Haviland, Richard Hutson, France Jaigu, Robert G. Lee, Margaretta Lovell, Mary Lui, Naoko Shibusawa, Susan Smulyan, and, last but not least, Laura Wexler. I am grateful to all the institutions and organizations that have funded my work in the course of almost 15 years: the American Antiquarian Society, the Association Française d’Études Americaines, the Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangeres (Universite de Lille), the Center for Research on the English-speaking World (Sorbonne Nouvelle), the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Schlesinger Library, the Societe Française des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Superieur, and the Sophia Smith Collection. I am especially grateful to all the librarians and curators who helped me with my work and made me think about the different directions it could take, as well as Paul Erickson and Conrad Wright for their support. I also want to thank the many colleagues I have worked with at Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle and Universite de Lille, more particularly the great American Studies teams in both universities. Some friendships have been particularly important to me in the years I have spent at those institutions: Isabelle Alfandary, Paul Brennan, Audrey Celestine, Aurore Clavier, Helene Cottet, Veronique Hebrard, Claire Helie, Helene Le Dantec-Lowry, Helene Lecossois, Christine Lorre-Johnston, Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Fiona McCann, Benedicte Miyamoto, Clíona Ní Ríordáin, Evelyne PayenVarieras, and Cecile Roudeau, to name but a few. I also want to thank my colleagues at Brown University and the University of Texas at Austin, where

Acknowledgments

ix

I was a visiting professor in 2008 and 2014. I am lucky to be a teacher and I would like to thank the students I have had the pleasure to work with over the years, more particularly graduate students, whose research has been an inspiration for me. This book was reviewed by my habilitation à diriger des recherches committee, which was composed of Lucia Bergamasco, Lori D. Ginzberg, Helene Le Dantec-Lowry, Guillaume Marche, Claire Parfait, and Cecile Roudeau. I am very grateful for their remarks and for making this process less diffcult and at times truly (and surprisingly) enjoyable. Special thanks to Helene Le Dantec-Lowry for her generosity in good times and hard times, and to Nathalie Peyrebonne and Christilla Vasserot for their support then and their friendship. Writing this book was clearly a very diffcult process. What kept me going were the encounters I had with many people and the discussions that ensued in the course of 15 years, more particularly: A.J. Aiseirithe, Sari Altschuler, Mary Kate Azcuy, Alice Beja, Gregory Bekhtari, Ina Bergmann, Hester Blum, Mathieu Bonzom, Mia Carter, Urvashi Chakravarty, Sophie Chapuis, Andrew W. Cohen, Nancy Cott, Joan Caton Cromwell, Claire Delahaye, Brian Doherty, Marion Douzou, Nathalie Duclos, Jonathan P. Eburne, Kendra Taira Field, Leigh Fought, Soraya Guenif, Barbara Harlow, DaMaris Hill, Ambre Ivol, Nathalie Jaëck, Martha Jones, Kathi Kern, Megan Marshall, Lyra Monteiro, Marie Moreau, Mame-Fatou Niang, Françoise Palleau, Deborah Paredez, Alison Parker, Pierre-Antoine Pellerin, Clement Petitjean, Melynda Price, Marcus Rediker, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Cecile Roudeau, Michaël Roy, Sirpa Salenius, Manisha Sinha, Elizabeth Tilley, and Lisa Tetrault. I especially want to thank Carol Faulkner for her friendship and her scholarship. I am also grateful to the participants and organizers of the following conferences: “Writing Past Lives: Biography as History” (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, June 2007); “Race and Gender in American History” (University of Rochester, April 2009); “L’Engagement des hommes pour l’egalite des sexes” (Institut Emilie du Châtelet, February 2010); “Wendell Phillips and His Legacy” (Harvard University, June 2011); “Cultures of Solitude: Representations of Hermits and Recluses” (Würzburg University, July 2015); “Literature, Culture, and the Work of the Humanities” (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Mellon Foundation, July 2017); the Nineteenth-Century American Literature Study Workshop (2017 and 2018); “Frederick Douglass across and against Times, Places and Disciplines” (Paris, October 2018); “‘How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty’: Woman Suffrage and Women’s Citizenships in the Long History of the 19th Amendment” (Universites de Lille and Gustave Eiffel, January 2020). I am grateful to the reviewers for their insight and to my editors Alexandra McGregor and Eleanor Catchpole Simmons for their great patience and encouragement. This book is dedicated to my parents, my sister Anne, as well as the next generation, Angele and Theo.

Introduction

“Feebler voices?” Addressing the participants of the 1887 annual meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia, reform activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson felt like “a revolutionary veteran.”1 He described the audiences of the women’s rights meetings he had attended before the Civil War—“the rows of quiet faces in Quaker bonnets in the foreground; the rows of exceedingly unquiet fgures of Southern medical students, with their hats on, in the background.” The women’s rights movement had come a long way since the 1850s. “The audiences have changed, the atmosphere of the community has changed,” he maintained, “nothing but the cause remains the same.”2 In his speech, Higginson also refected upon men’s role in the movement, which he saw as mostly supportive, in keeping with more traditional views that they were women’s protectors. In the fght for women’s rights, he argued, men had “feebler voices, because less personal and less absorbingly interested.”3 He remembered that in the 1850s the men who attended the women’s rights meetings escorted the female activists outside to shelter them from the “somewhat uncomplimentary and peripatetic audience of small boys.”4 According to Higginson’s recollections, men had helped women by essentially protecting them from other men, within and outside of the movement. Higginson’s claim about men’s “feebler voices” should not, however, go unquestioned, as it is not entirely consistent with the signifcant role they played in the antebellum women’s rights movement. Before the Civil War, they participated in women’s rights conventions and wrote essays and articles in support of gender equality. It was a man—Samuel J. May—who advocated for the enfranchisement of women in a sermon delivered in Syracuse, New York, in November 1845, more than two years before the Seneca Falls convention of July 1848.5 It was another man—James Mott—who chaired part of that meeting. It was yet another man—Frederick Douglass—who supported Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s controversial motion on woman suffrage on that occasion. It was also a man—Wendell Phillips—with whom Susan B. Anthony pleaded in 1861, writing about his and William Lloyd Garrison’s crucial presence at women’s rights conventions.6 While this does

2

Introduction

not mean that men were the primary force behind the emergence of the women’s rights movement, they certainly played an important part in it. The conspicuous antebellum presence of “woman’s rights men,” as they were called at the time, contrasts with their more peripheral status within the movement at the end of the 19th century, a context that might have infuenced Higginson’s remarks in 1887. In the biography of her mother Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell noted that after the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged in 1890, “the later work passed almost wholly into the hands of women.”7 Although this remark appears in an endnote, it is signifcant of a process that had been completed by the end of the century. After several decades of male participation in conventions and associations, the American woman suffrage movement had essentially become a women’s movement, i.e. a movement for and by women. Higginson’s assertion that men’s lack of personal interest in the fght for women’s rights made them “feebler voices” is contradicted in part by two seemingly conficting ideas developed by abolitionists and women’s rights advocates before and after the Civil War. On the one hand, disinterestedness was considered as a legitimate foundation of one’s activism. In 1888, Frederick Douglass thus described the essential difference between his fght for the abolition of slavery and his defense of women’s rights. “When I ran away from slavery, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act,” he claimed, alluding to the personal and collective beneft that could come from one’s ability to fght for the rights of people other than oneself.8 On the other hand, male women’s rights activists occasionally circumvented the notion that their fght was “less personal” than their female counterparts by arguing that “woman’s rights” were also “man’s rights.” Throughout the 19th century, male women’s rights activism could be portrayed as disinterested and/or personal, a tension that needs to be examined.

A women’s movement? This book reevaluates certain preconceived ideas about American feminism as a movement historically designed for and by women.9 Men’s commitment to women’s equality is probably as old as the idea of women’s rights itself.10 By contrast, women have not always supported gender equality. The Equal Rights Amendment battle in the late 1970s and early 1980s made neoconservative women’s opposition to equal rights visible to the American public. Historians have also shown that it was women, not men, who were the driving force behind anti-woman suffrage activism in the early 20th century. By illuminating the paradoxes at work in women’s antisuffrage militancy at the turn of the 20th century, Susan E. Marshall has helped qualify the dominant narrative that made men “the real power behind the antisuffrage movement,” a version that female suffrage activists helped spread.11

Introduction

3

My analysis is rooted in the project originally advocated by Gerda Lerner as early as 1975 to write “a history of the dialectic, the tensions between the two cultures, male and female,” based on the idea of gender as a relational category.12 This book examines the history of the 19th-century American women’s rights movement through the actions and discourses of its male activists from the 1830s to the 1890s, when men’s activism became less visible and central. The careful study of men’s place in the movement is crucial to the understanding of the history of American feminisms, which cannot be considered apart from the exchanges and tensions between diverse discourses on women’s rights that resonated differently with activists.13 These interactions account for the diversity of the 19th-century women’s rights movement, which has sometimes been underplayed by historians, as well as its divisions. Feminist activism and discourses were heterogeneous from the start. They resonated differently among different people and were composed of a myriad of intertwined, sometimes divisive, issues surrounding defnitions of gender and gender relations. My main aim is thus to uncover crucial “nuances” in 19th-century reformers’ activism through the study of men’s place in the women’s rights movement.14 In this book, it is not my intent “to give men ‘credit’ for their support of women’s demands,” as Lori D. Ginzberg suggests some scholars do, nor to discuss whether men can or cannot be feminists.15 More than men’s feminism or lack thereof, I will investigate the evolution of their place and role in the women’s rights movement throughout the 19th century, as well as their specifcity as supportive and powerful voices invested in the transformation of gender relations. I will also show why and how men’s particular contribution before the Civil War—the advocacy of rights from which they did not beneft directly—came to be considered a weakness for the movement later on, a transformation that can be explained in part by the increased importance of women’s voices in the public sphere throughout the century, which made men’s presence and support less crucial in the success of feminism. This book is a contribution to the literature on the “ally activism” of members of privileged groups, their complex roles in protest movements as well as the mutual infuence between their political engagement and their personal lives and relationships.16 Men contributed to the emergence of women’s rights but they also proved to be “cumbersome allies,” sometimes drowning and suppressing women’s voices while trying to control and narrow down the movement’s agenda. The men who were active in the 19th-century women’s rights movement often derived infuence from their advocacy of the “rights of others.”17 Their role illustrates the complexities of 19th-century social justice/reform coalitions and engaged allyship. This study aims at recovering the specifcity of women’s rights activism in men’s political and personal lives, its impact on their identities as men, husbands, and friends, as well as on 19th-century reform.18 Men’s feminist commitment did not necessarily provoke a drastic change in “their own gender identity” and the way they considered their different roles in their lives

4

Introduction

but it certainly involved personal queries and challenges that their other engagements did not necessarily imply, or implied differently.19 Higginson’s use of the phrase “feebler voices” thus needs to be analyzed in the light of the way masculinity was shaped throughout the 19th century. “Woman’s rights men’s” manhood was often challenged by their opponents, who portrayed them as being feminized through their fght for women’s rights. Why and how did some men come to advocate women’s rights, i.e. the rights of people other than themselves? What impact did their women’s rights ideas have on their relationships with women, with other men, and on their perceptions of ideal masculinity? How did they articulate their activism with their personal lives, and did it systematically lead to a reevaluation of their personal and intimate relations with women? How did women help shape these men’s gender identities?20 This book intends to answer these questions. An important aspect of this study is the way “woman’s rights men” articulated—or failed to articulate—their defense of women’s rights with their personal, often married, lives, and the way each sphere, personal and public, informed the other on a daily basis. Although they offer a wide range of marital arrangements, from traditional marriages to what amounted to more “experimental” and equal partnerships, their activism was the result of both private and public conversations about women’s rights and gender relations that took place within and outside the movement, contradicting the traditional vision of a strict separation of spheres in the 19th century.21 The study of “woman’s rights men” illuminates the process through which women’s rights ideas were formed in the 19th century. The women’s rights conventions that were organized and the texts advocating gender equality that were published then were important but they were in fact the tip of the iceberg, the result of important interactions that took place elsewhere and were often sustained by women’s work—at meetings that were not exclusively devoted to women’s rights such as Colored Conventions, in the letters they wrote their friends and relatives, and as importantly at home.22 Women’s rights ideas emerged in less visible spaces that were crucial sites of intellectual and political production, sustained as they were by personal relationships such as marriages and friendships.23 The focus on “woman’s rights men” paradoxically helps us recover the decisive intellectual and political role played by women who were less present in the public sphere for different reasons—because they enjoyed domestic work and taking care of their families, because they had more reserved personalities, or because they felt they had no other option given social expectations and their husbands’ life choices.24

Intersections One crucial aspect of this book is the way race, gender, and class issues intersected among female and male activists and within reform. It is impossible to study the 19th-century women’s rights movement without

Introduction

5

acknowledging the way it was, in Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s words, “shaped both by Black suffrage activism and by white racism.”25 In the last decades, crucial work has illuminated black women’s specifc contribution to the 19th-century women’s rights movement, despite numerous attempts at silencing and invisibilizing them.26 By the turn of the 20th century, the selfproclaimed women’s rights movement was a white women’s movement, as well as a white women’s movement, the result of decades-long evolutions and the post-Civil War debates about universal suffrage.27 The split of the antebellum reform coalition over the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments has been interpreted differently throughout the years. For Ellen Carol DuBois, it signaled the actual beginning of U.S. feminism as an independent movement.28 Faye E. Dudden has however shown that it was also a moment of many lost opportunities that set back the demand for universal suffrage by many years.29 My perspective on the events is slightly different as I contend in this book that the conficts of the late 1860s reveal the cracks that were already present in antebellum reform and the diffculty in maintaining a truly feminist-abolitionist coalition.30 While many activists who joined the women’s rights movement before the Civil War were abolitionists committed to universal rights, they found it diffcult to adopt a consistent position throughout the years and often deviated from the principle of universality when confronted with choices. Those conficts only make sense when activists’ specifc trajectories and what women’s rights actually meant to them politically and personally are revealed. Men’s contributions to feminisms’ connections with other social and political movements need to be further examined. This book explores how male militants articulated their women’s rights activism with other political struggles. Most men who appear in it have had their biography—and sometimes biographies—written by contemporaries, as well as historians. The personal biographies of Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips, among others, all deal with their women’s rights activism.31 With some exceptions, they usually consider women’s rights as the logical and unproblematic continuation of these men’s abolitionism and an integral part of their reform activism.32 I will however argue that the study of “woman’s rights men” will further illuminate the multifarious links between abolitionism and the women’s rights movement, and more broadly the intricacies of social justice coalitions. Martha Jones has dealt with this question in terms of the integration of the two issues of race and gender in African American public culture through black women’s actions, attesting to “the rich cross-pollinization of the antebellum antislavery and women’s rights movement.”33 The choice to write the collective study of male women’s rights activists who were “trained in the school of anti-slavery” originates in the concern to account for the diversity of trajectories among 19th-century reformers as well as the plurality of the ways they articulated their different activisms.34 The overlapping of

6

Introduction

different reform movements in the 19th century should encourage us to reverse the traditional perspective, which centers on abolitionism’s infuence on the women’s rights movement, and examine the way the latter might have informed the former.35 In that respect, the split of the reform coalition after the Civil War cannot be solely accounted for by party politics, matters of expediency, and personal antagonisms; the ambiguities of antebellum activism, defned as both disinterested and personal and rooted in the intersections of race, gender, and class, also account for the breakup. This book describes the process through which men from different social, familial, and racial backgrounds came to advocate women’s rights.36 The specifc form of this study helps show how individuals shaped the American women’s rights movement as well as how individual lives interacted with larger social, cultural, and political forces. In order to account for the evolution of the relationship between male activisms and the American women’s rights movement, this book will follow a chronological outline, each chapter focusing on one or several conventions where women’s rights were discussed and on two men, whose trajectories were signifcant and, to a certain extent, representative of male women’s rights activism and the personal and collective issues raised by their fght for women’s equality. The nine “woman’s rights men”—William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James Mott, Frederick Douglass, Stephen S. Foster, Henry B. Blackwell, Robert Purvis, Henry Ward Beecher, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—who represent the main focus were chosen for several reasons. They were all abolitionists and participated in women’s rights conventions, wrote in support of women’s rights, and, more generally speaking, advocated women’s rights publicly. These men knew each other, worked together, and were sometimes friends. Each chapter, however, will also include other male activists in the conversation and their chronologies will overlap, showing the “multicausal and multidirectional” evolution of the women’s rights movement and men’s place in it, as well as the complexities of the interactions between male and female voices in the movement.37 In this book, it is however not my intention to create problematic and far-fetched equivalences between activists of diverse backgrounds, especially those who were formerly enslaved. Douglass’s experience of slavery and struggle for autonomy were not a path to women’s rights among others and they shaped the antebellum women’s rights debate in unique ways. Special attention should be given to my choice to make Douglass the focus of two chapters, as his fgure has tended to overshadow in many historians’ works the importance of other black activists as well as of the different networks he belonged to.38 I would argue that it is precisely because Douglass was active in black networks and his ideas were informed by the debates that took place among black activists that his story is important to tell in this book.39 His unique position in the historiography of 19th-century reform is also due to the fact that he navigated many different worlds that fueled his feminism and where he managed to sometimes force the issue of gender equality.

Introduction

7

Chapter 1 centers on the two pioneering fgures of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who were both present at the London World’s Anti-Slavery convention of 1840. The two men came from different social backgrounds and they had very different marriages—Ann Greene Phillips was also an abolitionist and a delegate at the London Convention, whereas Helen Benson Garrison, though supporting the cause, seemed to ft the more traditional image of mother and wife. Both men, however, are representative of the way male abolitionists with different personal experiences became aware of and participated in the construction of the “woman question” in relation to abolitionism in the second half of the 1830s. This chapter examines how women’s rights were incorporated into the reform discourse on universal rights, as a result of both personal and public conversations between men and women. Men were given the central stage in the fght for women’s rights in London and during meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society, but their advocacy of women’s rights was the result of their personal interactions with women as much as political and public discussions with them. Frederick Douglass and James Mott—the central fgures of Chapter 2— played important roles at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention. Mott served as the chair, and Douglass was the only black man present and a vocal supporter of Stanton’s resolution on woman suffrage. Mott was married to Lucretia Mott, a prominent abolitionist and women’s rights activist, supporting her and representing, in the minds of his fellow reformers, the “perfect husband,” in keeping with Quaker ideas of gender equality. Because of his situation as a former enslaved man and his vocal support for women’s rights, Douglass was often described as the man who could best understand women’s plight.40 The Seneca Falls convention was the frst of many antebellum women’s rights conventions where men were active participants. Although the 1840s represented a period of stabilization and solidifcation of the partnership between men and women within reform around universal rights, men developed a specifc, somewhat ambivalent, discourse on women’s rights. While occupying a signifcant place in the movement, they strongly encouraged women to take the leading position and fght for themselves, in this way contributing to the construction of a specifc image of the ideal male partner in private and in public. At a time when the women’s rights movement was emerging as an entity independent of abolitionism, Douglass’s defense of gender equality mirrored his own personal struggle for autonomy and his and his wife Anna Murray’s conception of marriage, informed as it was by the experience of slavery and their aspirations for social mobility.41 Henry B. Blackwell gave his frst speech in favor of women’s rights at the Fourth National Women’s Rights Convention in Cleveland in October 1853. At the time, he was courting Lucy Stone and his defense of women’s equality was a way for him to prove that he would be a good husband. Stephen S. Foster was also present in Cleveland with his wife, Abby Kelley

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Foster, but he was chastised for speaking “out of order.” Blackwell and Foster, who are the focus of Chapter 3, shared many common features. They had a certain propensity for failed business ventures, but more signifcantly they both had to overcome the hesitations about marriage of their future, more famous, wives, and they did so by elaborating or appealing to a philosophy of equal partnership. Central to this philosophy was the idea that women’s rights would beneft men as much as women and contribute to the mutual elevation of the two sexes. But the tensions present in Blackwell’s and Foster’s marriages are also signifcant of the diffculty in implementing women’s rights at home. The two men’s activism raises the question of the place of men’s voices at a moment when more and more women were encouraged to join the movement and speak for themselves. They are also evidence of the mutual infuence between the private conversations among married women’s rights activists and the discourse on women’s rights, which made marriage a controversial issue within feminism. Chapter 4 deals with the contentious meetings of the American Equal Rights Association and the American Anti-Slavery Society after the Civil War. Robert Purvis and Henry Ward Beecher were important fgures during these conventions. Purvis was one of the men who opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which led to black men’s enfranchisement, while Beecher was to become the president of the American Woman Suffrage Association, formed in 1869, before he was caught in a sex scandal that affected the whole movement. The study of those two trajectories contradicts the image of a women’s rights movement split along racial and gender lines after the Civil War. Though best known for the debates over support for the Fifteenth Amendment, the meetings under study were places where black women struggled to make their voices heard in debates that incorrectly pitted white women against black men. They also provoked discussions on men’s place in the movement. The National Woman Suffrage Association, founded after the May 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, declared in its constitution that men could not be elected offcers, a radical departure from the antebellum period. In many ways, however, this development was anything but a rupture, as it testifes to the tensions present in women’s rights discourses before the Civil War. It is also evidence of the complexities of the articulation between race and gender before and after the Civil War and the evolution of the American women’s rights movement into a white women’s rights movement. The fnal chapter is centered on the two fgures of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frederick Douglass, and the evolution of their women’s rights activism in relation to their experiences of remarriage after the Civil War. The 1880s were a period of reconciliation after the bitter dispute of the 1860s and 1870s, but they also were times when men took a defnite back seat in the movement. The call for the International Council of Women of March 26, 1888, was signed only by women. Higginson declined the

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invitation but sent a letter to the convention, while Douglass gave a speech reminiscing about the antebellum women’s rights struggle. While Higginson continued to write imposing essays about women’s equality, his 1887 “feebler voices” speech also confrmed men’s more marginal position, a view with which Douglass concurred. Almost half a century after the London convention, men’s speeches at the International Council of Women meeting paradoxically corroborated their more marginal and “feebler” position and the centrality of gender and racial identities in the organization of the American women’s rights movement.

Notes 1 TWH, “For Self-Respect and Self-Protection,” speech at the annual Meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association, held in Philadelphia, November 1, 1887 (Philadelphia: s.n.), 1. 2 Ibid., 1. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Ibid., 1. 5 Samuel J. May, Sermon, Syracuse, November 1845, GFP/SSC. Donald Yacovone, Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion, 1797–1871 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 120. 6 SBA to WP, April 28, 1861, WPP. 7 Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone, Pioneer of Women’s Rights (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001 [1930]), 300, n.4. 8 National Woman Suffrage Association, Report of the International Council of Women, assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association, D.C., U.S. of America, March 25 to April 1, 1888 (Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, 1888), 329. 9 See Steven P. Schacht and Doris W. Ewing, “Introduction,” in Feminism and Men: Reconstructing Gender Relations, ed. Steven P. Schacht and Doris W. Ewing (New York: New York University, 1998), 1. Arianne Chernock claims that “the link between sex and feminism needs to be denaturalized”—and thus historicized. Arianne Chernock, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 6. 10 Sylvia Strauss,“Traitors to the Masculine Cause”: The Men’s Campaigns for Women’s Rights (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982); Michael S. Kimmel and Thomas E. Mosmiller, eds., Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 1776–1990, A Documentary History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Chernock, Men and the Making. 11 Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 58. Not only did women advocate antisuffragism but women on both sides of the debate had common interests and faced similar constraints. Ibid., 6. 12 Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History: Defnitions and Challenges,” Feminist Studies 3.1/2 (Autumn 1975): 13. On gender as a relational category also see Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class & the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10; Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 4. The notion of gender understood as “relational” is close to the concept of “rapports sociaux de sexe” developed by French scholars. The notion allows us to

10

13 14

15

16 17

18 19

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Introduction think about what both unites and opposes men and women as groups. Roland Pfefferkorn, Inégalités et rapports sociaux: Rapports de classe, rapports de sexes (Paris: La Dispute, 2007), 302. Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 11. I borrow the term “nuances” from Leigh Fought’s work about the women in Douglass’s life, which she sees as a way to uncover his “negative space,” or “feminine space.” Leigh Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4. Lori D. Ginzberg, “Men and Woman’s Rights,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 114 (December 2007): 117–118. In Against the Tide, Kimmel and Mosmiller argue that men who advocate women’s rights can only be called “profeminist” as only women have a direct experience of patriarchal oppression. Michael Kimmel and Thomas E. Mosmiller, Introduction, in Against the Tide. The term “pro-feminist” is also used by Stacey M. Robertson in her analysis of Parker Pillsbury’s advocacy of women’s rights. Stacey M. Robertson, “‘Aunt Nancy Men’: Parker Pillsbury, Masculinity, and Women’s Rights Activism in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” American Studies 37.2 (Fall 1996): 33. This perception has explicitly or implicitly infuenced many historians. In her seminal study, Gerda Lerner defnes feminist consciousness as the prerogative of women connecting through the shared experience of oppression and acting on it, which is in keeping with the works of many women’s historians, who have shown the importance of the development of “women’s culture” in the formation of feminist consciousness. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14. On the signifcance of women’s culture, see Ellen DuBois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Politics and Culture in Women’s History: A Symposium,” Feminist Studies 6.1 (Spring 1980): 26–64. Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz, Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 18. WP, “The Fifteenth Amendment,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 3, 1869, 1. On Phillips’s idea of “disinterestedness,” see W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2013), 106–107; Helene Quanquin, “‘The Rights of Others’: Wendell Phillips and Women’s Rights,” in Wendell Phillips: Social Justice and the Power of the Past, ed. A.J. Aiseirithe et Donald Yacovone (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 2016). As mentioned by Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz, “men’s feminist activism has always existed in a state of tension and contradiction with men’s access to male privilege.” Messner et alii, Some Men, 16. Lynn Hunt notes that “most of the abolitionists failed to make a connection to women’s rights.” Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 66. John Tosh, “The Making of Masculinities: The Middle Class in Late NineteenthCentury Britain,” in The Men’s Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1890–1920, ed. Angela V. John and Claire Eustance (London: Routledge, 1997), 39. Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 3–4, 395. Marlon B. Ross speaks about the role of “interested others” in the construction of black manhood. Ibid., 1.

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21 As Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone point out, in the 19th century “men and women inhabited the same domestic and public spheres.” Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone, “Introduction,” A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender, eds. Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 11. 22 On Colored Conventions, see the invaluable Colored Conventions Project. Accessed on May 11, 2020. https://coloredconventions.org/. On black conventions as the result of discussions that took place on the margins and the centrality of black women’s work in their organization, see Derrick Ramon Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 4, 11, 108, 247– 248; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, Indiana: University Press, 1998), 57. Derrick Spires speaks of black conventions as “an archive and repertoire of black citizenship.” Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 81. In the 19th century, the home was considered as “a shared space” by the middle class. Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 120. 23 On reform marriages, see Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: FeministAbolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). Same-sex friendships sustained reform activism. On “the politics of female friendship” in abolitionism, see Constance W. Hasset, “Siblings and Antislavery: The Literary and Political Relations of Harriet Martineau, James Martineau, and Maria Weston Chapman,” Signs 21.2 (Winter 1996): 379. Friendships between men and women were also crucial. On the importance of such relationships in the early American Republic, see Cassandra A. Good, Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 24 Women’s domestic work was also a case of citizenship as practice. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 3–4. 25 Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 1. On the women’s rights movement as a “white women’s rights movement” at the turn of the 20th century, see Michelle Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). After the Civil War, the question of female enfranchisement was also inextricably linked to questions related to U.S. imperialism and expansion, and citizenship rights in the U.S. empire. See Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 26 See Terborg-Penn, African American Women; Jones, All Bound Up Together; Sirpa Salenius, An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018); Martha S. Jones, “The Politics of Black Womanhood,” in Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence, ed. Kate Clarke Lemay (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 29–47. I would also like to include the following upcoming books: Cathleen Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020); Alison S. Parker, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Such works are the result of important discussions on the

12

27

28 29

30 31

32

33 34

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Introduction intersections of race and gender initiated since the 19th century by black women. Before Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term and defned its main principles, Anna Julia Cooper’s work was central to the defnition of intersectionality. Vivian M. May, “Historicizing Intersectionality as a Critical Lens: Returning to the Work of Anna Julia Cooper,” in Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, ed. Carol Faulkner and Alison Parker (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 17–47. “If we remain committed to the notion that only women could endorse woman’s rights, that women’s rights are particular ones, ‘merely’ personal and therefore threatening to men,” Lori D. Ginzberg writes, “we ignore the coalitions that have advanced feminism, reinscribe the movement as one peopled only by white, middle-class, Western activists and thinkers, and limit our conception of the possibility of feminist transformation itself.” Ginzberg, “Men and Woman’s Rights,” 118. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 201. Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also see James M. McPherson, “Abolitionists, Woman Suffrage and the Negro, 1865–1869,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 47.1 (1965): 40–47. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (1988): 28–59. See for instance James Brewster Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, Doubleday, 2006); Margaret Hope Bacon, But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018). Notable exceptions about Douglass include: Benjamin Quarles, “Frederick Douglass and the Woman’s Rights Movement,” Journal of Negro History 25.1 (1940): 35–44; S. Jay Walker, “Frederick Douglass and Woman Suffrage,” The Black Scholar 4.6/7 (1973): 24–31; Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, n.25 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976); Gary L. Lemons, Womanist Forefathers: Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009); Fought, Women. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 206. The phrase “trained in the school of anti-slavery” was used by Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the Woman’s Rights Convention that took place in New York City on May 10, 1866. ECS, SBA, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage, 6 volumes, 2nd ed. (Rochester, NY: Anthony and Mann, 1889), 2: 174. Also see TWH, “William Lloyd Garrison,” Woman’s Journal, May 31, 1879, GFP/SSC. John Ernest argues that collective biographies are “biographies of communities” that are especially interesting for the study of “black lives.” Panel “Biography Matters: Researching Black Lives,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conference, Penn State University, March 17, 2016. Michael D. Pierson, “‘Slavery Cannot Be Covered up with Broadcloth or a Bandanna’: The Evolution of White Abolitionist Attacks on the ‘Patriarchal Institution,’” Journal of the Early Republic 25.3 (Fall 2005): 387. See also

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37 38

39 40

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Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horn, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). In that respect, the notions of “biographical availability” and “carriere militante” used by sociologists have proved to be useful tools. Doug McAdam defnes “biographical availability” as “the absence of personal constraints that may increase the costs and risks of movement participation, such as full-time employment, family, and family responsibilities.” Doug McAdam, “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer,” American Journal of Sociology 92.1 (July 1986): 70. In his study of French feminist men, Alban Jacquemard uses the notion of “carriere militante” (militant career) to defne “activism not as a specifc moment in the life of an individual but as part of a person’s entire social, professional, emotional, and familial trajectory.” (“Il s’agit des lors d’apprehender l’engagement non pas comme un moment specifque dans la vie d’un individu mais comme s’inserant dans l’ensemble de sa trajectoire sociale, professionnelle, affective et familiale”). Alban Jacquemard, Les Hommes dans les mouvements féministes. Socio-histoire d’un engagement improbable (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 153. Jennifer Purvis, “Grrrls and Women Together in the Third Waves: Embracing the Challenges of Intergenerational Feminism(s),” NWSA Journal 16.3 (Autumn 2004): 110. On the dangers of “overemphasizing” Douglass at the expense of “the communal facets of citizenship discourse” among black activists, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 2, 8, 80. Also see Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 5. Cited in Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 122. P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Frederick Douglass’s Black Activism,” Black Perspectives, April 22, 2019. Accessed on March 11, 2020. www.aaihs.org/frederick-dougla sss-black-activism/. In this book, I have decided to use the following guidelines on writing about slavery: P. Gabrielle Foreman et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” crowdsourced document. Accessed on August 30, 2018. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM7 1My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/mobilebasic. Fought, Women, 128.

1

William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips The “man question”

It is one of history’s ironies that the frst World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, which took place in London from June 12 to 23, 1840, should be best remembered not for the transatlantic fght against slavery that it was supposed to organize but for its exclusion of the American female delegates on the frst day of its proceedings.1 The oft-repeated story, according to which it was in London that Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton frst came up with the idea of a women’s rights convention, has long been contradicted, but the meeting remains a landmark in the history of the American women’s rights movement.2 The events that took place in London did contribute to the construction of feminist consciousness among the American women present but this is only half the story. On the last day of the London meeting, the American female delegate Abby Kimber claimed that it was not the “woman question,” i.e. women’s participation in the same associations as men, which had divided abolitionists, but rather “the man question.”3 As many of her colleagues, she believed that the issue had been used in part as a pretext to challenge William Lloyd Garrison’s leadership of the movement, making the London convention the latest episode of the three-year battle for the control of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its auxiliaries.4 What Kimber’s remark also reminds us of is that the London convention was instrumental in the development of women’s rights discourses fueled by interactions between women and men. The decision to exclude women from the proceedings meant that the debates on the main foor lost some of their appeal after the frst day.5 The male delegates who supported women’s admission took part in the debates that followed and women continued to attend the meeting from the gallery but the discussions that took place on the margins of the convention eventually proved as important, if not more, for many of them.6 Taking place in a foreign country, the event was a powerful catalyst. It deepened relationships among women’s rights advocates and further united an already close-knit circle of female and male abolitionists, for whom the woman question was more than just theory.7 Wendell Phillips (1811–1884) and William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) were on the front line of the fght for women’s participation in London.

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They had become fast friends after Phillips had joined the abolitionist movement in 1837 and the convention only deepened their personal and political connections.8 For his son born while he was on his way to London, Garrison chose the name of Wendell Phillips, who was women’s eloquent advocate at the meeting.9 The convention also took place at an important moment in Phillips’s life. Both delegates of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he and his wife Ann Greene Phillips had been traveling in Europe for a year.10 Following doctors’ advice after she had started suffering from incapacitating pains, the couple had left the United States in June 1839 in search for a cure for her affiction. This quest eventually ended up in failure, and at the time of the convention Ann Greene Phillips’s condition, her husband wrote, was “very much the same as when we left.”11 For both men, the London convention was clearly associated with political issues such as the future of the American abolitionist movement and the contents of its platform— including women’s rights—but it was also linked to more personal queries about their own place in the public sphere and abolitionism, as well as their roles as husbands and family men. Before, during, and after the London convention, the “woman question” was both personal and political to them, resonating with several aspects of their lives. Their trajectories show that the issue of women’s rights was given shape as an experiential question for both genders in the second half of the 1830s, also making the “woman question” the “man question.”

The “father” and the “mother” of abolitionism Phillips and Garrison’s contemporaries often noted their complementarity as men and leaders, in line with their different backgrounds.12 Unlike Phillips’s privileged childhood, Garrison’s early life was defned by poverty and dependence due to his father’s sudden disappearance in 1808, when he was three years old.13 For most of his childhood and early adulthood, Garrison was a cog in the “binding out” system, which placed him under the immediate authority of adults other than his parents, an experience which probably shaped his activism.14 In 1814, his mother Frances moved to Lynn, Massachusetts with her eldest son, leaving Garrison and his sister in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he was placed as an apprentice with a cordwainer. He quickly gave up the trade.15 In October 1818, at the age of almost 13, he started his apprenticeship as a printer with the Newburyport Herald.16 Printing was Garrison’s way out of poverty and dependence and into reform.17 Through his apprenticeship at the Herald, he was exposed to literature and poetry, one of his favorite ways of engaging with the world.18 Later on, Benjamin Lundy, the founder of the abolitionist newspaper the Genius of Universal Emancipation, provided him with the model of a joint career of reform and newspaper editing.19 For Garrison, his meeting with the editor in 1828 was “the primary link” that accounted for his conversion

16

The “man question”

to immediatist abolitionism.20 By that time, Garrison was already involved in reform through his editorship of a temperance newspaper, and his sons argue that Lundy found in him “a ready and enthusiastic convert,” a clear exaggeration.21 Not only did black activists shape abolitionism as a “radical” movement but they also participated in Garrison’s antislavery education, converting him to immediatism and shaping his brand of abolitionism.22 It was during his time as co-editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1829–1830 that he advocated the immediate abolition of slavery.23 On January 1, 1831, he published the frst of the 1,820 issues of the Liberator, which could not have come into existence and survived without the fnancial, political, and emotional support of black communities in Boston and elsewhere.24 The Forten family is a good example of black female and male militants’ crucial infuence on Garrison’s abolitionism. A wealthy sailmaker and member of Philadelphia’s black elite, and Robert Purvis’s father-in-law, James Forten was close friends with Garrison and raised funds for him.25 He and his wife Charlotte were active reformers who participated in the activities of black associations and institutions as well as organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, both founded in December 1833.26 Their daughters also wrote for the Liberator, thus providing important literary and political contents to the newspaper.27 Phillips’s path to abolitionism was infuenced by his unique family background. A Boston Brahmin, he received an education typical of his class at the Boston Latin School, Harvard College, and then Harvard Law School, but, even there, he distinguished himself because of his wealth.28 Phillips joined the antislavery fght later than Garrison, with a speech at Faneuil Hall in 1837.29 His conversion to antislavery views can be explained by a combination of events. Later in life, he recalled joining the American AntiSlavery Society “rather from impulse than from any distinct understanding of the great and broad principle at the root of our movement.”30 On October 21, 1835, he witnessed the mob’s attack against the women of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, including Ann Greene, whom he had not yet met, during which Garrison narrowly escaped lynching.31 Contemporaries commonly commented on Ann’s infuence on her husband’s political ideas.32 When they met, she was already a committed abolitionist, living with her cousin Maria Weston Chapman—a member of the “Boston clique,” a closeknit group of infuential abolitionists that started to organize in 1830.33 Despite his wife’s poor health, Phillips quickly became an essential fgure of the movement, thanks in part to his great talent and effciency as an orator. When he met Ann Greene he had been uncertain about his professional future as a lawyer and abolitionism provided him with a clear vocation. By 1838, he had been appointed general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.34 He did not follow the path that had been carved for him by his family and his adoption of reform ideas put him on the margins of the world he had been born in but his privileged upbringing

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was also an asset for abolitionists and accounts for his quick ascent in the movement.35Originating from distinct backgrounds, Garrison and Phillips followed different paths to abolitionism but it was through the militant and personal relationships that originated in their activism that they both came to embrace women’s rights.

Abolitionist friendships Right from the moment when he became an active abolitionist, Garrison was convinced that women’s participation would be essential to the movement.36 In January 1832, he started the “Ladies Department,” a section in the Liberator targeting women, which was placed under the editorial responsibility of white poetess Elizabeth Chandler.37 During his trip to England in 1833, he was further impressed by the agitation of British female abolitionists.38 In August 1834, he expressed his admiration for women’s role in the antislavery movement, writing his future wife about their unparalleled “zeal” and “devotion.”39 When Garrison’s friend, British abolitionist George Thompson, toured the United States in the summer of 1835, many American women started forming female abolitionist societies.40 Black women’s role, although not always as publicized as black and white men’s, had always been essential in the fght against slavery.41 In the 1830s, abolitionist organizations and the nascent Colored Conventions movement were heavily dependent on their labor, which Garrison also harnessed for his own ventures.42 He published the writings of African American abolitionist and lecturer Maria W. Stewart as well as the literary contributions of members of the Female Literary Association, a black women’s society founded in Philadelphia in 1831.43 Despite the existence of interracial female antislavery societies, black female abolitionists still faced racist prejudices within the movement.44 Garrison thus declined an invitation by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society founded in October 1833 because it excluded black women.45 Although important from the start, the role of black and white women in the abolitionist movement was at frst limited by conventions and the reluctance to challenge gender roles among male and female activists. The women who attended the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in December 1833 made remarks but they did not sign the fnal document.46 Thirty years later, Samuel J. May explained the omission by fear of “impropriety” and the participants’ nonexistent “conception of the rights of women” at the time.47 Women’s early abolitionist role was shaped by the notion of “female infuence,” which was shared by a majority of activists in the early 1830s. In April 1832, Maria W. Stewart thus appealed to women to use their “infuence” over their families and friends.48 Resolutions passed at antislavery meetings in the frst half of the decade urged them to harness their unique merits to “waken a slumbering nation” to the evils of slavery.49 Their moral and spiritual strength was regularly hailed in abolitionist

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publications. Pieces published in the frst half of the 1830s encouraged them to join the abolitionist cause by appealing to their reputed natural inclination for empathy and the alleged natural bond uniting free and enslaved women—and mothers—best represented by the image of the female supplicant used to introduce the “Ladies Department.”50 In the early 1830s, Garrison adhered to the discourse of female infuence along with the idea that women should work as a separate organizational constituency within the abolitionist movement. In his 1833 address to free black women and men, he claimed that he relied on women’s role for “an entire change” in society.51 In 1834, he asked his future wife Helen Eliza Benson to organize a female abolitionist association in Providence, where she lived, trusting in “female infuence to break the shackles of the bleeding slave.” She, however, declined and claimed that her power was too “limited.”52 For Garrison, the creation of separate associations did not necessarily stem from a desire to exclude women. They were rather seen as the most effective sites for female labor.53 Women’s importance originally lay in the organization of activities to fund the movement as well as petition campaigns.54 They played a crucial role in sustaining the movement by working behind the scenes.55 Martha Jones describes female infuence as a truly “malleable” notion with ambivalent results, as it limited some women’s political role while allowing others to move out of their presumed sphere and protest their condition.56 Women’s early contribution to the abolitionist movement was infuenced by the belief in distinctive qualities requiring gender-segregated activities, but it also led to the emergence of “a new female political culture.”57 Female abolitionists themselves disagreed over the signifcance of their activism and its infuence on gender norms.58 They were also divided over the question of gender-segregated associations when it was raised at the end of the 1830s. White abolitionist and author Lydia Maria Child famously compared female organizations to “half a pair of scissors.” Other activists saw in interracial women’s associations such as the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society places of empowerment. In 1839, Lucretia Mott thus defended women-only meetings for “bringing our sex forward, exercising their talents, and preparing them for united action with men.”59 Gender-based organizations, however, never kept male and female abolitionists from working together and interacting with one another. Both women and men often attended the same meetings, participated in the same activities, and engaged in intense discussions over strategies and actions. Male activists were frequently asked to address female audiences. The regular interactions between men and women within abolitionism contributed to building strong relationships that mirrored those in a family.60 While same-sex friendships clearly empowered women, friendly relations between men and women within abolitionism also proved crucial to building effective support systems. A letter written by abolitionist and co-editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, Charles C. Burleigh, to Abby Kelley in 1840 provides

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a remarkable example of the admiration and empathy women’s actions elicited in some of their male colleagues. Kelley had been targeted for pushing the boundaries of accepted female behavior by speaking in public and being elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Burleigh assured her of his unconditional support. “I know something of what it is to be among strangers,” he wrote, “the object of prejudice & misapprehension & hostility, menaced & slandered for doing what I thought my duty—with almost none to speak a friendly word in my ear—to sympathise with my feelings & encourage my exertions.”61 Abolitionist friendships, which stemmed from shared goals and activities as well as admiration and sympathy, could potentially offer leeway in terms of gender roles and norms.62 Women’s strength and achievements in the face of opposition were often extolled by their male supporters.63 In 1837, May claimed at an abolitionist meeting that “the women of the Society were the most effcient bretheren (sic) and the men their weak and less and less (sic) effcent (sic) sisters.”64 It was an ambivalent compliment as it suggested that women were equal and even superior to men but also associated being a woman with weakness. May’s double-edged remark contrasts with Boston reformer Anne Weston Warren’s recollection of her relief when she realized she was not the only woman present at the American Anti-Slavery Society’s anniversary meeting in May 1839 as she spotted another female abolitionist “ready to man or rather woman her point to the last.”65 The male activists who came to advocate women’s equal participation often enjoyed the society of strong-minded women and Garrison and Phillips were no exception. They worked closely with black and white female abolitionists, valued their judgment and had feelings of affection for them. Both men had deep attachment for their mothers, who had strong personalities of their own. “She was everything to him,” Ann Greene Phillips wrote about her husband’s mother, whom Phillips counted as one of the three most infuential fgures in his life, along with his wife and Garrison.66 Garrison expressed similar feelings about his mother and the diffcult life she had also made him extremely aware of the acuteness of gender inequalities when coupled with poverty.67 Those who were on the right side of the “woman question” certainly embraced more elastic gender norms but they also based their advocacy of women’s equal participation on discourses that extolled traditional norms and behaviors.68 They regularly denounced the way masculine and feminine ideals were distorted by the Southern slaveholding system, a corruption that affected both white enslavers and enslaved blacks, who they claimed were kept from fulflling their traditional gender roles as wives, mothers, fathers, and husbands.69 Northern society also provided abolitionists with counter-models of appropriate masculine behavior. Nowhere was this more evident than during the mob incidents that tried to derail abolitionist agitation in the North in the 1830s. The mob of October 21, 1835, which had so impressed Phillips, remained in abolitionist memory as the best example of

20 The “man question” masculinity gone wrong.70 Texts written after the facts denounced in ironical terms the mob’s “noble army of gentlemanly savages” and “heartless and unmanly persecutors.”71 These descriptions provided a sharp contrast with the behavior of the female abolitionists present at the 1835 meeting— “industrious, estimable, intellectual and devout women, the ornaments of the Christian church, patterns of moral and social excellence, and exemplary mothers, wives and daughters,” according to Garrison.72 The events made such an impression on male abolitionists that during the London convention George Bradburn evoked the courage of the women who had “made their own persons a bulwark of protection” to shield Thompson as an argument for their admission.73 This narrative long subsisted after the incidents.74 It was given new life throughout the decade every time women were the victims of anti-abolitionist brutality, sometimes with serious consequences.75 Chivalry and heroism were important components of men’s defense of abolitionist women against attacks by men outside of and within the movement throughout the decade. According to them, despite their strength and courage, women were also in dire need of protection from those who were men only superfcially, a rhetoric that was present in London in 1840.76 An American delegate urged his colleagues to “meet the question like men, and not disgrace those who have sent us.”77 When defending women’s right to participate in the debates, albeit reluctantly, Thompson also appealed to notions of gentlemanly and chivalrous behavior: “One gentleman has said, that if we do not exclude them we shall regret it. What shall we have to regret? Our magnanimity, our justice, our gentlemanly feeling,” he asked.78 In the 1830s, women abolitionists were hailed for their courage and for being true “ladies,” and the men who defended them were described as “gentlemen,” two terms that were anything but neutral.79 The latter referred to certain assumptions about a true man’s conduct, including control, which was a constant feature of both Phillips’s and Garrison’s self-defnitions of masculinity, although for different reasons. Phillips’s upbringing was infuenced by his family’s social position and Calvinist beliefs. At Harvard, he had learned the rules of oratory, defned as man’s domain at the time, from Edward Tyrrel Channing, who insisted on the control of emotions.80 Despite his modest origins and his emotional and powerful style, Garrison was also a proponent of gentlemanly self-control, which probably originated in the presence of male countermodels in his family, namely his father and brother, who were both alcoholics.81 Garrison’s own brand of masculinity was also inspired by evangelicalism, an important component of abolitionist immediatism, and the producer of norms of male behavior rooted in restraint.82 Both Phillips and Garrison adhered to the notion of disinterest as the abolitionist gentleman’s prime virtue. A few years after Garrison’s death, his sons thus extolled his “gentlemanliness,” which they defned as “the preferment of others to self.”83 This explains why someone like Garrison, who came from an underprivileged background, could also display gentlemanly qualities. Philadelphia abolitionist Robert Purvis also shows that, among

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abolitionist circles, gentlemanliness could equally apply to black and white men under certain conditions. Purvis was thus consistently praised for his “high standard” because of his social class.84 When she visited him in 1852, white abolitionist Sallie Holley was immediately impressed by his “manners, conversation, and bearing.”85 While white women’s actions were often praised in abolitionist organizations in the 1830s, black women’s role was too often underplayed despite its great importance. Garrison himself was aware of the invisibilization of black women’s activism, noting in an 1833 address that although equal to white female societies “for general worth and true respectability,” black women’s organizations did “not receive as much applause as their white sisters.”86 At the height of the confict over the “woman question,” advocates of women’s participation in the same abolitionist organizations as men frequently mentioned white female abolitionists’ worth to prove their point. Before the New York meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1840, Garrison and Francis Jackson accused their opponents of quelling “the convictions and emotions of such women as a Mott, a Grimke, a Chapman, a Child and a Kelley.”87 This list of white activists suggests a difference in the way white and black women were considered within the movement, the former being deemed worthier of respect and protection than the latter. Men who supported women’s equal participation did so in ways that were compatible with dominant norms and behaviors. While Purvis’s and Phillips’s examples are evidence that men’s advocacy of women’s rights was early on framed as part of gentlemanly selfessness originating in class privilege, Garrison’s trajectory shows there were other paths to this ideal that were rooted in personal experiences of poverty and intemperance. Garrison’s unique position in the movement also allowed him and his children to be accepted in circles like the “Boston Clique,” which would normally have been out of their reach because of its social makeup, making of abolitionism a site of social mobility for him and his family.88

The “woman question” The notions that were used by male abolitionists in their defense of their female counterparts against attacks from outside of the movement in the frst half of the 1830s remained important when opposition to the “woman question” started to emerge from within after 1837. The last three years of the decade were critical to the transformation of the issue of women’s participation in mixed abolitionist societies into the “woman question,” which led to discussions about “the rights of woman.”89 At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, abolitionist Charles Follen had argued in favor of the inherent equality of rights and duties of “all human beings, white men and colored men, citizens and foreigners, men and women.”90 But it was in 1837 that the “woman question” came to dominate debates within the American abolitionist movement, when Angelina E. and

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Sarah M. Grimke were hired as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The two women were trained with other men and were soon speaking in front of mixed audiences, prompting opposition from the clergy as well as from within abolitionist ranks.91 In 1837, Garrison and some of his colleagues started to advocate women’s participation in the same organizations as men, prompting resistance almost immediately. As time went by, the confict over the terms of women’s participation in the abolitionist movement gained in intensity and became the subtext of many abolitionist meetings.92 The Grimkes’ example, however, shows that the “woman question” did not necessarily entail equal treatment, as they were paid less than white male agents.93 Phillips joined the abolitionist movement in 1837, at the exact moment when the question of women’s participation was mentioned at abolitionist meetings and in publications. Right from the very beginning, he supported the idea that women should occupy the same positions as men in the movement, in keeping with his wife’s activism and views on the woman question.94 When men protested the admission of female delegates to the New England Non-Resistance Society founded in September 1838, he agreed to sit on the executive committee in support of women.95 At the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in 1839, he also defended the position of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, which had accepted female members.96 In the last years of the decade, Garrison’s nonresistance principles and his belief in “moral suasion,” which implied both pacifsm and nonparticipation in government, became primary bones of contention between the warring sides. The question of women’s place in the movement continued to divide activists to the point that tensions became too great to overcome. The annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City in May 1840 confrmed that differences had become irreconcilable. When Abby Kelley was elected to the executive committee, several members denounced the introduction of “foreign” issues into the movement’s platform.97 The meeting resulted in the resignation of Arthur Tappan and other members, including eight black activists.98 Lucretia Mott, who was already in London, Lydia Maria Child, and Maria Weston Chapman, all white women, were then elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It is clear from those events that, despite black women’s crucial role in the development of antislavery activism and the existence of interracial female abolitionist societies, the “woman question” within the abolitionist movement was early on framed as a “white woman question.”99 The appointment of Hester Lane, a New York City black female abolitionist and former enslaved woman, to the executive committee was withdrawn. Even if the cause might have been her opposition to women’s equal position in abolitionist organizations, the limits of women’s rights discourses originating in Garrisonian ideology were already showing.100 During the New York meeting, evangelical abolitionists, led by Lewis and Arthur Tappan, founded the all-male American and Foreign Anti-Slavery

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Society.101 An address “to the abolitionists of the United States” was then issued by the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in order to give its version of the split.102 Answering the dissenting abolitionists and using the example of the U.S. Constitution, the authors opposed any “limitation of the term [person]” as meaning only men.103 They alluded to the constitution of the New Organization and the “repugnant” clause that “limited the right of speaking and acting, ‘to the offcers, and such other men as may be sent as delegates,’” an indication that the “woman question” had been one of the main bones of contention.104 The question of women’s admission in mixed abolitionist societies had organizational but also personal implications for activists. Empathy, which had been celebrated as women’s unique quality to justify their participation in abolitionism, also served as a channel for men’s defense of women’s rights in the movement.105 Maria Weston Chapman claimed that women’s exclusion was less insulting for them than for their male supporters. “Women are so accustomed to suffering under the many indignities which men unconsciously infict,” she wrote, “that in this instance they felt less keenly for themselves than did their brethren for them, the tyrannical attempt to assume their responsibilities.”106 She thus distinguished between two types of men—male allies and unenlightened men. Although it is probable that many women, especially black activists, suffered greatly from the numerous slights they had to deal with, Chapman’s remarks point to male allies’ possible role, i.e. to expose situations of oppression some of them might have seen more clearly because they were in the position of outside observers.

Abolitionist marriages Abolitionist activism was often based on the intermingling of the political and the domestic, and it was especially true among Garrisonians, who remained members of the American Anti-Slavery Society when it split.107 Although a non-negligible number of activists were single, marriage was an important element of their lives and rhetoric.108 Regular personal interactions among activists also sometimes led to sentimental attachment and the formation of “abolitionist marriages.”109 Garrison and Phillips both married into abolitionist families and were involved in antislavery as individuals and as spouses. As both men show, however, women’s rights were supported by activists whose marital and family arrangements differed widely.110 Phillips met his future wife through friends from Harvard. Only one silhouette of her made in London in 1841 has survived, but she was remembered for her “good looks” and “her cheerfulness and vivacity.”111 She was also wealthy, a perfect match for Phillips in terms of social class.112 Her health started to fail soon after they met. In the fall of 1836, her condition became desperate and Phillips tried to visit her.113 He was regularly denied access until he was admitted to her room one day in December 1836. The meeting was short, but its consequences were remarkable: “He went

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up stairs, saw her alone 20 minutes, & came down a Fiance.”114 Phillips’s proposal to Ann Greene was quite the romantic gesture, and its consequences greatly infuenced his life.115 They married on October 12, 1837, in a ceremony performed by Phillips’s brother. Not all his relatives, however, approved of the union probably because of the bride’s abolitionist convictions. A guest thus noted that Phillips’s mother behaved like “a perfect Dragon” at the wedding.116 Garrison’s engagement was probably more conventional and involved a longer period of courtship, which has been well documented through letters. He and his future wife met in April 1833, when Garrison visited Providence before embarking on his frst trip to England. Helen was the daughter of George Benson, a Providence abolitionist, and Garrison found in her family great support for his activities.117 They started a correspondence in January 1834. He was immediately taken by her.118 After they became engaged, Garrison praised the “fne and perfect affnity” existing between their two “souls.” “I am no longer William Lloyd Garrison,” he wrote her, “but Helen Eliza Benson.”119 Right from the start of their relationship, Helen adhered to the idea that her role as a wife would be to help him fulfll his mission. She was ready to dedicate her life to that end. She was aware of “the weight and responsibility” that came with being the spouse of a prominent abolitionist leader and assured him that he would never have to worry about her.120 They married on September 4, 1834, in a ceremony where neither alcohol nor cake was served.121 After his engagement, Garrison expressed his conviction that “a wedded life, if there be a union of hearts as well as of hands, is usually preferable to a single one.”122 Despite or because of their high expectations about marriage, Garrison’s and Phillips’s early years of wedded life were a source of both comfort and uncertainty for them. By the time the “woman question” was raised within the abolitionist movement, Garrison had been married for just a few years and Phillips was a newlywed. They were then both trying to come to terms with their new roles and responsibilities as husbands, and for Garrison, as a father.123 Marriage and questions that emerged in relation to it in their personal and public lives provided tests of their advocacy of the “woman question.” When in May 1834, a woman named Leah Fell proposed to Garrison, he expressed his support in the name of equality between men and women, even though he was unable to reciprocate—“Why should not females as freely communicate their love as the other sex?” To his future wife, who disapproved of the woman’s actions, he maintained that a woman was “to choose for herself.”124 Garrison’s exchanges on Fell’s proposal with his fancee might be interpreted as evidence that he had by that time started adhering to women’s rights but they also suggest that personal events in his life provided him with opportunities to refect over women’s condition.125 His engagement had made him particularly vulnerable as he was caught in a turmoil of contradictory feelings and emotions. His sympathy for Fell placed him in a

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position that encouraged him to think about women’s peculiar position in society.126 When Helen claimed that, had her fance never declared his love to her, she would “have stifed within my own heart the attachment and to no earthly mortal should I have revealed the secret,” he sympathized with the direct and personal consequences of women’s unequal treatment by society.127 In the same way, when he heard that Angelina E. Grimke was set to marry Theodore D. Weld, a man known for his intransigence, he wrote about his “fear” that she would end up experiencing “bondage.”128 Those remarks did not mean that by the 1830s he was ready to adopt the idea of an “equal symmetrical development” in marriage, which became popular among women’s rights activists in the mid-19th century, but they show his awareness of inequalities in the marriage relationship.129 Through activism, male and female abolitionists were confronted with issues that challenged their ways of thinking and compelled them to adapt their ideas to a changing world and bridge the gap between convictions and actions.130 When Phillips and Garrison got married they had to adjust to the demands of marriage and the overwhelming presence of activism in their lives. At frst sight, both men’s marital arrangements seem very different, but neither conformed to the traditional idea of the separation of spheres based on men’s role as breadwinners that was extolled in the early decades of the 19th century.131 For most of his life, Phillips did not need to work to make a living as his and his wife’s estates provided comfortably for their needs. Garrison, on the other hand, depended on the wealth and generosity of other men, including Phillips and Forten, and never truly provided for his family in the conventional sense of the term. When he was imprisoned in Baltimore in 1830, it was Arthur Tappan, the wealthy trader, who paid his fne. It was also Tappan along with other black and white activists who agreed to fund the Liberator in its frst years and it is black readers and subscribers who allowed it to survive.132 The newspaper did not generate proft and Garrison was never able to make a decent and stable living with it but he was willing to sacrifce his and his family’s fnancial security for his fght.133 When he got engaged, he was concerned with his situation and the responsibility he felt in being a breadwinner.134 Financial diffculties were a constant worry for the Garrisons right from the start and it was clearly Helen Benson Garrison who bore the brunt of her husband’s low income and the lifestyle associated with his leadership in the movement.135 After his death, his children recalled his somewhat careless attitude on matters that involved money.136 Contrary to the Phillipses, who appeared equally active in the public sphere despite Ann’s poor health, the Garrisons’ public involvement in the movement was imbalanced. As a man wholly committed to the abolitionist cause, Garrison was very often absent from home in the frst years of his marriage. Very rapidly, Helen Benson Garrison assumed the role of the “conventional housewife” and the early years of her marriage were probably very diffcult for her.137 Life as the wife of a leader of the abolitionist movement was not an easy task. She was pregnant with their frst

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child during the 1835 Boston mob and the violence targeting her husband impressed her greatly.138 On their frst wedding anniversary, Garrison wrote his brother-in-law that he did not “marry her, expecting that she would assume a prominent station in the antislavery cause, but for domestic quietude and happiness.” In the same letter, he conceded that he had made a “wise” choice in choosing a spouse who had abolitionist convictions but “was less immediately and entirely connected with” the fght, probably an incorrect assertion.139 On June 14, 1840, a few hours before he landed in England, he poured his heart out to his wife, claiming that “duty and friendship demanded the sacrifce” of his absences. “Sometimes you have hinted that I was too ready to go away from home,” he added, which shows the tensions that existed in the Garrisons’ early years of marriage and Helen’s frustration.140 Despite her complaints, however, he decided to extend his stay, “in the consequence of the importunities of friends, who desired him to visit Scotland and Ireland,” he claimed.141 Not only did he decide to leave his wife when she was close to her due date but he also made the choice to stay in England after his son’s birth without consulting her, which also helps us put her complaints and his assurances in perspective and understand his priorities.142 The experience of domesticity was however crucial to Garrison as it was for other Garrisonians.143 The domestic sphere was a haven for female and male activists who were the targets of violent attacks.144 At a time when women’s domesticity was extolled, men’s participation in the activities of the household was also becoming the norm of middle-class masculinity.145 While men’s experience of domesticity was not necessarily synonymous with the support of women’s rights and gender equality, it contributed to an increased awareness of women’s condition among Garrisonians. In 1838, Samuel J. May praised men’s domestic role in strikingly modern terms. “I hold that husbands and fathers are as much bound by their domestic ties as wives and mothers are and may not with greater propriety neglect their households for any more public cares,” he claimed.146 Despite his frequent absences, Garrison’s “home character” was often noted by his contemporaries and his relatives.147 His sons remembered him as “a handy man about the house.”148 The stories they tell, however, show that his presence verged on the tyrannical.149 The Garrisons provide us with one of the best examples of domestic abolitionism, which centered on the home as a space where important political work was done.150 Helen and William both used the term “hotel” to describe their house, an allusion to the stream of guests that they entertained as well as its nature as the meeting point between the public and the private.151 While Helen did not consistently participate in public abolitionist activities, her role was however central to the fght, not only as a helpmeet, but as the “magnet” celebrated by both Garrison and Phillips.152 This was confrmed by Charlotte Forten, James Forten’s niece, who described having dinner at their house and calling Helen “one of the loveliest persons” she

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had ever met and “worthy of such a husband.”153 It is impossible to think that she did not participate in the many political conversations that took place at her dinner table or in her parlor.154 Phillips’s place in the domestic sphere was inevitably infuenced by his wife’s health.155 In the early years of their marriage, there was no real indication that Ann’s condition would become a lifelong affiction and the trip to Europe was a sign that the couple hoped for a recovery. Although devoted to his wife and her well-being, Phillips was also a man of action and conviction, which made his European exile diffcult to bear. The letters he wrote during his stay, some of which were published in the Liberator, show melancholy feelings prompted by homesickness and months of political inactivity.156 After their return to the United States in the early 1840s, the Phillipses gradually came to terms with Ann’s situation, around which they rearranged their lives, shaped as they were by their exclusive and intense relationship as well as their unconditional commitment to reform. Contrary to the Garrisons, they very rarely entertained guests and Phillips never left Boston for more than a few days at a time. Their home inevitably became the place where intense political discussions took place between the two spouses. Phillips also was his wife’s caretaker, forcing him to invest the domestic sphere and assume a role usually associated with women.157 In the later part of the 1830s, both Garrison and Phillips had to adjust to the joint demands of married life and activism. The “woman question” did resonate with different aspects of their personal lives in the years that followed. Despite the different roles played by their wives in the abolitionist movement, they both experienced female infuence frst-hand. Garrison’s wife organized his home life to make sure it would be the foundation of his activism. Ann Greene Phillips’s disease meant that the personal conversations between her and her husband weighed on his activism. In both cases, the two men’s marital arrangements made them particularly prone to embrace the notion of female infuence in all its ambivalent aspects.

The London convention More than 400 delegates from the United States, France, the United Kingdom and its colonies attended the London convention, which lasted for almost two weeks.158 When the proceedings opened on June 12, the women who were present sat in the “upper end and one side of the room.”159 The meeting’s original call had been issued to “the friends of the slave of every nation.”160 In August 1839, Phillips, who was then in London, had passed on Thompson’s wish that Garrison would attend the London meeting “accompanied by many of the men and women of our ranks,” which shows that both English and American activists had originally interpreted the invitation in the largest possible way.161 In February 1840, however, the meeting’s organizing committee, which was warned by the American opponents to women’s participation that American organizations would be sending

28 The “man question” female delegates, issued a recommendation that only “gentlemen” would be accepted as delegates.162 Once in England, the female representatives of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the American Free Produce Association, and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society were told that the decision to exclude them would still stand, which prompted the women from Pennsylvania to publish a protest reaffrming their status as “delegates” and “co-equals.”163 It was Phillips who was chosen to make the frst case for women’s admission, probably for political as well as personal reasons. A well-known orator, he also had personal stakes in the matter due to his wife’s status as a delegate.164 He was clearly eager to reclaim the promising position he had held in the abolitionist movement before leaving for Europe. Although they had not been directly involved in the latest developments of the split within the American Anti-Slavery Society and had been given credentials to the London convention while abroad, the Phillipses had been kept informed by personal letters and the press.165 The debates in London included terms that were similar to the discussions that had been taking place for several months in the United States. Americans had been discussing the question of women’s equal participation in abolitionist societies for almost three years, developing arguments and strategies on the issue. When Phillips frst spoke, he called for the preparation of an offcial membership roll, which members of the American antislavery organizations had fought over at the beginning of their meetings since 1838.166 The main two arguments he relied on to defend women’s participation in London—the important role played by women in the American abolitionist movement and the analogy between blacks’ treatment in the United States and women’s exclusion in Great Britain—had also widely circulated among Americans.167 On the contrary, British delegates did not all have the same level of awareness, as evidenced in their sometimes ambivalent positions.168 This difference between British and American delegates explains why some described the debate over women’s participation as the result of a cultural misunderstanding.169 The many dissimilarities chronicled by American delegates while in England might have helped fuel discussions on cultural divergences on the main foor. During their stay, Americans were kept busy with parties, sightseeing, and various meetings and they had many opportunities to investigate England’s idiosyncrasies.170 One point that was frequently underlined by Americans was British men’s intemperance, which they frst witnessed on the ships that took them to Great Britain.171 American delegates were apt to notice the different sets of expectations regarding women’s behavior in Great Britain. When Mary Grew visited Saint Paul’s Cathedral, she was discouraged from ascending the tower by an attendant, who claimed this activity was not for “ladies.” She however ignored the warning and reached the top.172 In an interesting echo to the events in London, some American women traveling to England had to leave

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a party on the ship when alcohol was served but still witnessed the scene “through the hatchway.” When a toast was proposed “in honor of the ladies of America,” some of the men noted the women’s presence and asked them to name a man to represent them. According to Mary Grew, the answer was that “the women of America did not deputize gentlemen to do their business, but did it themselves,” a resolution that they however were unable to keep during the London meeting.173 Differences in terms of women’s expected behaviors became even more noticeable during the convention. Reluctant to be dragged into the confict over women’s participation, British female abolitionists initially refused to meet with their American counterparts, fnally agreeing four days after the end of the convention on June 27.174 When Lucretia Mott decided to forfeit her credentials, she mentioned that merely attending the convention was in itself major progress for women in England.175 As noted by delegates in the course of the debates, however, there had been no consensus among Americans over the issue of women’s participation and the cultural argument was not completely well-founded.176 Contrary to what had been the norm at antislavery meetings in the United States in the past several months, women in London were not allowed to speak for themselves or vote on their own admission, relying instead on male mouthpieces to advance their cause.177 When the question had been raised at American conventions, it had been very often settled in favor of women. In May 1838, the New England Anti-Slavery Society Convention admitted 60–70 women with speaking and voting rights.178 At the May 1840 meeting in New York, when the question of “the right of women to a voice in the decision” of their admission was raised by two opponents, the President, Francis Jackson, explained “that it is in order for women to vote.”179 Women might not have addressed the London convention directly but the debate over their participation took place in their presence. Male delegates were clearly aware of the awkwardness of the situation and even those opposed to women’s inclusion expressed the desire not to hurt their feelings. This caused a delegate from Vermont, Jonathan Miller, to urge the other men present to “remember, that in receiving or rejecting these ladies, they acknowledge or despise.”180 Men made it a point of honor to multiply expressions of respect for their female counterparts.181 One notable exception was Henry Grew, Mary Grew’s father, who was particularly vocal in his opposition to women’s participation and argued against their admission in the presence of his own daughter in strong terms, which shows that family relationships did not guarantee support of women’s participation.182 While there is no record that male delegates ever suggested that their female counterparts should address the London convention, or that women themselves asked for the opportunity, we have evidence that women delegates did speak their minds and infuenced the debates that took place.183 When during the frst day’s debates a black delegate from Barbados, Samuel Jackman Prescod, claimed that he knew with a certainty that the female

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delegates had never expected to be accepted, he was rebuked by both the chairman and Phillips himself in terms reminiscent of a note that his wife had passed him.184 Other men also played the role of women’s mouthpiece, for instance Bradburn, who explained why the women of Massachusetts had refused to withdraw their credentials.185 Black women might however have been an important constituency in the American abolitionist movement but none of them were chosen as delegates and their absence was not noted in the discussions.186 The male assembly voted overwhelmingly against admitting women as delegates.187 The vote, however, did not stop discussions about women’s participation in part because of the decision made by Garrison and three other American male delegates, including Charles Lenox Remond, the only African American delegate to travel to London, to forfeit their credentials in order to protest the assembly’s decision.188 Before leaving for London, Garrison knew there was a good chance he might not make it in time for the opening of the convention, which put him in a state of depression throughout his voyage. When the lack of winds delayed his ship further, the possibility turned into a certainty and he wrote about his anxiety as to the way the “woman question” was going to be settled.189 Garrison’s decision to forfeit his credentials came from his conviction that he could have tipped the scale in favor of women’s admission had he been present on the frst day of the convention.190 Although there is no doubt that his decision was rooted in a sincere support of women’s equal participation, it is also important to note that he felt his opponents had used the “woman question” to try and take control of the movement and discredit him as a leader. In London, however, he still seized every opportunity to speak outside of the convention.191 Garrison’s silence at the meeting made women’s exclusion even more visible and the “woman question” a very tangible one because of the sacrifce it involved on the part of a man who should have been one of the stars of the convention.192 Charles Lenox Remond’s decision to forfeit his credentials sheds light on the different meanings of this silent protest. Born in a black abolitionist family from Massachusetts, he was one of the delegates of the American Anti-Slavery Society, a tribute to his signifcant position in the movement. An agent for the New England Anti-Slavery Society since 1838, he was also a well-respected orator as evidenced by his lengthy tour in Great Britain following the London convention.193 Remond could have thus anticipated playing a crucial part in the meeting and his sacrifce was as important if not more than Garrison’s. The only black American present in London, he felt the need to defend his decision in letters published in the Colored American and the Liberator, a probable sign of his responsibility toward the constituency he had been expected to represent.194 In two letters published in the Liberator in the fall of 1840, he reiterated his support of women’s equal rights—“I hope I am not far behind friend Garrison as a woman’s rights man,” he wrote in October. Answering his critics, he argued that his

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silent protest had not prevented him from doing his best as an abolitionist advocate when abroad.195 Garrison’s gesture and the fact that, unlike Remond, he was not asked to justify it when he returned to the United States, also point to his privilege as a white man in the movement. For the nonparticipation in representative democracy that he and other activists supported to have political value, the position needed to be the result of voluntary self-exclusion, not of discrimination. For the black and white women and most black men who were disenfranchised in the 1830s and 1840s, the adoption of similar views was mostly symbolic.196 Contrary to Remond, who was expected to represent black Americans, Garrison’s white male privilege also meant that he did not have to answer to anyone about his choice.197 Garrison’s position was informed by both his views on the “woman question” and more personal queries relative to his position as a husband and father prompted by his long absence and the guilt he might have felt about leaving his wife when she was about to give birth.198 The two questions overlapped in the choice of a name for his newborn son. When hearing the news of his son’s birth, he was “joyfully electrifed.” He and his wife had not decided on a name for the baby before he had left for England, and he suggested to Helen that they let the matter rest until his return, a situation which must have been diffcult to bear for her.199 Their frst son had been named after George Thompson, a friend of the family, and his fellow activists present in London were intent on perpetuating the tradition, suggesting different names.200 Garrison returned to the United States on August 15. In early September, the baby was still without a name. “I have not yet given a name! Shall we call a ‘World’s Convention’ to decide upon it? If so, remember that women are not to be included in the call! And yet I am determined to have their decision in the case,” he wrote British abolitionist Elizabeth Pease.201 The Garrisons eventually settled on the name Wendell Phillips. While Phillips attributed the choice to the fact that he was the frst to inform Garrison about his son’s birth, it was also probably motivated by other reasons, among which his defense of women’s participation in London, Garrison’s desire to strengthen his friendship with Phillips, and the guarantee that the latter’s wealth and infuence would be an asset for Garrison’s son.202 Although used to the gesture—as it was the third baby bearing his name—Phillips was clearly moved by it and he and his wife proved to be generous to his namesake through the years.203 The events that took place before and at the London convention had important consequences on Phillips and Garrison as well as the abolitionist movement and the women’s rights issue. After London, the Phillipses stayed in Europe for another year but came back to the United States in 1841. They adjusted to Ann’s condition, which continued to shape their lives, but they managed to maintain a marriage based on deep affection and form meaningful relationships. In 1849, they adopted Phoebe Garnaut, an 11-year-old

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orphaned girl, whom they raised despite Ann’s illness.204 While his wife almost never left the house anymore, Phillips resumed his ascent within the abolitionist movement.205 The Garrisons also settled into a married life that refected a traditional separation of roles but they remained committed to domestic abolitionism. The division of the abolitionist movement also had important political consequences. It gave the American Anti-Slavery Society greater ideological coherence and critical roles for women.206 It also provided male allies with an important role in the advocacy of women’s rights and allowed them to think of men as possible benefciaries in the fght for gender equality while making mixed activities and organizations the main framework of subsequent agitation in favor of women’s rights. The events of the second half of the 1830s however also account for why and how the “woman question” and then women’s rights came to be narrowly framed in both racial and class terms. The women who were sent to London as delegates were all white, and, even if they did not conform to expected gender roles, they also belonged to privileged and “respectable” backgrounds, a choice that had profound consequences on the future of the women’s rights movement.207

Notes 1 On the origin of the convention, see W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 68. On the use of the name “World Anti-Slavery Convention,” see ibid., 74. 2 This story can be found for instance in The History of Woman Suffrage. ECS, SBA, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage, 6 volumes, 2nd edition (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1881), 1: 61–62. According to Lucretia Mott, the idea of a women’s rights convention was discussed in 1841. Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 97. For an analysis of the infuence of the London convention on the emergence of a “women’s political culture” among American women, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 313. 3 Slavery and “The Woman Question”: Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, ed. Frederick B. Tolles, supplement No. 23 to the Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society (Haverford, PA and London: Friends’ Historical Association and Friends Historical Society, 1952), 43–44 (emphasis in original). 4 In January 1839, Garrison had denounced “a conspiracy” against him. WLG to Samuel J. May, January 4, 1838 [1839], in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Volume 2: A House Dividing Against Itself, ed. Louis Ruchames (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 415. On the split of the abolitionist movement, see Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang,

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5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12

13

33

1996 [1976]); McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy. On the “woman question” and abolitionism, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 266–298. Lucretia Mott took special interest in the free produce question. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 98. Participants were particularly upset by the fall of a man who was closing windows in the ceiling when he fell from 40 feet or so and injured two delegates. Mary Grew, Diary, Alma Lutz collection, women’s studies manuscript collections from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, series 1, woman’s suffrage (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1990), M-59, Reel 973, No. M 13, June 17, 1840. On the second day of the meeting, the chairman expressed his satisfaction at seeing the delegates who had been “in the minority” the day before ready to participate in the debates. Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and Held in London, from Friday June 12th, to Tuesday, June 23rd, 1840 (London: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1841), 46. Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 37; Sklar, “Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,” 313. Two years later, Garrison wrote that the gallery had been “a capital point of observation.” WLG to Elizabeth Pease, April 4, 1843, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, volume 3, No Union with Slaveholders, 1841–1849, ed. Walter M. Merrill (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), 148. On the role of the gallery at the convention, see Karen I. Halbersleben, Women’s Participation in the British Antislavery Movement, 1824-1865 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), 50. Although the outcome of the vote on women’s participation was not a surprise, it was a major disappointment, only equal to the excitement the event had aroused. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 90. On the expenses induced by the trip to London, see Charles P. Bonson, “Expense of a Trip to England,” Liberator, March 20, 1840, 46. In London, the American delegates deepened existing friendships, but they also developed more romantic attachments, as for instance American activists George Bradburn and Mary Grew. Slavery and “The Woman Question,” 14. Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 65. In Garrison’s mind, his son was always to be associated with the London convention and his own friendship with his namesake. See WLG to Wendell Phillips Garrison, June 3, 1878, GFP/SSC; WLG to WP, Boston, September 12, 1842, WPP. The exact status of Ann Greene Phillips as a delegate at the London convention is a matter of debate. Sklar, “Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,” 333. WP to Sarah Phillips, May 10, 1840, WPP. At Phillips’s funeral in April 1884, Archibald Grimke, Sarah M. Grimke and Angelina E. Grimke Weld’s nephew, called Garrison and Phillips “the common parents” of abolitionism, describing the former as the “mother” and the latter as the “father” of the movement. Archibald H. Grimke, A Eulogy of Wendell Phillips, delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, April 9, 1884 (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 1884), 27–28. Also see HWB, Wendell Phillips: A Commemorative Discourse (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1884), 418. Ralph Korngold associated the two men in Two Friends of Man: The Story of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and Their Relationships with Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950). W. Caleb McDaniel has underscored the necessity to study Phillips and Garrison together. McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 17. Harriet Hyman Alonso, Growing Up Abolitionist: The Story of the Garrison Children (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 22. The reasons

34

14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27

The “man question” for Garrison’s father’s disappearance are unknown. See Alonso, Growing Up, 12–13; Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 13. Alonso, Growing Up, 22. Garrison’s maternal grandparents were also indentured servants. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children. 4 volumes (New York: Century Co., 1885–1889), 1: 14. On the apprentice system in early America, see Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009). WLG to William B. Oliver, October 25, 1876, GFP/HL. Alonso, Growing Up Abolitionist, 17–18. In 1815, Frances Lloyd Garrison moved her family to Baltimore. A few months later she sent William back to Newburyport. She died in September 1823, just after she and her son had reunited for the frst time in seven years. Garrison called printing his “destiny.” WLG to William B. Oliver, October 25, 1876, GFP/HL. McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 23–28. Garrison’s education was primarily literary. Mayer, All on Fire, 28. Ibid., 53. Helen Eliza Garrison. A Memorial (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1876), 7, GFP/ SSC. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 1: 92. About black abolitionists’ infuence on Garrison, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 214–227. Garrison attacked colonization, which advocated the migration of blacks to Africa, in a well-known pamphlet published in 1832. WLG, Thoughts on African Colonization: Or, an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832). On colonization, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 161–171, 330–338; Douglas Egerton, “‘Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic 5.4 (Winter 1985): 463–480. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 1: 140. On Boston blacks’ crucial role in the Liberator, see Donald M. Jacobs, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Boston’s Blacks, 1830–1865,” The New England Quarterly 44.2 (June 1971): 259–277. On James Forten’s role in starting the paper, see Mary Kelley, “‘Talents Committed to Your Care’: Reading and Writing Radical Abolitionism in Antebellum America,” The New England Quarterly 88.1 (March 2015): 43. Forten regularly gave advice to white activists on how to sell their publications. Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 105. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 240. Ruth Bogin and Jean Fagan Yellin, Introduction, in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 7. On the Forten women’s activism, see Janice Sumler-Lewis, “The Forten-Purvis Women of Philadelphia and the American Anti-Slavery Crusade,” The Journal of Negro History 66.4 (Winter 1981–1982): 281–288. On Sarah Forten’s literary contribution to the Liberator, see Todd S. Gernes, “Poetic Justice: Sarah Forten, Eliza Earle, and the Paradox of Intellectual Property,” The New England Quarterly 71.2 (June 1998): 229–265. Abolitionist poet James Greenleaf Whittier published a poem entitled “To the Daughters of James Forten” in the Liberator. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 273–274.

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28 Higginson remembered that at Harvard Phillips “was the only student of that period, for whom the family carriage was habitually sent out to Cambridge on Saturday morning to bring him into Boston for Sunday.” “Other Days and Ways in Boston and Cambridge,” TWH to Mr. Rossiter, February 3, 1911, 4, TWH Papers, 1853–1911, AAS. One of Phillips’s ancestors was on board the Arabella in 1630, and his father was the frst mayor of Boston. On Boston’s aristocracy, see Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard & the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980); Betty G. Farrell, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 1993). 29 George Lowell Austin, The Life and Times of Wendell Phillips (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1888), 81. 30 “Wendell Phillips at the 34th annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, evening session,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 25, 1867, 1. 31 The Boston mob made such an impression on Phillips that he later exchanged bitter letters with the son of the mayor of Boston in 1835 over the role of his father. Theodore Lyman, Papers Relating to the Garrison Mob (Cambridge: Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 1870). On the infuence of those events on Phillips’s views, see Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 43. 32 See for instance Francis Jackson Garrison, Ann Phillips, Wife of Wendell Phillips: A Memorial Sketch, (Boston: printed for private circulation, 1886), 4. Irving H. Bartlett also notes religion as a decisive factor in Phillips’s conversion to abolitionism. Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips: Brahmin Radical (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 58. 33 Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 45. Also see Quanquin, “The Rights of Others,” 223–224. 34 Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 63. 35 Phillips’s contemporaries believed that by becoming an abolitionist he had sacrifced his social position to the cause. See Francis Jackson and WLG (Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society) to WP, June 4, 1839, WPP. 36 Garrison urged women to join the temperance movement a few years before he became an abolitionist. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 1: 85–86. 37 Elizabeth Chandler wrote for the Genius of Universal Emancipation, which also had a “Ladies Department.” Hersh, The Slavery of Sex, 7. 38 McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 50. Garrison’s trip to London was funded in part by James Forten. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 249. 39 WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, August 11, 1834, GFP/HL. 40 McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 58. 41 On black women’s role in freedom suits, see Loren Schweninger, “Freedom Suits, African American Women, and the Genealogy of Slavery,” The Mary and William Quarterly 71.1 (January 2014): 35–62. 42 On black women’s crucial role in the political sphere in the 19th century, see Jones, All Bound Up Together. 43 Julie Winch, “Sarah Forten’s Anti-Slavery Networks,” in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, eds. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewster Stewart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 143. On black abolitionist women’s authorship, see Kelley, “Talents Committed to Your Care,” 37–72. The abolitionist press was instrumental in giving black and white women a voice. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 29; Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xiii.

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44 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 27. 45 WLG to the members of the Boston Female Antislavery Society, April 9, 1834, Boston Female Antislavery Society Letterbook, April 9, 1834 to January 7, 1838, MHS. The Corresponding Secretary of the Society Mary Grew noted that, by speaking his mind, he had treated the members of the association as “rational beings” and had showed he was not inclined to use different standards to judge women’s actions and behavior. “Answer by order of the board, Mary Grew Cor. Sec., Boston, April 11, 1834,” Boston Female Antislavery Society Letterbook. 46 On Lucretia Mott’s suggestions about the Declaration of Sentiments adopted on the occasion, see Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 64–65. 47 American Anti-Slavery Society, Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society at it third decade, held in the city of Philadelphia, Dec. 3rd, and 4th, 1863 (New York: Anti-Slavery Society, 1864), 41. 48 Maria W. Stewart, “An Address Delivered before the African-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston,” Liberator, April 28, 1832, 66. Pieces unrelated to slavery published in the Liberator also insisted on women’s specifc qualities. See for instance “Woman,” Liberator, February 18, 1832, 28; “On the Loveliness of Woman,” Liberator, March 3, 1832, 36; “The Young Mother,” Liberator, June 7, 1834, 92; “Advice to Young Ladies,” Liberator, August 9, 1834, 128. 49 First annual report of the American Anti-Slavery Society with the speeches delivered at the anniversary meeting (New York: Dorr & Butterfeld, 1834), 36. 50 On the “female supplicant,” see Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3–25. Abolitionist men also identifed with this image as Theodore Weld’s intense response to it shows. Ibid., 17. 51 WLG, Address delivered in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, before the Free People of Color (New York: printed for the free people of color, 1833), 14. On women’s role, also see “Female Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, July 14, 1832, 110. 52 WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, January 18, 1834; Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, February 18, 1834, GFP/HL. The society was later formed in April 1835. George Thompson to “My dear Sir,” New York, April 1835, in George Thompson, Letters and Addresses by George Thompson during his mission in the United States, from Oct. 1st, 1834, to Nov. 27, 1835 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), 60. 53 Bogin and Yellin, Introduction, 6. 54 About female antislavery societies’ role in funding the movement, see Ann Chapman to Abby Kelley, August 13, 1836, AKFP/AAS; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 276–277; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 169–171; Ralph Thompson, “The Liberty Bell and Other Anti-Slavery Gift-Books,” The New England Quarterly 7.1 (March 1934): 154–168. On women’s petition campaigns, see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 55 Black women’s role was also crucial in the organization of black conventions. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 89–90. 56 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 28, 49. As early as the frst half of the 1830s, pieces published in the Liberator questioned women’s traditional roles, providing early examples of a juxtaposition of different discourses on women’s place in society. An article published in March 1834 advocated for women’s entry in the medical profession in the name of their “superior capacities for the science

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57 58 59

60 61

62

63 64

65

66 67 68

69

37

of medicine.” “Women Physicians (by A Physician, in the Cincinnati Gazette),” Liberator, March 21, 1834, 48. Bogin and Yellin, Introduction, 10. Also see Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 140–156. Bogin and Yellin, Introduction, 3. On women’s differing opinions on women’s equal participation in abolitionist associations, see Sarah Baker to WP, June 4, 1839, WPP. LM to Abigail Foster, March 18, 1839, in Selected letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 81–82. On the construction of women’s activist networks in Philadelphia, see Emma Jones Lapsansky, “Feminism, Freedom, and Community: Charlotte Forten and Women Activists in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113.1 (1989): 3–19. Women abolitionists organized three Anti-Slavery Conventions of American Women between 1837 and 1839. Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 49. Charles C. Burleigh to Abby Kelley, August 27, 1840, AKFP/WHM. On attacks against Kelley, see John Greenleaf Whittier to his sister, May 30, 1840, in John B. Pickard, “John Greenleaf Whittier and the Abolitionist Schism of 1840,” The New England Quarterly 37 (June 1964): 253. Also see Angelina E. Grimke to Abby Kelley, February 24, 1838 (?), AKFP /WHM. On friendships between men and women in the early American Republic, see Good, Founding Friendships. On the importance of friendships for Garrisonians, see Donald Yacovone, “Abolitionists and the Language of Fraternal Love,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 86; Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 134. On Garrison’s praise of women’s actions see WLG to Elizabeth Pease Nichol, Boston, November 6, 1837, GFP/HL; WLG to LM, Boston, April 28, 1840, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2: 590. Lucia Weston to Deborah Weston, Boston, January 22 through January 31, 1837, Deborah Weston Correspondence, BPL. Cited in Chambers, The Weston Sisters, 19. Lee V. Chambers also notes that Maria Weston Chapman spoke of “Wobbly Garrison” and called Samuel J. May “shilly shally,” derogatory terms evoking weakness and effeminacy. Ibid., 163. Anne Warren Weston to Mary Weston, May 6, 1839, BPL. In the report of the 1838 New England Anti-Slavery Convention, it is mentioned that Abby Kelley spoke “most manfully, though with great modesty and dignity, and carried her point by acclamation.” “The Late New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, June 22, 1838, 97 (emphasis in original). Cited in Garrison, Ann Phillips, 17; Wendell and Ann Greene Phillips to the Garrisons, n.d., BPL. See for instance WLG to James Carnigham, September 16, 1823, GFP/SSC. Also see Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, June 23, 1834, GFP/HL; Alonso, Growing Up, 22. On Garrisonians’ rejection of “rigid defnitions of gender,” see Yacovone, “Abolitionists and the Language of Fraternal Love,” 87. On the abolitionist discourse that denounced the way slavery deprived the enslaved of their traditional roles, see Kristin Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850–1860,” American Quarterly 45 (1993): 561. Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 30; Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 31, 158. The 1830s also coincided with the use of

38

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80

81

82

83

The “man question” “voyeuristic abolitionism,” centered on “sexually explicit language” aimed at mobilizing male and female activists. Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic 28.1 (Spring, 2008): 92. The denunciation of the South as a place of unbridled corruption was also present in the Federalist rhetoric that infuenced Garrison. Mark M. Arkin, “The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric,” The Journal of American History 88.1 (June 2001): 75–98; Matthew Mason, “Federalists, Abolitionists, and the Problem of Infuence,” American Nineteenth-Century History 10.1 (2009): 1–27. On the reality and heterogeneity of slave and free black marriages before and after the Civil War, see Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock. On the riots that took place during Thompson’s lecture tour in 1835, see McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 53. George Thompson to WLG, October 22, 1835, in Letters and Addresses by George Thompson, 109. “Appendix: Triumph of Mobocracy in Boston, From the Boston Liberator of November 7, 1835,” in WLG, Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1852), 374. Proceedings, 30. “Right and Wrong in Boston,” Liberator, February 20, 1836, 30. After the second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was mobbed in May 1838, Maria Weston Chapman suspended her abolitionist activities for a few months. Chambers, The Weston Sisters, 123. Garrison’s love for Romantic poetry was also in keeping with ideas of chivalrous masculinity. McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 43. Proceedings, 36. “You talk of being men, then be men,” a male delegate against women’s participation also argued. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 35 (my emphasis). On women abolitionists as “ladies,” see for instance “Mrs. Child’s New Work,” The Liberator, September 7, 1833, 1. Years later, Ida B. Wells was intent on claiming “her status as a lady” in the face of segregation. Ross, Manning the Race, 125. Dorothy C. Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in NineteenthCentury Boston (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 24. On oratory as man’s area, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Charleston: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 58. Ernest Crosby, Garrison the Non-Resistant (Chicago: The Public Publishing Company, 1905), 59. On the importance of personal reform in the early temperance movement, see Joyce Appleby, “The Personal Roots of the First Temperance Movement,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 141.2 (June 1997): 141–159. On the infuence of evangelicalism on abolitionism, see Lucia Bergamasco, “D’un reveil à l’autre: l’evangelisme americain aux XVIIIe et XIXe siecles. Aperçu historiographique,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 85 (June 2000): 81–104. See for instance the defnition of a “gentleman” given by Presbyterian pastor Nathan Perkins, The National Sins (Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1812), 13. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 4: 324. This insistence on “woman’s rights men’s” gentlemanliness reversed the popular opinion that they “unsexed” themselves by denying assumed defnitions of true manhood and womanhood. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 271–272.

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84 Margaret J. Burleigh to WP, January 28, 1868, WPP. Purvis’s wealth made him one of Garrison’s benefactors. See “William Lloyd Garrison, Indenture and Declaration of Trust,” January 1844, GFP/SSC. 85 Holley also described his wife Harriet as “very lady-like in manners and conversation; something of the ease and blandness of a southern lady.” Letter from Sallie Holley, November 26, 1852, in A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters of Sallie Holley, ed. John White Chadwick (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 292. 86 WLG, Address delivered in Boston, 13–14. 87 Francis Jackson and WLG, “To the Abolitionists of the United States, April 24, 1840,” in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 4: 577. The selective use of female fgures to illustrate women worth protecting is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s beautiful text published in the New York Times in 1971. In it, she contrasted the two terms “women,” when applied to black women and “ladies” to describe white women. Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” New York Times, August 22, 1971, section SM, 14. 88 Both Parker Pillsbury and Frederick Douglass felt ill at ease among elite Garrisonians. Stacey M. Robertson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 108. 89 In December 1837, “Universal Emancipation,” including “THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN to their utmost extent”—“to redeem woman as well as man from a servile to an equal condition,” was added as the new motto of the Liberator. WLG and Isaac Knapp, “Prospectus of the Liberator. Volume VIII,” Liberator, December 15, 1837, 203. 90 New England Anti-Slavery Society, Fourth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, presented January 20, 1836 (Boston: Garrison & Knapp, 1836), 49. 91 On the consequences of the Grimke sisters’ tour, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 279–280; Chambers, The Weston Sisters, 28–32. 92 For an example of the tensions generated by the “woman question,” see the reaction of Amos A. Phelps when he was asked to “introduc[e] women” at a committee meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Anne Warren Weston to Mary Weston, July 9, 1838, Anne Warren Weston Correspondence, BPL. 93 Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 141. 94 In 1837, Phillips apparently discussed the creation of a periodical about the woman question with Garrison and in 1839 he sponsored a petition against racial discrimination written by women in Lynn, Massachusetts. Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 66, 72. In 1838, Anne Warren Weston wrote that Ann Greene Phillips “frighten[ed] the ministers’ wives about the country half to death, talking on the woman question.” Anne Warren Weston to Mary Weston, July 9, 1838, Anne Warren Weston Correspondence, BPL. 95 “Proceedings of the Peace Convention,” Liberator, September 28, 1838, 54. 96 “Proceedings of the N.E. Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, June 7, 1839, 90. In June 1839, before leaving for Europe, Sarah Baker thanked Phillips for speaking for women. Sarah Baker to WP, June 4, 1839, WPP. Also see Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 184. 97 “Letter from 20 ministers of the M.E. Church, Baltimore to the American AntiSlavery Society, May 9, 1840,” in Seventh Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society (New York: American AntiSlavery Society, 1840), 10–11. The New York convention provides an illuminating example of the value of what Derrick Spires calls “intrusive” practices of citizenship. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 175.

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98 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 53. 99 On black women’s decisive role in abolitionism, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 267–278. On the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, see ibid., 271–272. 100 Ibid., 287. According to Martha Jones, the decision is an indication that “the principle of the equality of the sexes was apparently applied differently to black and white women.” Jones, All Bound Up Together, 57. She also mentions the ambivalence of the attitude of the black male activists present at the meeting. Ibid., 56–57. 101 Lori D. Ginzberg, however, notes that some of the men who left the American Anti-Slavery Society had supported women’s abolitionist endeavors. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 87. 102 Seventh Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American AntiSlavery Society, 55–56. 103 Ibid., 56–57. The meaning of the term “person” was discussed at other meetings. See American Anti-Slavery Society, Declaration of Sentiments and Constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), 18. 104 Seventh Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American AntiSlavery Society, 58 (emphasis in original). 105 On the role of compassion in antebellum reform activism, see Elizabeth B. Clark, “The Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82.2 (September 1995): 486. On “the repressive effects of empathy” and the “obliteration” of the black body it resulted in, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19–20. On sentimental antislavery in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s work, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 218–220. 106 Maria Weston Chapman, Right and Wrong in Massachusetts (Boston: Dow & Jackson’s Anti-Slavery Press, 1839), 52–53. 107 Helene Quanquin, “‘The World to Each Other’: The Joint Politics of Isolation and Reform among Garrisonian Abolitionists,” in Cultures of Solitude: Loneliness-Limitation-Liberation, eds. Ina Bergmann and Stefan Hippler (Frankfurt Am Main: Peter Lang, 2017, 139–152; Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 204. 108 Deborah Hansen shows that half of the women active in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society were single. Hansen, Strained Sisterhood. Speeches after speeches, abolitionists denounced the way enslavers “deformed marriage” by denying the enslaved the legal right to marry and by sexually abusing them. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 57. 109 Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 87, 78; Chambers, The Weston Sisters, 14. 110 Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 85. 111 Wendell Phillips Garrison to Francis Jackson Garrison, August 6, 1886, Wendell Phillips Garrison Papers, HL. In 1878, Ann Greene Phillips wrote Garrison that she had never had her portrait drawn. AGP to WLG, November 17, 1878, William Lloyd Garrison Correspondence, BPL. She had obviously forgotten about the silhouette made in London and discovered after her death by Francis Jackson Garrison. Wendell Phillips Garrison to Fanny Villard, May 2, 1886, Fanny Garrison Villard Correspondence and Papers, 1844–1928, HL. 112 Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 44.

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113 Anne Warren Weston to Deborah Warren, November 19, 1836, Anne Warren Weston Correspondence, BPL. 114 Anne Warren Weston to Deborah Warren, December 15, 1836, Anne Warren Weston Correspondence, BPL. Also see Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 47. 115 According to James B. Stewart, Phillips’s proposal was a way “to restore his sense of mastery over his feelings and his purpose in life” but also a reaction to the helplessness he had experienced when his father had died. Ibid., 47–48. 116 Ibid., 49. Anne Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, October 17, 1837, Anne Warren Weston Correspondence, BPL. James B. Stewart mentions that Garrison was probably present at the wedding. Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 51. 117 Walter McIntosh Merrill, “A Passionate Attachment: William Lloyd Garrison’s Courtship of Helen Eliza Benson,” The New England Quarterly 29.2 (June 1956): 185. On the Benson family, see Wendell Phillips Garrison, The Benson Family of Newport, Rhode Island. Together with an appendix concerning the Benson Families in America of English Descent (New York: The Nation Press, December, 1872). 118 WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, March 26, 1834, GFP/HL. Also see WLG to George Benson March 29, 1834, GFP/HL; WLG, “In Memoriam,” in Helen Eliza Garrison, 18. Helen Benson remembered being “riveted to the spot” when she frst met Garrison. Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, April 3, 1834, GFP/HL. 119 WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, April 24, 1834, GFP/HL. 120 Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, April 14, 1834, GFP/HL. Helen Benson believed that Garrison was superior to her. Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, February 18, 1834; Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, March 13, 1834, GFP/HL. She also wrote about her special duty to the black community as Garrison’s wife in condescending and prejudiced terms: “I am aware of the responsibility that will devolve upon me, and how much my example will be copied among that class, you have so long labored to elevate and enlighten.” Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, May 22, 1834, GFP/HL. Garrison’s answer was in the same vein: “I regret to say that it is too true that a passion for gaudy fnery is too prevalent among our colored population; but this is naturally created and infamed by their degraded situation, which leads them to imitate and surpass in folly those who are on a higher level than themselves.” WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, May 30, 1834, GFP/HL. 121 Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, June 23, 1834, GFP/HL. 122 WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, April 5, 1834, GFP/HL. Also see WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, June 14, 1834, GFP/HL. The frst piece Garrison ever published, when he was 16 years old, criticized a court decision that awarded a woman damages for a breach of marriage promise and ended with the young author’s promise “to lead the ‘single life.’” AN OLD BACHELOR, “Breach of Marriage Promise,” Newburyport Herald, May 21, 1822, 2 (emphasis in original). In the 12 years between the publication of the article and his engagement, Garrison had thus come a long way on the issue of marriage and of his relationships with women. 123 Helen Benson and William Lloyd Garrison had seven children: George Thompson (1836–1904); William Lloyd, Jr. (1838–1909); Wendell Phillips (1840–1907); Charles Follen (1842–1849); “Fanny” Helen Frances (1844– 1928); Elizabeth Pease (1846–1848); Francis Jackson (1848–1916). They lost two children within a year, Elizabeth Pease of the fu in 1848 and Charles Follen in a tragic accident in 1849. Alonso, Growing Up Abolitionist, 55–61. On the link between women’s rights and the personal lives of activists, see Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 150. 124 Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, May 22, 1834; WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, June 2, 1834, GFP/HL.

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125 126 127 128

Merrill, “A Passionate Attachment,” 194. WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, May 16, 1834, GFP/HL. Helen Eliza Benson to WLG, June 2, 1834, GFP/HL. WLG to HBG, May 12, 1838, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison 2: 211. Garrison’s fears were shared by many abolitionists. See Sarah M. Grimke to Abby Kelley, June 15, 1838, AKFP/AAS. William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 3. The correspondence between Angelina E. Grimke and Theodore D. Weld before they were engaged is a good example of this tension between principles and actions. Helene Quanquin, “‘There Are Two Great Oceans’: The Slavery Metaphor in the Antebellum Women’s Rights Discourse as ‘Redescription’ of Race and Gender,” in Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, ed. Carol Faulkner and Alison Parker (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 82–86. Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (New York: Routledge, 2001), 23; Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 2. Arthur Tappan to WLG, New York, August 9, 1830. Cited in Eugene Portlette, “Arthur Tappan and the Anti-Slavery Movement,” The Journal of Negro History 15.2 (April 1930): 187. Also see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1999 (1979)), 89; Donald M. Jacobs, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Boston’s Blacks, 1830– 1865,” The New England Quarterly 44. 2 (June 1971): 259–277. According to Donald M. Jacobs, without its black readers, who represented more than 70% of all its subscribers in 1834, the newspaper would never have survived its early years. Ibid., 261. Garrison frequently complained about the subscribers who did not pay their dues. WLG to George Benson, January 12, 1835, GFP/ HL; GFP to Edmund Quincy, Boston, December 14, 1844, GFP/SSC; WLG to Edmund Quincy, Boston, December 4, 1847, GFP/SSC. On Garrison’s “dependence,” see Amos A. Phelps to Abby Kelley, January 20, 1838, AKFP/AAS. WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, April 12, 1834, GFP/HL. HBG to William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., January 21 (1856), GFP/SSC. Fanny Garrison Villard, William Lloyd Garrison on Non-Resistance, together with a personal sketch by his daughter Fanny Garrison Villard and a tribute by Leo Tolstoi (New York: The Nation Press Printing, 1924), 8; Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 4: 340. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 4: 329. Abolitionists believed that the consequences of violence on abolitionist families and children were great. Bradburn noted that one of Thompson’s sons was “a feeble child, owing, doubtless, to the perpetual alarm and excitement of Mrs. Thompson caused by the mobocratic assaults on her husband.” Frances H. Bradburn, A Memorial of George Bradburn (Boston: Cupples, Upham and Co., 1883), 118. Also see Chambers, The Weston Sisters, 246– 247, n. 27. WLG to George W. Benson, September 4, 1835, GFP/HL. Cited in Merrill, “A Passionate Attachment,” 200. In 1846, Garrison wrote Elizabeth Pease that his wife “always feels my absence so keenly that I never leave home without great reluctance, though she never wishes me to forego the discharge of any duty to please her.” Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 4: 341. WLG to HBG, June 14, 1840, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2: 642–643.

129 130

131 132

133 134 135 136

137 138

139

140

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141 Oliver Johnson to Edmund Quincy, July 19, 1840, Quincy Family Papers, 1639–1930, MHS. 142 Pregnant middle-class women expected their husbands to be present during childbirth at the time. Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 96: Johansen, Family Men, 62. Stacey M. Robertson notes that in the case of abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, absences gave him “freedom and power” and “further cemented the gendered hierarchy” in his relationship with his wife. Robertson “Aunt Nancy Men,” 51. 143 Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 51. Garrison was also known for his proximity to children. WLG to Helen Eliza Benson, Boston, March 12, 1834, GFP/ HL; Villard, William Lloyd Garrison on Non-Resistance, 6; Henry C. Wright, “Juvenile Anti-Slavery Societies,” Liberator, January 14, 1837, 10. Wright was an antislavery agent for children. 144 “Those who talk so idly about us,” Sarah M. Grimke wrote Abby Kelley in 1838, “are afraid I suspect that the woman question will gain ground too rapidly, if it is discovered that the same woman, who can hold an audience in profound attention as an A.S. lecturer can retire from the sound of public applause & quietly & unobstrusively perform the duties of a housekeeper & a wife,” thus pointing to both the contrast between the two spheres and their interdependence. Sarah M. Grimke to Abby Kelley, June 15, 1838, AKFP/AAS. 145 Johansen, Family Men, 19. On the relationship between masculinity and the domestic sphere before the Civil War, see Sarah Wilson, “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity,” American Literature 76.1 (March 2004): 59. On “masculine domesticity” after the Civil War, see Margaret Marsh, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870–1915,” American Quarterly 40.2 (June 1988): 165–186. 146 Samuel Joseph May to Maria Weston Chapman, November 24, 1838, BPL. 147 Theodore D. Weld to “my dear Mr Garrison,” June 21, 1879, GFP/HL (emphasis in the original). 148 Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 4: 310. 149 Ibid., 329. See also Phillips’s following remark in his eulogy of Garrison: “So Garrison, from the serene level of his daily life, from the faith that never faltered, was able to say to American hate, ‘You cannot reach up to the level of my home mood, my daily existence.’” “William Lloyd Garrison, eulogy by Wendell Phillips, at the funeral of Garrison, May 28, 1879” (Old South Leafets, n.79), 10. On the role of the home among Garrisonians, see Quanquin, “The World to Each Other,” 146–148. 150 Corey M. Brooks, “Reconsidering Politics in the Study of American Abolitionists,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8.2 (June 2018): 301. 151 HBG to William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., January 21, 1858, GFP/SSC; Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 4: 328. 152 Helen Eliza Garrison, 30, 42. Lee V. Chambers argues that the role of the household “in shaping women’s political work” has been minimized by historians because of its strict defnition as a “private” sphere. Chambers, The Weston Sisters, 15. On the role of the “parlor” in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Fancy Sketches,” see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 229–248. 153 May 31, 1854, in The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 64. Charlotte Forten was 16 years old at the time. A few months later, she remembered talking with Garrison and Phillips, who told her about some of the Italian and German cathedrals he had visited. October 8, 1854. Ibid., 103. 154 On the political role of parlors in the 19th century, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 89.

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155 On interpretations regarding their marriage, see Quanquin, “The Rights of Others,” 225–226. 156 Phillips complained to his mother about the infrequency of his family’s letters when in Florence and the dullness of his life in Italy. WP to Sarah Phillips, December 7, 1839; WP to Sarah Phillips, February 9, 1840, WPP. In a letter written in January 1840, and later published in the Liberator, he described feelings of helplessness and inadequacy. The Liberator, April 3, 1840, 55. 157 Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 116. After listening to Phillips speak about John Brown’s funeral, one of Garrison’s sons concluded that he had “the tenderness & delicacy of a woman.” William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., December 12, 1859, in Diary and scrapbook, December 1859–1864, GFP/SSC. Among abolitionists, as in other parts of society, very often “the most esteemed style of manhood combined elements commonly assigned separately to each gender.” Donald Yacovone, “Surpassing the Love of Women,” 209. 158 For a discussion on the number of participants, see Douglas H. Maynard, “The World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47.3 (December 1960): 455–456. This number was not rightly estimated before the convention. “World’s Anti-Slavery Convention (From the American Citizen),” Emancipator, July 2, 1840, 38. 159 Proceedings, 1. 160 Ibid., 8. 161 “Letter from Wendell Phillips,” Liberator, August 23, 1839, 135; Proceedings, 25. 162 One of the issues at stake was the fnancial support of U.S. abolitionism by the British. Donald R. Kennon, “‘An Apple of Discord’: The Woman Question at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840,” Slavery and Abolition 5 (1984), previously published in Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender, ed. John R. McKivigan (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 340. 163 Slavery and “The Woman Question,” 28. Also see Sklar, “Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,” 305. For fear of disrupting the convention and its agenda, women from Pennsylvania decided not to present their credentials. James Mott, Three Months in Great Britain (Philadelphia: J. Miller M’Kim, 1841), 18. 164 Phillips was chosen as one of the two American Secretaries at the convention. Proceedings, 8. The other American secretary was Henry B. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s husband. 165 See for instance Francis Jackson to WP, August 22, 1839, WPP. 166 Quanquin, “The Rights of Others,” 215. The question of the roll was crucial and continued to be so until the Civil War. At the 1855 black convention in Troy, a woman’s name was excluded from the roll under the pretext that its inclusion would have turned the meeting into “a Woman’s Rights Convention.” Cited in Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 106. 167 On Phillips’s addresses in London, see Quanquin, “The Rights of Others,” 216–217. 168 Sklar, “Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,” 311. Despite his approval of women’s participation, Thompson expressed his regret that the “abstract question” of women’s participation should have been introduced. Proceedings, 32, 33–34. Other British delegates supported the admission of women in the proceedings. Ibid., 24. 169 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 55. Lucretia Mott mentions “English usage” was one of the reasons for women’s exclusion. Slavery and “The Woman Question,” 58.

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170 About Americans’ busy schedule in London, see WP to Sarah Phillips, London, June 25, 1840, WPP. Phillips still had time to visit the National Gallery with Bradburn. Bradburn, A Memorial, 68–69. 171 See for instance Mary Grew’s diary, September 1, 1840; Bradburn, A Memorial, 45. 172 Mary Grew’s diary, July 7, 1840. 173 Ibid., May 26, 1840. 174 Lucretia Mott noted in her diary that at a meeting planned two days before the opening of the convention, American female delegates were asked why men could not represent them. Trying to answer, she was interrupted by an American delegate, Nathaniel Colver, who replied that “[she] should have been called to order if [she] had not been a woman.” Slavery and “The Woman Question,” 27. 175 LM to Maria Weston Chapman, July 29, 1840, in Selected Letters, 78–79. 176 See for instance Nathaniel Colver’s address. Proceedings, 27. Another delegate from Canada called the position of Americans “undecided.” Ibid., 28. Also see Sklar, “Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,” 313–315. 177 Eliza Barney and Abby Kelley spoke at the annual 1839 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Convention. “Annual Meeting of the American AntiSlavery Society,” Liberator, May 17, 1839, 79. At the London convention, James G. Birney explained that in the United States “wherever the result ha[d] been in favour of the admission of female representation, females ha[d] themselves voted.” Proceedings, 41. 178 Chambers, The Weston Sisters, 33. 179 Chapman, Right and Wrong, 110 (emphasis in the original). 180 Proceedings, 33. Miller was interrupted by loud cries, causing him to backpedal. “I did not mean to say you would despise the ladies,” he argued, “but that you would by your vote acknowledge or despise the parties whose cause they espouse.” 181 Ibid., 39. 182 Ibid., 27. Henry Grew had traveled on the Roscoe with a few other American delegates supporting women’s participation, including the Motts, who disliked him. Bradburn notes that a sermon he made on board the ship was a failure, and did not fare well in comparison with Lucretia Mott’s. Bradburn, A Memorial, 43–44. Grew had to justify his position when he returned to the United States. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 107. He publicly defended women’s subordination at the Fifth National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1854. Lucretia Mott and Garrison rebuked him for his ideas. Ira V. Brown, Mary Grew: Abolitionist and Feminist (1813–1896) (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1991), 55–56. 183 At the time, women were considered as destabilizing infuences in the public debate. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 44. 184 Proceedings, 43–45. The note reads as follows: “Wendell Please to maintain the foor—no matter what they do dont give up y[ou]r right to—Please deny for me who never saw Mr Prescott [sic] his assertion with regard to the women saying they doubted whether they sh[ou]ld be accepted & Massachusetts was appointed conditionally—” Ann Greene Phillips to WP, [n.d.] 1840, WPP (emphasis in the original). 185 Proceedings, 30. 186 Enslaved black women’s condition was occasionally commented on. One of the delegates argued for instance that in slavery “the husband has no claim on the enslaved wife.” Ibid., 48.

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187 Lucretia and James Mott wrote that the vote was “about 3 to 1.” Lucretia and James Mott to their children, June 14, 1840, Mott Papers, Swarthmore College. After the vote, Thompson asked Phillips if he would accept the results and Phillips answered in the affrmative. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 60. Fifty years later, Stanton and Anthony described his compliance as proof of his inability to understand women’s oppression. Ibid., 60–61. Phillips’s defense of women’s participation was however praised by his contemporaries. Quanquin, “The Rights of Others,” 218. 188 Garrison had participated in the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May and he arrived almost one week after the beginning of the London convention. 189 WLG to HBG, June 14, 1840 in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2: 642. As early as April 24, Garrison had written Bradburn that women had to be admitted as delegates. WLG to George Bradburn, April 24, 1840 in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2: 587. 190 WLG to HBG, June 29, 1840, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2: 654. 191 See ECS to Angelina E. Grimke and Sarah M. Grimke, June 25, 1840, History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 845–846. On the activities of the four American male delegates who refused to present their credentials while in England, see “The World’s Convention,” The Liberator, October 30, 1840, 173. 192 Garrison’s decision is linked to a strategy commonly used by Garrisonians prompting identifcation with oppressed groups. Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere, xxii. For Garrison’s recollection about this decision, see Proceedings at the public breakfast held in honour of William Lloyd Garrison, esq., of Boston, Massachusetts, in St. James’s Hall, London, on Saturday June 29th, 1867 (London: William Tweedie, 1868), 41. William Howitt, a British abolitionist, admired Garrison’s decision, calling it “a far nobler protest, not in the mere Convention, but in the world at large,” than if he had opposed the exclusion of women publicly. Mott, Three Months, 47. 193 Remond returned to the United States in December 1841. Les Wallace, “Charles Lenox Remond: The Lost Prince of Abolitionism,” Negro History Bulletin 40.3 (May–June 1977): 697. 194 About the reactions of Remond’s black colleagues during and after his stay in Great Britain, see Jones, All Bound Up Together, 53–54; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Ends, Means, and Attitudes: Black-White Confict in the Antislavery Movement,” Civil War History 18 (1972): 117–128, previously published in Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender, 135. 195 Charles Lenox Remond, “Letter to Thomas Cole, October 2, 1840,” The Liberator, October 30, 1840, 174. For an analysis of the letter, see Jones, All Bound Up Together, 54. Also see “Letter from Charles L. Remond, Manchester, England, Aug. 31, 1840,” The Liberator, September 25, 1840, 155. Remond was badly treated on board the ship to London. Wallace, “Charles Lenox Remond,” 696; Horton, Black Bostonians, 65. He remained consistent in his defense of women’s rights and women’s participation in conventions. See for instance his role in Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s participation at the 1855 black national convention in Philadelphia. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 108. Cary founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association in 1880. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 83. Racism also existed among delegates at the London convention. Benjamin Robert Haydon, who was commissioned a painting of the convention, recorded the refusal of the English abolitionist John Scoble, also an opponent of women’s participation, to be represented next to a black delegate, William Knibb. Willard Bissell Pope, ed., The

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196

197 198 199 200

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Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 5 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 4: 642. On Haydon’s painting, see Helene Quanquin, “‘Question de la femme’ et ‘question de l’homme’: Les Americains à la Convention mondiale contre l’esclavage de 1840,” in L’engagement des hommes pour l’égalité des sexes (XIVe-XXIe siècle), ed. Florence Rochefort and Eliane Viennot (SaintEtienne: Publications de l’Universite de Saint-Etienne, 2013), 74–76. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 84. Published in 1838, Robert Purvis’s Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania protested black men’s exclusion from the franchise in Pennsylvania. On the document and its signifcance, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 19–20, 86. T. Gregory Garvey, Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), 122. Shawn Johansen speaks of the “frst weeks of fatherhood” as “a time of turmoil and transition for middle-class men.” Johansen, Family Men, 64. WLG to HBG, London, July 3, 1840, in Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 2: 385. Ibid., 386. Two other of Garrison’s children were named after abolitionists Charles Follen and Elizabeth Pease. In a letter written to Francis Jackson on the occasion of the birth of the son who was bearing his name, Garrison claimed that his choice had been motivated by “my admiration of your character, and the strong desire that I feel that the new comer may, through life, be inspired by that rare example of moral courage and unbending regard for principle, in contending with popular injustice and oppression, which his namesake has so nobly given to the world.” WLG to Francis Jackson, November 5, 1849, WLG Papers, MHS. On naming practices in the 19th century, see Johansen, Family Men, 68; Frank, Life with Father, 110. WLG to Elizabeth Pease, September 1, 1840. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 2: 413. About the reason for the choice of the name Wendell Phillips, see WP to Sarah Phillips, January 22, 1841, WPP. Harriet Lyman Alonso maintains that Garrison heard about the news in a letter by another abolitionist, Oliver Johnson. Alonso, Growing Up Abolitionist, 53. Helene Quanquin, “William Lloyd Garrison par ses enfants : une correspondance familiale politique,” Epistolaire 40 (Fall 2014): 188. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips, 138; Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 91. Wendell Phillips Garrison probably developed romantic feelings toward Phoebe but they were unrequited. Wendell Phillips Garrison to Ann Greene Phillips, July 30, 1864, WPP. Garnaut married George Washington Smalley, a Civil War correspondent, in 1862. In the 19th century, there was an assumption that childlessness in a couple was the wife’s fault. Frank, Life with Father, 87. Phillips then became the movement’s “leading intellectual.” McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 92. Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 64; Yacovone, Samuel Joseph May, 69–70. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 63. Nancy Isenberg also notes that Abby Kelley was “a controversial fgure, not because she was a woman, but because she failed to meet the gendered expectations of bourgeois publicity,” including for her supporters. Ibid., 61. The Liberator still mentioned Abby Kelley as a delegate of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, but she was not present in London. “The World’s Convention,” Liberator, April 3, 1840, 55.

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Frederick Douglass and James Mott Women’s rights partners

The Seneca Falls convention, which took place on July 19 and 20, 1848, was not the frst time when the demand for woman suffrage was made publicly in the United States.1 In 1845, Samuel J. May advocated women’s enfranchisement in a sermon.2 In July 1846, Phillips called for the “ballot” for women along with their “full and unfettered control of all her property and earnings” in a letter to Garrison published in the Liberator.3 In August of the same year, six women from Jefferson County, New York, sent a petition asking for woman suffrage that was introduced by a man to the state constitutional convention.4 The signifcance of the Seneca Falls meeting was not clear to all its participants and their contemporaries at the time. At the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention of Cleveland in 1853, Garrison thus remembered reading the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 but forgetting about it until someone had mentioned it during the debates.5 Even if the Seneca Falls convention was not the frst time the claim for woman suffrage had been made publicly, it signaled the emergence of the women’s rights movement as an entity with some degree of autonomy while still linked to a host of other reforms, including abolitionism. Right from the beginning, the meeting raised the question of men’s role in the new movement as both necessary and problematic. It lasted for 48 hours, and men were only allowed to join the proceedings on the second day.6 The existence of two separate audiences seemed to contradict in part the fght led at the end of the 1830s for the integration of women into mixed organizations. It certainly showed that the female organizers of the convention were aware of the two genders’ specifc positions when it came to the question of women’s rights and the need to have a space for themselves to discuss their own condition. It is also evidence of their conviction that the movement’s constituency was to be composed of women fghting for their own rights and male allies.7 As the husband of a woman who was described as “the moving spirit” of the convention, James Mott (1788–1868) occupied a position of importance, contributing his experience and stature to the meeting.8 He was asked to chair the second day’s proceedings, a somewhat surprising choice coming

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from women who were advocating for women’s autonomy in the public sphere. This might be due, not necessarily to the audience of 300 or so, as some of the women present had had previous experiences of speaking in public at abolitionist meetings, but rather to the organizers’ concern that appointing a female president would make them the target of ridicule and accusations of immorality. This was confrmed a few weeks later at the Rochester women’s rights convention, where some female reformers initially refused to participate in the proceedings because of “fears for the honor of the Convention” after a woman was appointed chair.9 Mott, who was an experienced reformer and a respectable Quaker businessman with a stainless reputation, was a safe choice, especially at a convention where members of the Society of Friends were such an important presence. Another important male participant at Seneca Falls was Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the only man to speak in favor of Stanton’s controversial resolution on woman suffrage during the convention. Douglass was an prominent women’s rights ally throughout the 19th century.10 He was the only recorded black activist, male or female, present at Seneca Falls, which speaks both to the whiteness of a nascent women’s rights movement centered on conventions dedicated to the question and to his unique position as a member of different important reform networks where women’s rights were discussed.11 Douglass was a black women’s rights ally, which infuenced his feminism in two interrelated ways.12 First of all, his positions were informed by the “Black activist worlds” he belonged to, as described by P. Gabrielle Foreman.13 Secondly, his feminism was shaped by his experience as an enslaved man, then as a free black man, as well as his views on the interactions between male and white domination.14 In the 1840s, women’s rights emerged as an autonomous discourse and movement, creating challenges for individuals, including male sympathizers. Men like Douglass and Mott earned praise for being the most trusted partners in the fght, the epitomes of specifc masculinities infuenced and produced by radically different experiences and marriages.

From abolitionism to women’s rights: “Right is of no Sex— Truth is of no Color” Like Garrison and Phillips, Mott and Douglass followed the somewhat conventional course that took them from abolitionism to women’s rights, which they came to see as interconnected reform causes as summed up by the motto of Douglass’s North Star, “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color.” Their path to activism was however rooted in fundamentally different experiences and lives that determined their defnitions of women’s rights and the mutual infuence between their convictions and their personal lives. Mott’s life as a reformer was shaped in great part by his religious affliation, his family, and his profession. He was born on June 20, 1788, at Cow Neck, Long Island, in a Quaker family. His grandfather, James Mott,

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Sr., was a businessman and a reformer. A wealthy merchant before the American Revolution, he bought a four mill, where his son Adam—Mott’s father—also worked.15 A great infuence on his grandson, James Mott, Sr. was also an educator and an author whose books advocated a less authoritarian form of education and condemned corporal punishment.16 He was the superintendent of Nine Partners, a coeducational Quaker school founded in 1796 by New York Yearly Meeting, where his grandson and his future wife Lucretia Coffn studied and taught.17 Quakers in New York and elsewhere in the United States had disagreed on the issue of slavery in the 18th century but by the time of the American Revolution, most of them had rejected bondage, and the Mott family was no exception.18 They were opposed to slavery and James Mott, Sr. refused to use products from enslaved labor at home.19 As Mary Grew wrote in her eulogy of James Mott, his “religious, domestic, and business life” formed an indivisible whole.20 With his wife’s support, he followed his grandfather’s joint vocation of business and reform. In 1809, he moved to Philadelphia, where Lucretia’s family lived, to become his future father-in-law’s partner in a wholesale business.21 Philadelphia was at the time the home of the two communities, free blacks and Quakers, that were the most effcient and infuential abolitionist constituencies. Mott joined the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, acting as its secretary in 1822 and 1823.22 The Motts’ reform activism was infuenced by Quakerism and its divisions. The Society of Friends was known for its relatively egalitarian treatment of women. Men and women were supposed to attend separate meetings, but they also had the same rights when it came to public speaking, as evidenced by Lucretia Mott’s work as a preacher.23 It was in this context that the schism between Hicksites—named after Quaker minister Elias Hicks—and Orthodox Quakers took place in 1827. Hicksites, with whom the Motts sided, advocated the superiority of the “Inner Light” over the Bible, and criticized the absence of democracy among Quaker elders.24 The two groups also promoted two different visions of “womanhood,” one more egalitarian, the other more traditional.25 This explains why the schism had an important infuence on Quaker women’s commitment to reform, from abolitionism to women’s rights.26 The Motts were Garrisonians from the start. When Garrison, whom they met in August 1830, started advocating the immediate abolition of slavery, they instantly joined him in his fght.27 They were present at the 1833 founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. James signed the Declaration of Sentiments adopted on the occasion and Lucretia famously suggested additions to the text.28 The Motts also sided with Garrison during the split of the late 1830s, as they agreed with many of his positions. His advocacy of nonresistance converged with Quakers’ pacifst principles.29 His support of women’s equal participation in abolitionist

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societies also resonated with the Quaker gender egalitarianism embraced by the Motts. In 1820, James thus wrote his parents in favor of women having “an equal voice in the administration of the discipline.”30 Lucretia became a minister in 1821, a decision that was the result of intense soul-searching after the death of their son Thomas in 1817, an event described by James as a “close trial.”31 The Motts were both present as delegates at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The event was so important for them that their three-month stay in Great Britain was recorded in his memoir and her diary. They were both indignant at the frst day’s decision to exclude women, which left James “discouraged” and taking “little interest in the proceedings of the Convention.”32 In London, however, the couple was embroiled in another confict. James recalled being told on one occasion that, because he and his wife were Hicksites, they could not be accepted as Friends in Great Britain. “This frst open exhibition of prejudice and bigotry,” he wrote, “made me feel somewhat sad for a time, but we soon saw so much of it that my sadness was turned into pity.”33 Despite the hostility, Lucretia seized every opportunity to address an audience in London and her husband proudly recorded such occasions.34 James’s support of his wife’s views and activities was praised by his contemporaries. Phillips recalled that it was in London that he met James Mott for the frst time and he claimed that, despite the “very hearty distaste” he felt for Quakers at the time, he was impressed with his “serene and beautiful presence.”35 At the last annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in April 1870, Douglass also expressed his admiration for Mott and his unwavering support for his wife’s endeavors. Mott was never “more happy at any time than when I have seen him standing in the great congregation under a tent in the West holding the bonnet of his beloved wife while she plead the cause of the American slave as none other could plead it at that time,” Douglass wrote.36 Lucretia’s great visibility and fame as a reformer explain why her words and actions have often been used to assess James’s own activism and ideas. In Three Months in Great Britain, he apologized for his lacking “the power of description,” an allusion to what he perceived as his inferior rhetorical skills.37 Their granddaughter writes that, because of Lucretia’s more extrovert personality, she often was the couple’s mouthpiece on reform, including women’s rights.38 It is probable that, just like his wife, James saw women’s rights as part of a network of different causes, in keeping with Quakerism and Hicksite theology.39 This of course does not mean that James did not have strong opinions of his own. The memoir of his stay in Great Britain is flled with categorical comments on English society and aristocracy.40 He was also a staunch supporter of Elias Hicks before the schism, which affected his relationship with his parents.41

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Douglass’s path to reform was clearly incomparable, shaped as it was by his early life as an enslaved man. He was born Frederick Bailey, with slave status and a hazy genealogy, in Talbot County, Maryland in 1818. His memories of his mother were “of a few hasty visits made in the night on foot.”42 After spending his frst years with his grandparents, he experienced the uprooting which structured the experience of the enslaved. When he was seven, he was sent to work in his enslaver’s home; a year later, he was moved to Baltimore to live with Hugh Auld, his enslaver’s relative, working frst as a servant, then as a laborer in his shipyard.43 Seven years later, he was working on a plantation again.44 He endured abuse in the hands of a “slave breaker” by the name of Edward Covey until he stood up to him in a very famous incident.45 After this episode, he was sent to another plantation, and in 1836, went back to Baltimore, where he worked in the shipyards and met his future wife, Anna Murray, a free black woman.46 With her help, he escaped on September 3, 1838, the day he called the beginning of his “free life.”47 After getting married on September 15 at the New York City home of black abolitionist David Ruggles, the couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Douglass became involved in antislavery work. In August 1841, at the annual meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society, he heard Garrison speak for the frst time and made some remarks that impressed the abolitionist leader. He gave his frst speech against slavery three days later, and started employment as an antislavery lecturer. White abolitionist leaders, however, tried to confne him to the role of witness and victim of the horrors of slavery, a position he refused to conform to.48 He achieved prominence very quickly due to his great oratory skills.49 In 1845, he published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which gave him national and international fame but also put him at risk of being reclaimed by his former enslaver. He traveled to Great Britain, lecturing for a year and a half. He came back to the United States in 1847 as a free man, after a campaign organized by British abolitionist Ellen Richardson to raise money to buy his freedom.50 When enslaved, Douglass had experienced the loss of what was considered as one of the attributes of masculinity at the time, i.e. control over one’s life.51 After his escape, his fght for autonomy remained constant. When in England, he had enjoyed a life free of “insults” and “prejudice” in spite of his race.52 White abolitionists’ bias, however, continued to show in his absence. Early in his stay, Maria Weston Chapman wrote his travel companion, white abolitionist James Buffum, that he should take care of their travel money, a clear sign of distrust caused by prejudice.53 When his freedom was bought, some white abolitionists, including Lucretia Mott, criticized him in the name of moral and political purity, which shows that his main value for some white abolitionists lay in his former enslavement and it was diffcult, even for the most enlightened allies, to understand what life as a “fugitive” was like.54

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Douglass’s women’s rights activism was informed by his early life as an enslaved man and his unique position within the abolitionist movement. He believed that his direct experience of oppression and degradation had made him particularly prone to defend women’s rights and other causes. “Having experienced slavery in his own person, it was impossible that he could be indifferent to any call for freedom,” he was reported to say in 1858.55 Douglass also knew about the specifc abuse that enslaved women were the victims of.56 After the Civil War, he famously claimed, “I belong to the women,” in a speech in which he argued that blacks’ rights and women’s rights were not “inconsistent.” He alluded to both British women’s help to buy him back from his enslaver and the work of the female members of the Massachusetts AntiSlavery Society, who had “surrounded and protected” him when he became an active abolitionist.57 Later, he wrote that he came to advocate women’s rights as a form of “gratitude” for women’s “service” to abolitionism.58 In the same way that women had agitated for the enslaved, he had felt the need to support the women’s rights movement at its inception, i.e. at a time when it most needed help.59 For Douglass, woman’s and the slave’s causes were closely linked and it is probably no coincidence that he should have claimed to be introduced to women’s rights the year when he became an abolitionist.60 Douglass’s and Mott’s activisms were born in different personal and social contexts, which shaped their involvement in the women’s rights movement and made them reliable allies of the fght for gender equality. Mott experienced women’s rights as a couple’s commitment stemming from Quaker egalitarian views, while Douglass’s feminism was rooted in his past experiences of oppression and activism. Drawing from these different contexts, they however agreed on the fact that women’s rights were not to be agitated apart from other causes but rather as part of a larger fght for justice and against oppression.

Marriage: Divisions of labor Douglass’s and Mott’s courtships are poorly documented. The circumstances of Douglass and Anna Murray’s acquaintance remain diffcult to ascertain.61 Five years his senior, she was the daughter of a woman and a man who were freed right before her birth. When she and Douglass met, she was working as a domestic servant. Given their situation—he an enslaved shipyard worker, she a free black wage earner—they might have been able to settle as a couple in Baltimore. “But . . . in spite of myself, I continued to think, and to think about the injustice of my enslavement, and the means of escape,” he wrote.62 Murray helped him with his plan, and it was in part to protect her that he did not detail his fight in his 1845 narrative and remained hesitant about disclosing the specifc circumstances of his escape later.63 Frederick and Anna most probably entered marriage as “working people” did at the time, i.e. in part as “a business contract” or a union of “skills” meant to ensure their families would be provided for.64

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The Motts’ union certainly conformed to a different idea. James met his future wife, who was his sister’s friend, at Nine Partners, where she was an assistant teacher and he a junior teacher.65 Their courtship followed Quaker guidelines, as they asked for their parents’ approval.66 Right after they were engaged, James described his feelings of joyous anticipation and “fctitious pleasure” regarding domestic life, which he contrasted with the business career he was entering—“There is no pleasure now in anticipating things in the mercantile line.”67 Lucretia and James married on April 10, 1811, in a ceremony that eschewed the wife’s vow of obedience in conformity with Quaker principles.68 The Motts lived up to the principles of what they considered to be a Christian marriage. In a letter to the new couple, James’s mother wrote about her belief in marital felicity rooted in religious faith—“Let the happiness which only real Christians experience, be the mark for which you aim, the prize for which you run and then will every secondary consideration have only its own, its proper weight.”69 The two spouses’ complementarity, which was hailed by their contemporaries, was seen as the foundation of a sound union. In 1835, Garrison identifed different qualities in the two reformers: Lucretia was “a bold and fearless thinker, in the highest degree conscientious, of most amiable manners, and truly instructive in her conversation,” and James was “worthy of that sacred relation to her which he sustains, being distinguished for his goodness, benignity and philanthropy.”70 In her 1849 “Discourse on Woman,” Lucretia developed a marriage ideal around the notions of equality and reciprocity between the two spouses, as well as “the union of similar, not opposite affections.”71 Her discourse was undoubtedly informed by her experience of what she saw as a happy marriage. The Motts’ harmonious married life and the fact that they were older than their fellow activists explain why they were considered as models in their public as well as private lives.72 They sometimes played the role of surrogate parents for younger activists. In 1854, Garrison recalled that during a visit he paid to the couple in Philadelphia, James embraced Stone “in a most fatherly fashion.”73 After Blackwell frst proposed to her in June 1853, she turned to James Mott, who encouraged her to marry based on his experience of a marriage centered on “harmony.” “As age advances our love, if possible, increases. This being my experience I am in favor of matrimony, and wish to see all in whom I feel interested, made happy in that way, which includes thy little self,” he wrote her.74 Lucretia shared similar feelings and when her husband died in 1868, after 57 years of marriage, it was feared that she might not “rally after this shock.”75 The Motts’ division of labor within and outside of marriage was both traditional and nontraditional. James was the family’s breadwinner for most of their married life, and Lucretia was well-known for her competence in the domestic sphere, which she still considered as women’s site.76 As in Garrison’s case, the home was however important for James. In a poem

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written around 1841, the couple’s older daughter Anna best described the comforts brought by domestic and family life to him after a day’s work.77 The second stanza starts with the verse “Our mother’s charge (when she’s at home),” which however shows that while Lucretia was a strong and energetic presence in the domestic sphere, she was also away quite often due to her numerous speaking engagements as a Quaker minister. Her husband tried to accompany her as often as possible, which is evidence of his support for her career as an activist and a reversal of the traditional pattern of women assisting their husbands’ activism.78 Douglass’s frst marriage was shaped by the specifc hardships of his life. He had been exposed to enslavers’ complete control over the enslaved and their families.79 He married immediately after escaping from slavery, which demonstrates his vision of marriage as synonymous with certain rights and his inclusion in the nation as a citizen.80 The reasons for the division of labor that existed within the Douglass household were numerous, including Anna Murray Douglass’s great competence in house management.81 She was an active abolitionist when she and her husband lived in Massachusetts but given her life and economic situation, her main political participation was through the support of her husband’s activism by providing him with income and the best living conditions possible. The couple’s daughter Rosetta thus writes about Anna’s “pleasure to know that when he stood up before an audience that his linen was immaculate and that she had made it so.”82 Because of the limitations imposed on her as a black woman of limited means and because of her husband’s choices, her abolitionism could not take the same form as James Mott, who also supported his spouse’s activism, or even as other abolitionist women. Like Helen Benson Garrison, Anna Murray Douglass was an active domestic abolitionist, whose political actions were performed mostly at and from home.83 Given her interest in abolitionism, it is very likely that she participated in the political discussions that took place in her house. As a consequence of this situation, Frederick and Anna experienced long periods of separation and estrangement, to the point that their daughter described her father as her “mother’s honored guest.”84 This was of course especially true during Frederick’s stay in Great Britain in 1845 and 1846, when Anna had to provide for and look after their four young children.85 The couple’s “greatest trial,” however, was Douglass’s decision to move his family to Rochester in order to start his own newspaper.86 This caused Anna to be uprooted from the support system she had built in Massachusetts. This also put them in a diffcult fnancial situation, which she once again had to deal with. Anna Murray Douglass was different from the women Douglass came to be acquainted with in his work as a reformer and to some degree from the model he tried to impart to his daughters.87 The women he invited into their family led different lives from hers.88 Anna was probably just barely literate, in striking contrast to her husband, who had proudly written about

56 Women’s rights partners how he had taught himself to read when he was a young boy.89 She did not accompany him “as often as he would have liked”—and in fact she hardly ever did.90 The home was Anna’s domain, where she had skills and competence, and it is no coincidence that Douglass should have described her as “the post in the center of my house” after she died in 1882.91 Like Helen Benson Garrison, Anna entertained numerous guests—besides her husband.92 One of them was Julia Griffths, a British abolitionist Douglass met during his stay in England, and with whom he formed an important partnership and friendship. When he was in England, she had raised funds to help him start his newspaper, and when hearing about the fnancial diffculties of the publication, she and her sister traveled to Rochester to assist him in his endeavor, moving into his home in 1849.93 Griffths’s presence was an endless source of gossip. Essentially white Garrisonians, who resented Douglass’s move to Rochester and saw the North Star as a competition to the Liberator, were especially prone to spread rumors about an affair, which Douglass himself had to refute.94 The gossip reached the columns of the Liberator in November 1853, when Garrison alluded to “much unhappiness in [Douglass’s] own household” due to Griffths’s infuence.95 This led Anna Murray Douglass to send Garrison a note in which she refuted this claim.96 Another important relationship was the one he formed with Ottilia Assing, a German reformer, whom he met in 1856. Assing was another guest Anna had to entertain as she started spending her summers at the Douglass’s house. She also looked down upon her host, calling her in 1874 an “unknowledgeable and illiterate creature.”97 The fact that Douglass allowed a woman who visibly despised his wife into his family circle for long periods of time is important to note in that it shows a certain indifference to Anna’s feelings. Douglass was not immune to the turmoil caused by the scandals that targeted him. When several decades later, in 1888, he met Julia Griffths again in England, they talked “of the good people” who had stood by “in the midst of popular prejudice.”98 At the First National Woman’s Rights Convention in October 1850, he claimed that he was the “victim” of “public opinion,” a probable allusion to both the racial prejudice he experienced daily and the rumors about the nature of his connections with white women.99 In 1847, he had answered slanderous press articles reproduced without any comment by Garrison in the Liberator. He was accused, among other things, of practicing “amalgamation” with a white woman.100 The fact that Garrison had printed such violent and racist attacks against Douglass shows his racist prejudices as well as the strength of his resentment to someone he saw as competition. It is also evidence of the way some white abolitionists viewed the former enslaved man and the extent to which they begrudged his autonomy and friendships with white women.101 “How do we understand the ways enslaved people responded to this history of bodies and souls in circulation,” Daina Ramey Berry asks, a question that also applies to free blacks before the Civil War.102 One of Douglass’s

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and other black reformers’ answers was the value they placed on their own privacy.103 As Douglass’s case shows, privacy protected them against possible attacks from within and outside of the movement. It was important inasmuch as it defned their position as autonomous citizens, especially for those who had experienced slavery and the incessant scrutiny and abuse of enslavers.104 An article published in 1853 in the Liberator criticizing Douglass, however, makes it very clear that for some white activists he was not entitled to privacy. “There is a point where private questions become matters of public interest; where personal troubles, assuming a general importance, need to be spoken of in their new relations,” it claimed.105 Despite Anna’s protests to the contrary, the strains in Douglass’s frst marriage were real. They might not have been that different from many other activists’ couples but they were made more public because of Douglass’s fame and race, coupled with the couple’s resistance to seeing their lives put on display. In a letter addressed to a female abolitionist in 1857, Douglass described his wife’s complaints about his shortcomings. Anna, who was sick at the time, “still seems able to use with great ease and fuency her powers of speech” in order to point to his “need of improvement in my temper and disposition as a husband and father, the head of a family!” In the same letter, Douglass ironically noted that his wife remained an effcient housekeeper despite her sickness—“Amid all the vicissitudes, however, I am happy to say that my wife gives me an excellent loaf of bread and keeps a neat house.”106 Anna might not have corresponded to the model of womanhood exhibited by her husband’s female associates, but she was clearly a strong woman, who did not hesitate to speak her mind while giving her husband the means to pursue his career as an activist, to the point that their daughter called her her father’s “ally.”107

“Manly, not mannish” Douglass and Mott’s experiences of gender roles were rooted in religious, racial, and class specifcities. Their gender identities were also shaped by the women in their lives, especially their wives, as well as their relationships with them. In 1849, Lucretia Mott gave an address on women’s condition in which she described men’s and women’s ideal behaviors—“As it is desirable that man should act a manly and generous part, not ‘mannish,’ so let woman be urged to exercise a dignifed and womanly bearing, not womanish.”108 Her choice of words is reminiscent of the discourse developed by abolitionists in the late 1830s, extolling gentlemanly and ladylike demeanors. It also points to the way the term “manly” was used in the 19th century to describe the “moral attributes” that made a “worthy” man.109 In Lucretia’s discourse, being “womanish” and “mannish” were synonymous with excess and imbalance, the opposite of the moderation and “modesty” she saw in herself and her husband as well as other men around her.110 Morality was however not disconnected from work and material success.111

58 Women’s rights partners James Mott’s career as a businessman and breadwinner status depended on his reputation and the trust he inspired.112 It was also guided by the moral principles stemming from his abolitionist convictions. Reconciling his responsibilities to his employees and family and reform activism might have put a strain on him, as he “was apt to become depressed and discouraged,” a tendency the instability generated by a business career might have exaggerated.113 His business followed the ups and downs of the U.S. economy before and after the Civil War, and just in the frst decade of his professional life, he had to deal with several crises. In 1813, he expressed his wish to “realize a comfortable living, which is all we can expect in the unsettled state of affairs, and all we ought to be anxious for at any other time.”114 In 1820, Lucretia wrote his parents about business being “poor” and James’s depression.115 In 1840, his fnancial situation was far from secure, and he and his wife had to raise money to pay for their trip to London.116 Part of his unease was due to his involvement in a trade that depended on stolen labor, knowledge, and skills. In 1827, he was one of the co-founders of the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania despite his involvement in the lucrative cotton business, which he fnally abandoned for wool in 1830 under the infuence of his wife.117 His qualms about cotton might explain why in 1830 he declared that he was “tired of the mercantile business” and was considering “withdrawing from it and doing something else—perhaps going to the country,” which he did only in 1851.118 Mott relied on models of masculinity rooted in his religious and professional background that were compatible with a defense of women’s rights. These models drew on the different religious and professional aspects of his life. Pacifsm was a major element of Quaker masculine ideals in England at the end of the 17th century, a tradition that American Quakers perpetuated.119 James was also a man on whom the lives of many people depended—his family but also his employees.120 As a newlywed, he had experienced dependence upon entering the business profession. When his father-in-law, for whom he had worked, died in February 1815, he wrote about “feel[ing] a responsibility unknown before,” as he was supposed to take over the business.121 Many elements threatened Douglass’s ability to provide for his family, which was seen as constitutive of free black men’s citizenship at the time.122 In the last years of his enslaved life, he had made a living working in the shipyards. As he settled with Anna in New Bedford, he took different manual jobs—from woodcutting to shoveling coal. When he joined the abolitionist community, he was employed as an agent of antislavery societies and thus received a salary. Throughout their married life, he relied heavily on Anna’s skills and “executive ability” in domestic affairs as well as her thrift.123 At the same time that Douglass was achieving recognition as an abolitionist and powerful orator, he was also dependent on other people, a situation reminiscent of Garrison’s, but with different consequences. While Garrison’s reliance on his wife’s work and his friends’ generosity

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never undermined his position as one of the movement’s leaders, some white abolitionists believed that Douglass’s similar situation made him indebted to them. Before and after the Civil War, Douglass’s struggle took place in a context in which, Saidiya V. Hartman writes, “manhood and whiteness were the undisclosed, but always assumed, norms of liberal equality.”124 Douglass’s relationship to work and “self-made manhood” was infuenced by the debates that took place among black activists about the meaning of manual labor and domestic service.125 It also raises the questions of what counted as “work” for a black man in the 19th century and of the value of political work in general. Douglass had to fght for his autonomy and “self-possession.”126 His move to Rochester and the creation of his own newspaper have been rightly interpreted as the result of his wish for independence from white Garrisonians.127 His experience of bondage accounts for his insistence on self-reliance as a condition of his very existence, as manifested in his use of photography to affrm both personhood and citizenship.128 But this was a prerequisite that he extended to women as well. In a letter addressed to Samuel Drummond Porter in which he denied any indiscretion with Julia Griffths, he thus insisted on her being “a free woman,” who was “uninfuenced by any interference of [his].”129 Douglass and Mott relied on models of masculinity originating in their different experiences. This meant both a retreat from dominant notions and an acceptance of valued masculine qualities, including control and autonomy, that sustained their advocacy of women’s rights.

The Seneca Falls and Rochester conventions: Women’s rights with and without men The Seneca Falls convention was born out of local, national, and international contexts.130 The idea of the meeting originated in an afternoon tea at Quaker reform activists Jane and Richard Hunt’s house, in Waterloo, New York, where they were joined by Lucretia Mott, her sister Martha C. Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, who was probably accompanied by two of her daughters, Elizabeth and Mary Ann, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.131 Stanton was the only woman in the group who was not a Quaker, and it is clear that members of the Society of Friends were the moving force behind the convention—at least 25% of the signatories of the Declaration of Sentiments were Quakers.132 The Quaker female participants at Seneca Falls were already involved in other reforms, including temperance and abolitionism.133 Around the time of the meeting, the Motts had been working for a great host of different causes and traveling across the state of New York and to Canada for different religious and political events.134 Stanton wrote that during the visit at the Hunts’ house, she “poured out, that day, the torrent of [her] long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that [she] stirred [her]self, as well as the rest of the

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party, to do and dare anything.”135 The meeting led to the publication of an unsigned notice announcing a “Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” to be held in the Wesleyan Chapel of Seneca Falls in the Seneca County Courier and Douglass’s North Star.136 Invitations were sent, but as the husband of one of the organizers, James Mott did not need one. The call for the convention specifed that the frst day of the proceedings would “be exclusively for women,” which he was aware of. His wife wrote Stanton that her husband asked her to “reserve” her “great Speech” for the second day of the convention, which shows both his support of the cause and his trust in women’s abilities to promote it.137 At the time of the convention, Douglass was a prominent reformer whose presence was considered as important by the organizers. As he lived in the close city of Rochester, Elizabeth McClintock sent him a personal invitation, which he immediately accepted.138 Douglass’s life had changed dramatically in the last few years. By 1848, money had been given to is former enslaver, he had declared his independence from Bostonian Garrisonians and started the North Star, thus achieving the autonomous life to which he had long aspired despite fnancial diffculties. He also worked within black activist networks, where he also agitated the “woman question.”139 By 1848, the women’s rights issue was raised at black reform associations’ meetings.140 A few months after the Seneca Falls convention, Douglass and his associate in the North Star, African American activist Martin Delany thus asked for women’s participation in the debates of the National Convention of Colored Freedmen in Cleveland, Ohio.141 In October of the same year, Lucretia Mott attended the Philadelphia African American antislavery society and noted that “they include[d] women & white women too.”142 Women were appointed offcers at this convention, probably with the support of men such as Douglass, Delany, Purvis, and Remond, who had proved to be one of women’s most consistent allies since London.143 Although Douglass was the only African American man present at Seneca Falls, he was joined by two black male activists, Jermain Loguen and William C. Nell, at the Rochester convention, which took place just a few weeks later on August 2.144 Despite Douglass’s and others’ intention to confront the issue of women’s rights in black reform organizations, and despite the participants’ abolitionist convictions, issues related to slavery and racism were however not raised at the Seneca Falls convention, which shows that the movement’s emerging autonomy from abolitionism was synonymous with a narrowing of claims to suit mostly white middle-class women.145 This manifested itself in black women’s quasi absence from early women’s rights conventions, despite their unfagging activism.146 At Seneca Falls, Douglass famously defended the resolution on woman suffrage. In The History of Woman Suffrage, its adoption is presented as a joint effort between him and Stanton.147 At the conference organized on the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls convention, Stanton gave a more detailed, although maybe inaccurate, version of the event. She recalled the

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opposition of the other organizers, as well as of her husband, to her resolution on woman suffrage and her determination to put it forward. She had no experience of public speaking and decided to ask for Douglass’s help, but eventually interrupted him when “he didn’t speak quite fast enough.”148 According to Stanton’s story, then, she was the one who chose Douglass as her mouthpiece. She probably valued his great oratorical skills and powers of persuasion, but she also picked him as the most reliable partner who would understand the value of the franchise. Douglass was well aware of the limitations imposed on black men’s right to vote at the time, and he probably understood better than white men the value of a right he was deprived of and which, by the late 1840s, had become white men’s prerogative in the United States.149 The franchise had also been discussed at black conventions throughout the decade due to some States’ intervention to restrict black suffrage, and the debates infuenced Douglass’s views on the topic.150 He defended woman suffrage again at the Rochester convention. There, he made a “long, argumentative, and eloquent appeal,” answering “the many objections made, by the gentlemen present, to granting women the right of suffrage,” and arguing that “he should not dare claim a right that he would not concede to women,” a position he consistently advocated before the Civil War.151 In Seneca Falls and Rochester, Stanton and Douglass agreed on the importance of the right to vote, and they had to fght against the views of many participants, like Lucretia and James Mott, who, infuenced as they were by their Quakerism and nonresistant ideas, did not see suffrage as crucial in the fght for women’s rights and considered political participation in the democratic process as impossible as long as slavery existed in the United States.152 Unlike them, Douglass had evolved on his position on nonresistance, thus completing the process of independence from Garrisonians he had started a few months earlier.153 Stanton’s position on the vote might have been the result of conversations with her husband, abolitionist Henry B. Stanton, who had rejected Garrison’s nonresistant position and left the American Anti-Slavery Society at the time of the split, as well as her own personal development.154 Despite the battle on woman suffrage at Seneca Falls and Rochester, even opponents of Stanton and Douglass quickly rallied to the idea.155 The participants at the Seneca Falls convention had expected to be the laughing stock of the press and public opinion but in an editorial published in the North Star on July 28, Douglass praised what he called an “extraordinary meeting.” He noted that the proceedings “were almost wholly conducted by women,” which he claimed was “a novel” position for women, despite their previous experience in conducting abolitionist meetings. He affrmed his support for women’s rights, but clearly stated that, for him, women were to be the primary force behind this new movement. “We therefore bid the women engaged in this movement our humble Godspeed,” he wrote.156

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The Motts also attended both the Seneca Falls and Rochester conventions. They had not originally intended to participate but eventually decided to go, which is an indication of the enthusiasm they felt for this new movement.157 In September 1848, Lucretia wrote Scottish phrenologist George Combe and his wife of “our recent movement for the enlargement of Woman’s Sphere.”158 In a letter to abolitionist Edmund Quincy at the end of August 1848, she praised the Seneca Falls and Rochester meetings as noteworthy events about “importance (sic) demands.” In keeping with the Garrisonian position at the end of the 1830s, she refused to see women’s rights as detrimental to the fght against slavery and even viewed it as a condition of true abolitionism: Antislavery activists “will not love the slave less, in loving the humanity more,” she wrote in 1848.159 The Rochester convention was in many ways the logical continuation of the Seneca Falls meeting, with one major exception.160 A woman, Quaker reformer Abigail Bush, was appointed as chair of the meeting. This bold move was initially rejected by some participants, including three of the organizers of the Seneca Falls convention, who considered it as “a most hazardous experiment.”161 A vote was taken in favor of Bush’s appointment.162 During the meeting, however, women’s legitimacy as public speakers was again questioned, not because of conventions, but because of their “low voices.” Bush then took the stand and asked for the audience’s indulgence: Friends, we present ourselves here before you, as an oppressed class, with trembling frames and faltering tongues, and we do not expect to be able to speak so as to be heard by all at frst, but we trust we shall have the sympathy of the audience, and that you will bear with our weakness now in the infancy of the movement?163 Bush was aware that a new movement was being born and that although women were destined to lead the fght, they also needed time to be its true leaders and bypass the common opinion that public speaking was a man’s art.164 In Rochester, men talked both in favor and against women’s rights. Douglass and Nell “advocated the emancipation of women from the artifcial disabilities imposed by false customs, creeds, and codes.”165 Nell’s address praised women’s “moral and intellectual greatness.”166 Clearly, not all women were diffdent about expressing their opinions publicly as Lucretia Mott criticized him for “the fulsome adulation and fattery he had bestowed on her sex” and answered a letter by Gerrit Smith with “great sarcasm and eloquence.”167 Her remarks made in the presence of her husband are evidence that, even if she at frst opposed a woman chairing the convention, she did not conform to a model of femininity based on modesty and discretion. During the convention, she also alluded to the Quaker wedding vows, claiming that “in the Society of Friends she had never known any diffculty to arise on account of the wife’s not having promised obedience in

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the marriage contract,” an indication that her activism was clearly shaped by her experience of Quakers’ views on gender equality.168

Women’s rights challenges Throughout the 19th century, the women’s rights movement presented both its opponents and proponents with challenges. Theoretical questions that were raised at conventions sometimes became tangible issues that had to be dealt with and the positions activists took were informed by events in their lives. Besides the franchise, important topics related to women’s rights were discussed at the two conventions of Seneca Falls and Rochester, including women’s access to employment and married women’s property rights. The Declaration of Sentiments thus claimed that “[Man] has monopolized nearly all the proftable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.” At the Rochester meeting, political as well as economic rights were mentioned.169 While the Declaration of Sentiments of Seneca Falls had asked for all women’s “right in property,” Douglass unexpectedly opposed joint ownership of marital property fve years later. Reiterating his support of woman suffrage, he opposed equal “disposition of property” under the dubious motive that in marriage, the man “labors hard, perhaps, while the wife lives in luxury.”170 This assertion is all the more surprising as it clearly corresponded neither to the reality of Douglass’s marriage nor his wife’s life and hard labor for their family’s sake. By 1869, the name of Douglass’s wife, Anna Murray Douglass, started to appear on some legal documents next to her husband’s. She was also the joint owner of their house, named Cedar Hill, purchased in 1877.171 The discrepancy between Douglass’s position and his life experiences shows that he sometimes did not hesitate to resort to the most hackneyed cliches to serve his goal of self-promotion. The demands made at Seneca Falls and Rochester concerning employment were also tested in the fall of 1849, when two Quaker women, Anna Southwick and Elizabeth McClintock—one of the co-organizers of the Seneca Falls convention—applied for positions from a Philadelphia silk import frm, Davis & Company, whose owner, Edward M. Davis, was the Motts’ son-in-law.172 Davis, who was also a reformer, decided to call a staff meeting to discuss the possibility of hiring the two women, but eventually decided to turn down their demand.173 He also wrote his mother-in-law, enclosing several documents, among which a report of the staff meeting and, more unexpectedly, cartoons drawn by some of his male employees to make sense of the unusual situation. Mott then sent the documents to Stanton, who forwarded them to McClintock and Southwick—a good example of the circulation of information among reformers. The report of the staff meeting, entitled “Abstract of the discussion among the employees of E.M. Davis & Co., upon the expediency and right of admitting women into the store,” mentioned different arguments against

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accepting women as employees. While some men used arguments based on the traditional doctrine of the separation of spheres—women were not strong enough for such work; working in the store would be “subversive of [their] delicacy and refnement”; women had other “domestic and social duties” to attend to—others pointed to the fragile position of Davis’s business and the negative impact the hiring of two women would have on “the interests of the house.”174 The abstract also recorded the fnal decision not to hire McClintock and Southwick in terms that show that Davis was torn between his commitment to reform and the instability of his professional position.175 Like her son-in-law, Lucretia Mott had mixed feelings about the affair, due to her knowledge of the reality of business, which she had acquired as the daughter and the wife of businessmen. Davis had apparently alluded to the possibility of hiring McClintock in 1844, but in 1848, he had lost $40,000, which caused him to enter a partnership.176 This explains why Mott defended her son-in-law to Stanton, writing about him being “bound with others,” a reference to his unstable situation.177 McClintock reacted violently to the cartoons. “We had not thought that we would so publicly become subjects for caricature and ridicule,” she wrote.178 Trying to bring her some comfort, Lucretia Mott and her sister Martha C. Wright dismissed the clerks’ cartoons as “childish and playful documents” and “the playful illustration of the ideas of some of the junior clerks not intended to be seen by others.”179 They urged McClintock not to take the matter personally—“it need not necessarily be ‘death’ to you,” Wright encouraged her. Mott and Wright were evidently surprised by McClintock’s reaction, probably for several reasons. First of all, since the 1830s, women reformers had been the targets of ridicule, and someone like Mott had probably grown accustomed to such attacks with her husband’s support. Also, quoting from a salesman who worked in the company, she wrote that Davis’s “boys and young men” were “given to sketching & caricaturing,” and their drawings had never been meant for public circulation.180 In the two sisters’ eyes, all these points confrmed that McClintock and Southwick had not received any special treatment from the store clerks and should thus not feel hurt by the events. The affair involved different models of masculine behavior at the time and the way they were challenged by women’s rights, chief among them, the image of the respectable businessman. The store clerks were young but they were also infuenced by their own image in American society at the time. Members of their profession were often satirized in the press as “counter jumpers,” catering to customers and dependent on their whims.181 They were also competing with other men, and the irruption of women in the workplace might have proved too disruptive for them, as the cartoons show.182 Mott sent at least three cartoons to McClintock and Southwick, describing mostly the distraction that a female presence would cause in the clerks’ working environment. In all of them, men are marginalized, sometimes absent, which offers perspectives on the way the store clerks conceived

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of their working environment if it were to be feminized. McClintock answered with documents of her own, namely a play and cartoons, which ridiculed the clerks’ reaction.183 The attack must have stung Davis and his employees all the more so since McClintock’s cartoons were also circulated by Lucretia Mott. She showed them at an antislavery executive committee meeting attended by Edward Davis and one of his salesmen, who, she wrote, “with rather an ill grace, bore the ‘fagellation’ regarding it undeserved.”184 In McClintock’s cartoons, men are depicted as cowardly and weak, while the women represented are sexually assertive and strong. They aimed at exposing the hypocrisy of the men who advocated women’s rights only in principles but refused to enforce them in practice when given the chance.185 Lucretia Mott and Davis’s attitude during the argument exemplifes the challenge that women’s rights represented for both male and female activists at the time. The back and forth also shows that male women’s rights allies were especially targeted when they failed to act upon their convictions. The agitation around the “woman question” in the late 1830s gave birth to an autonomous women’s rights movement in the 1840s, leading to the organization of women’s rights conventions. Men were considered as allies helping a nascent movement, drawing on their abolitionist activism and, in Douglass’s case, on his experience of exploitation as an enslaved man and of emancipation. Very early on, the women’s rights movement was defned as a movement in which women should take the lead. Another of its features was black women’s invisibilization despite the crucial role they played in the antebellum reform movement. The responsibility for making early feminism a movement for and by women fell on the shoulders of a few female activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was only indirectly involved in abolitionism.186 In October 1848, Lucretia Mott was already aware of this fact, when she wrote Stanton that she was “wedded to this cause.”187 Right from the start also, activists were confronted with the test that women’s rights represented in their daily, personal, and public lives, which means that even men like Douglass and Mott, who were considered as reliable partners in the fght, sometimes wavered in the face of challenges.

Notes 1 As Lisa Tetrault has shown, the “origins myth” about Seneca Falls originated in a post-Civil War context infuenced by debates over the memory of the confict and the division of feminisms. Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Also see Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 11. Many scholars have chosen to consider the women’s rights meeting not as a unique endeavor, but rather as one among many others that took place in the 1840s and early 1850s. For instance, Nancy A. Hewitt analyzes the Seneca Falls meeting in relation to the Rochester convention of August 2, 1848. Nancy A. Hewitt,

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Women’s rights partners “Feminist Friends: Agrarian Quakers and the Emergence of Woman’s Rights in America,” Feminist Studies 12.1 (Spring 1986): 40. Quaker women who were present at the Seneca Falls and Rochester conventions had sold copies of May’s sermon at the West New York Anti-Slavery Society’s fair they had organized in 1846. Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 38. WP, “Capital Punishment—Women’s Rights,” Liberator, July 3, 1846, 107. Garrison had thanked him for his article a few days before. “Success to the cause of Woman’s Rights, the world over!,” he wrote him. WLG to WP, June 30, 1846, WPP. Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Jacob Katz Cogan and Lori D. Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage, New York State Constitutional Convention,” Signs 22.2 (Winter 1997): 427– 439. Lucy Stone made her frst speech on women’s rights in 1847. Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 48; Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 75. “It was measuring the people of this country by their own standard. It was taking their own words and applying their own principles to women, as they have been applied to men,” Garrison said of the Declaration of Sentiments. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 136–137. “Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th & 20th, 1848,” in Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Conventions, held at Seneca Falls & Rochester, N.Y., July & August, 1848 (New York: Robert J. Johnson, 1870), 3. The 32 male signatories of the Declaration of Sentiments were recorded separately, which Judith Wellman sees as “a deft compromise between those (including Stanton) who wanted women to make their own demands and those who believed men also should have a voice.” Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 201. The proceedings mention that the question of men’s signatures “was discussed in an animated manner.” “Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Seneca Falls, N.Y.,” 3. Ibid. “Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at the Unitarian Church, Rochester, N.Y., August 2, 1848, To Consider the Rights of Woman, Politically, Religiously, and Industrially,” in Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Conventions, 3. In 1881, he wrote that he had “never been ashamed” to be called “a woman’s rights man.” Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Citadel Press, 1983 (1881)), 480. Seven years later, he proudly professed, “I am a radical woman suffrage man.” Speech at the 20th annual meeting of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, Tremont Temple, Boston, May 28, 1888, Woman’s Journal, June 2, 1888, FDP/LOC. When he died in February 1895, Stanton wrote that Douglass “was the only man I ever saw who understood the degradation of the disfranchisement of women.” Letter from ECS in In Memoriam: Frederick Douglass, ed. Helen Douglass (Philadelphia: J.C. Yorston & Co., 1897), 45. The letter was read at Douglass’s funeral by Susan B. Anthony. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn speculates that free black women attended the meeting but that their presence was not recorded. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 14. Foner, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, x. P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Frederick Douglass’s Black Activism,” Black Perspectives, April 22, 2019. Accessed on March 11, 2020. www.aaihs.org/f rederick-douglasss-black-activism/.

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14 Lemons, Womanist Forefathers, 8. 15 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 35, 36. 16 Ibid., 28. James Mott, Sr. also had an important infuence on Lucretia Mott. Ibid., 27. 17 Ibid., 26–27. 18 Ibid., 35. On the Quakers’ evolution on the question of slavery, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 12–24; Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 16–17; John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 28. Radical activist Benjamin Lay (1682–1759) was excommunicated by several Quaker meetings due to his abolitionist views. On Benjamin Lay, see Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (New York: Verso Books, 2017). 19 Anna Davis Hallowell, ed. James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters (Boston: Houghton, Miffin, 1896), 13. 20 Mary Grew, James Mott: A Biographical Sketch, with Tributes from Wendell Phillips, and Others (New York: William P. Tomlinson, 1868), 15. 21 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 36. 22 Ibid., 53. Mott was appointed to the Education Committee. Margaret Hope Bacon, Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott (New York: Walker and Company, 1980), 41. On abolitionism in Philadelphia and the role played by Quakers and free blacks, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 136–139; Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 36; Margaret Hope Bacon, But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 17–20. On the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 73–79. 23 Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 36; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 271. 24 Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 36–37. On the schism, also see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 172. 25 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 51. 26 Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 92. The relationships between Hicksite Quakerism and abolitionism were however strained. Ryan Jordan, “Quakers, ‘Comeouters,’ and the Meaning of Abolitionism in the Antebellum Free States,” Journal of the Early Republic 24.4 (Winter 2004): 587–608. Some Quaker women such as Mott continued the movement toward radicalism in the 1840s and 1850s, merging “religious anti-ritualism and feminism.” Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 134. 27 Bacon, Valiant Friend, 53. 28 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 64–65. 29 Ibid., 83. About Quakers’ “Peace Testimony” during Restoration England, see Erin Bell, “The Early Quakers, the Peace Testimony and Masculinity in England, 1660–1720,” Gender & History 23.2 (August 2011): 283–300. On Lucretia Mott’s positions on peace, see Lori D. Ginzberg, “Virtue and Violence: Female Ultraists and the Politics of Non-Resistance,” Quaker History 84.1 (Spring 1995): 23. 30 JM to Adam and Anne Mott, June 18, 1820, in Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 74. 31 Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 54; Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 40. 32 Slavery and “The Woman Question,” 40. 33 JM, Three Months in Great Britain (Philadelphia: J. Miller M’Kim, 1841), 15–16, 44. Lucretia Mott claimed that “sectarian proscription,” along with

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Women’s rights partners “English usage” and the “American New organization,” led to the exclusion of women from the proceedings. Slavery and the “Woman Question,” 58. Mott, Three Months in Great Britain, 26, 28–29. “Extract from a letter from Wendell Phillips,” in Grew, James Mott, 23. “American Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 16, 1870, 2. Douglass was also appreciative of Lucretia Mott’s oratorical skills. FD to Sydney H. Gay, September 17, 1847, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three, 1: 247. Mott, Three Months in Great Britain, 3. Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 89. There is evidence that Lucretia read Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the 1820s. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 56; Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, “Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,” American Journal of Political Science 48.4 (October 2004): 712. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 127. Mott, Three Months in Great Britain, 12. In 1841, Mott wrote Phillips: “To every real lover of freedom, a visit to Europe it appears to me, will have the effect to make him a truer democrat than he was before he witnessed the crushing effect of the aristocracy of that country.” JM to WP, 1841, WPP. JM to Adam and Anne Mott, January 13, 1822, in Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 76; Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 101. In 1841, Lucretia wrote Irish abolitionists Richard D. and Hannah Webb that she had enough of theological disagreements and her husband claimed that “he ‘don’t care a fg about it.’” LM to Richard D. Webb and Hannah Webb, April 2, 1841, in Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 91. Douglass, Life and Times, 27. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4 volumes (New York: International Publishers, 1975 (1950)), 1: 17. Ibid., 19. Douglass, Life and Times, 176–177. Rosetta Douglass Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass—My Mother as I Recall Her,” The Journal of Negro History 8.1 (January 1923): 93. Douglass, Life and Times, 250. On Douglass’s early life as an enslaved boy and man and his escape, see Blight, Frederick Douglass, 9–86. Foner, The Life and Writings, 1: 48; Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 37–38 Eric J. Sundquist, “Frederick Douglass: Literacy and Paternalism,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991), 120–121, 123. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 108–109. On Douglass’s charismatic presence, see Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere, 83. Stanton claimed her frst impression of him when they frst met was that of “an African Prince, conscious of his dignity and power, grand in his physical proportions, majestic in his wrath, as with keen wit, satire, and indignation he portrayed the bitterness of slavery.” Letter from ECS, in In Memoriam, 45. Douglass was also known for his impressions. Granville Ganter, “‘He Made Us Laugh Some’: Frederick Douglass’s Humor,” African American Review 37.4 (Winter 2003): 536. Fought, Women, 90. James Oliver Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks,” Feminist Studies 12 (Spring 1986): 53. FD to Amy Post, April 28, 1846, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 3: Correspondence, ed. John R. McKivigan (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009), 1: 122.

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53 Chapman had been critical of Douglass on previous occasions. Fought, Women, 79–83. 54 LM to George Combe, April 26, 1847, Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 149. On Douglass’s relation to “fugitivity,” see Manisha Sinha, “Frederick Douglass and Fugitivity,” Black Perspectives, November 26, 2016. Accessed on March 11, 2020. www.aaihs.org/frederick-douglass-and-fugitivi ty/. 55 FD, “Assimilating Woman to Man: An Address Delivered in NY, NY, on 14 May 1858,” New York Morning Express, May 15, 1858 and New York Times, May 15, 1858, FDP/LOC. In 1841, he argued that, contrary to white abolitionists, he could speak about slavery “from experience.” Cited in James A. Calaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York: Palgrave, 2006, emphasis in original), 13. This position was also developed by other black abolitionists. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Ends, Means, and Attitudes: Black-White Confict in the Antislavery Movement,” Civil War History 18 (1972), previously published in Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender, ed. John R. McKivigan (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 137. 56 Douglass’s awareness of enslaved women’s abuse in the hands of enslavers is visible in the scene of his aunt’s beating and mentions of another enslaved woman being used for forced reproduction which we fnd in his narrative. On Douglass’s description of his aunt’s beating, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3. 57 FD, “Women’s Rights Are Not Inconsistent with Negro Rights: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19 November 1868,” New York World, November 21, 1868, FDP/LOC. 58 Douglass, Life and Times, 574. 59 “The Woman’s Suffrage Movement: Address before the Woman Suffrage Association,” April 1888, FDP/LOC. 60 Douglass, Life and Times, 370. See Fought, Women, 152; Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 161. 61 Fought, Women, 46–49. 62 FD, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Offce, 1845), 103. 63 Douglass, Narrative, 107. Twenty years later, he was still reluctant to give details about the circumstances of his fight. “No good end would be served by such publication—and some evil might possibly come of it,” he wrote. FD to Lydia Maria Child, July 30, 1865, FD Papers, University of Rochester. Leigh Fought describes their fight as “a joint venture undertaken to create a life in which they could have a chance to thrive and protect the integrity of their family to the fullest extent of their abilities.” Fought, Women, 50. 64 Ibid., 49. 65 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 33. They met at a time when parents were less involved in their children’s decision to marry and love was considered as the main foundation of marriage. Ibid., 34; Fought, Women, 49. 66 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 34. About the process of approval for a new union among Quakers, see Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 31. 67 JM to his parents, February 23, 1811, in Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 42. Lucretia and James Mott were engaged on February 20, 1811. 68 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 37. Four months later, they moved to their new home. 69 Anne Mott to James and Lucretia Mott, May 8, 1811, in Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 44. 70 WLG to HBG, March 19, 1835, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 1: 467. Their granddaughter described Lucretia as “impulsive and vivacious”

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Women’s rights partners and James as “reserved and silent.” Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 89. Stanton remembered James as “a magnifcent man,” who was “tall and stately, and very distinguished in appearance.”Report of the International Council of Women, 324. LM, Discourse on Woman (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1849), 20, 12. An abolitionist committed to interracial activism, Lucretia however did not hesitate to compare the situation of some married women to slavery. Ibid., 17. Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 11. WLG to HBG, October 19, 1854, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 4: 322. JM to LS, June 29, 1853, BFP/LOC. On the infuence of the Motts’ example on Stone’s decision to marry, see Hersh, The Slavery of Sex, 227. For another example of James’s views on marriage as “the natural state of man,” see JM to a friend, June 29, 1853, Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 337. Stone turned down Blackwell’s frst proposal. Kerr, Lucy Stone, 65–66. Margaret J. Burleigh to WP, January 28, 1868, WPP. On James’s 61st birthday, Lucretia wrote him: “Forty years that we have loved each other with perfect love, though not formally married quite so long. How much longer the felicity is to be ours, who can tell? What the higher joys to be revealed in the spiritual world, no man can utter!” Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 271. She also refused to sleep in the bedroom that they had shared until then, a sign of their “deep physical as well as emotional connection.” Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 38. Mott, Discourse on Woman, 10; Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 87; Christopher Dixon, “‘A True Manly Life’: Abolitionism and the Masculine Ideal,” MidAmerica 77.3 (1995), previously in Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender, 279. A popular theory at the time, phrenology insisted on domesticity as a source of fulfllment for men and women. In a lecture published in 1841, American phrenologist Orson S. Fowler praised domesticity as an essential part of the lives of both women and men. Orson S. Fowler, Fowler on Matrimony: Or Phrenology and Physiology Applied to the Selection of Suitable Companions for Life Including the Analysis of the Domestic Faculties; and Also Directions to the Married for the Living Affectionately and Happily Together. Showing Them How to Adapt Themselves to the Phrenological Developments of Each Other (Philadelphia, 1841), 13–14. The book was republished in the following years. The Motts visited the Scottish phrenologist George Combe when they were in Great Britain in 1840. Fowler was American but the Motts thought he was inferior to Combe. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 101– 102. On phrenology, see Christopher G. White, “Minds Intensely Unsettled: Phrenology, Experience, and the American Pursuit of Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1880,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 16.2 (Summer 2006): 234. Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 255–256. Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, xvii. Cott, Public Vows, 90. On slave marriages, see Hunter, Bound in Wedlock. On the sexual abuse experienced specifcally by enslaved men, see Thomas A. Foster, Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2019). Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 7. The inclusion of Douglass’s marriage certifcate in his frst narrative is highly signifcant of the relationship between marriage and citizenship. Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 113, 127. On the signifcance of marriage for freedmen and women, see Amy Dru Stanley, “Instead of Waiting for the Thirteenth Amendment: The War

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Power, Slave Marriage, and Inviolate Human Rights,” The American Historical Review 115.3 (June 2010): 732–765. Fought, Women, 160. Rosetta Douglass Sprague writes that her mother’s employment as a domestic servant in Baltimore made her “a thorough and competent housekeeper.” Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 93–94. Anna was in charge of the household’s fnances. Fought, Women, 44. Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 97. Leigh Fought discusses the importance and signifcance of housekeeping for Anna Murray before and after her wedding to Douglass. Fought, Women, 44. Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 96–97. On black women’s competence in sustaining family life at the time, also see Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke,” 66. Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 98. Anna and Frederick Douglass had fve children: Rosetta (born in 1839); Lewis Henry (born in 1840); Frederick (born in 1842); Charles Remond (born in 1844); Annie (who was born in 1849 and died in 1860). Douglass arranged for the revenue generated by the sale of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in June 1845, to be paid to his wife during his absence but she did not use it. The publication of the narrative was a personal as well as a transatlantic enterprise. Michaël Roy, Textes fugitifs. Le récit d’esclave au prisme de l’histoire du livre (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2017), 147–173. Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 96–97. On Douglass’s relation with his daughter, see Fought, Women, 152–177. R.J. Young, Antebellum Black Activists: Race, Gender, and Self (NY: Garland Publishing, 1996), 126. Nell Irvin Painter notes that Douglass “associated illiteracy to enslavement.” Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), 97. According to Milton C. Sernett, “Frederick Douglass discovered that by putting words on paper he could defne himself for posterity,” as opposed to Harriet Tubman, whose “place in the American memory is largely the result of having her story written down by others.” Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 105. Rosetta writes that Anna “drew around herself a certain reserve.” Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 97. Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 97. FD to Doctress S.M. Loguen, August 12, 1882, cited in Foner, Frederick Douglass on Woman’s Rights, 22. Fought, Women, 128. In April 1848, Douglass wrote Griffths about his “present embarrassment,” an allusion to his fnancial diffculties. FD to Julia Griffths, April 28, 1848, in Foner, The Life and Writings, 307. See for instance FD to Samuel Drummond Porter, January 12, 1852, FD Papers, University of Rochester. Griffths went back to England in 1855. Liberator, November 18, 1853. Cited in Foner, Frederick Douglass on Woman’s Rights, 20. Lucretia Mott also participated in the gossip, writing American abolitionist Sydney H. Gay: “We have our fears for Fredk. [Douglass] through the infuence of these women—but hope that his strong good sense will preserve him from estrangement.” LM to Sydney H. Gay, April 13, 1850, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 201. Cited in Foner, Frederick Douglass on Woman’s Rights, 20. Cited in T.H. Pickett, “The Friendship of Frederick Douglass with the German, Ottilie Assing,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 73.1 (Spring 1989): 97. About Assing’s relationship with Douglass, see Fought, Women, 145–151. FD to Joseph Dotting Husbands, January 12, 1888, FD Papers, University of Rochester.

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99 FD, “‘Let Woman Take Her Rights’: An Address Delivered in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 24 October 1850,” New York Daily Tribune, October 26, 1850, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 2: 249. On Griffths’s time in Rochester and the speculations surrounding Douglass’s relation with her, see Fought, Women, 124–151. 100 “Practical Amalgamation,” Liberator, June 4, 1847, 89. The woman in question had accompanied him to the Assembly Chamber in Albany. 101 Douglass wrote a long letter to Garrison to express his outrage. FD to WLG, June 17, 1847, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three, 1: 214–219. On Douglass’s friendships with white women and their signifcance, see Fought, Women, 6–8. 102 Daina Raimey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 194. 103 James Forten also complained about the scrutiny he and his family were under. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 273. 104 On Douglass’s sense of privacy, see Fought, Women, 126. 105 “Frederick Douglass Vs. Robert Purvis, Wendell Phillips, and Charles L. Remond,” From the Pennsylvania Freeman, Liberator, September 23, 1853, 149. 106 FD to Lydia Dennett, April 17, 1857. Cited in Foner, Frederick Douglass on Woman’s Rights, 22. 107 Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 100. 108 Mott, Discourse on Woman, 8. 109 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 18. Also see Summers, Manliness, 22. 110 Mott, Discourse on Woman, 11. 111 “Manliness” in the 19th century, Martin Summers notes, “was forged within the marketplace but at the same time existed above it.” Summers, Manliness, 42. Also see Johansen, Family Men, 23. 112 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 146. 113 Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 89. 114 JM to his parents, April 24, 1813, in Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 47. 115 JM to his parents, June 18, 1820, in Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 74. 116 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 90. 117 Ibid., 55. On James’s dependence on cotton, see LM to Adam and Anne Mott, April 23, 1826, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 15. On the Free Produce movement, see Carol Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil: Free Produce and Radical Antislavery, 1820–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 27.3 (Fall 2007): 377–405. 118 Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 105. 119 Bell, “The Early Quakers,” 283, 293. 120 Carole Srole, Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and Offces (Ann Harbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 18. 121 Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 49. 122 Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke,” 55. 123 Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass,” 96. 124 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 118. “The recognition of the African American as a man in nineteenth-century America,” Michael Hatt writes, “was a question of negotiating between sameness and difference, permitting manhood without disturbing inequalities of power based on ethnicity.” Michael Hatt,

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“‘Making a Man of Him’: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-NineteenthCentury American Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal 15.1 (1992): 29. On work and domestic labor as an issue among black activists, see the debates at the 1848 National Convention of Colored Freemen, which Douglass attended. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 125–127; Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke,” 56–57. On Douglass as “laborer,” see ibid., 153. On the place of craftsmanship among black masons and its contribution to the construction of black masculinity, see Maurice Wallace, “‘Are We Men?’ Prince Hall, Martin Delaney, and the Masculine Idea in Black Freemasonry, 1775–1865,” American Literary History 9 (Fall 1997): 396–424. James Forten was a Freemason. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 144. The emergence of “self-made manhood” was made possible by what E. Anthony Rotundo calls a “shift in thinking from community to person,” which was a product of the development of market economy in the early 19th century. Rotundo, American Manhood, 19. The phrase “self-made men” was frst used by Henry Clay in 1832. Michael S. Kimmel uses the phrase “Marketplace Manhood” to describe the emergence of a “‘new man’ who derived his identity entirely from success in the capitalist marketplace, from his accumulated wealth, power, and capital.” Michael S. Kimmel, “Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832–1920,” in The History of Men: Essays in the History of American and British Masculinities, ed. Michael S. Kimmel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 38. On the history of the “self-made man” ideal, see John Cawelti, Apostles of the SelfMade Man (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1965). In an address delivered in England in 1860, Douglass praised self-made men for their “brave, honest, earnest, ceaseless heart and soul industry” and described the United States as “the home . . . of self-made men.” He, however, criticized them for being “generally very egotistical,” and for “often display[ing] a want of respect for the means by which other men have risen above the level of the race”— i.e. education. FD, “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men: An Address Delivered in Halifax, England, on 4 January 1860,” Halifax Courier, January 7, 1860, in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 3: 294, 297, 299, 300. On Douglass as “self-made man,” see Deborah E. McDowell, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), 198. Ginger Hill, “‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures,” Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 47. This importance of autonomy and control infuenced blacks’ involvement in the temperance movement. Donald Yacovone, “The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement, 1827–1854: An Interpretation,” Journal of the Early Republic 8.3 (Autumn 1988): 290. On Douglass’s views on photography, also see Laura Wexler, “‘A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation,” Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 18–40. Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere, 114. Hill, “Rightly Viewed,” 45. Kimberly Drake describes Douglass’s “need for communal affrmation.” Kimberly Drake, “Rewriting the American Self: Race, Gender, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs,” MELUS 22.4, Ethnic Autobiography (Winter 1997): 106.

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129 FD to Samuel Drummond Porter, January 12, 1852, FD Papers, University of Rochester. Interpretations of Douglass’s sense of manhood have diverged dramatically. Vincent Woodard writes that he “was aware of and acted from a place of indeterminacy or fuidity.” Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture, edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 125. Deborah E. McDowell has convincingly highlighted Douglass’s “problematical relation to the feminine” mirroring similar complexities within abolitionism. McDowell, “In the First Place,” 199. 130 About the specifc domestic and international context of the Seneca Falls convention, see Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 64–87, 183; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 175; Bonnie S. Anderson, “The Lid Comes Off: International Radical Feminism and the Revolutions of 1848,” NWSA Journal 10. 2 (Summer 1998): 1–12; Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 153–178. 131 Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 186. In her autobiography, Stanton only mentions Lucretia Mott, Mary McClintock, Jane Hunt, Martha C. Wright, and herself as “the chief movers and managers” of the convention. ECS, Eighty Years and More, Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002 (1898)), 148–149. 132 Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 29. See Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 92. 133 Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 29. 134 They also visited Lucretia’s pregnant sister Martha Wright, who lived in Auburn. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 127–138. 135 Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 148. Judith Wellman notes that according to “Hunt family tradition,” Richard P. Hunt joined the meeting and suggested they “do something about it.” Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 189. 136 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 67; Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 189. 137 Ibid., 189. LM to ECS, July 16, 1848, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 163. James was sick and did not travel with his wife, who attended the frst day of the proceedings. 138 Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 191. 139 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 64. 140 Ibid., 60. 141 The resolution was accepted. Ibid., 59–60. Douglass presided the convention. Quarles, “Frederick Douglass and the Woman’s Rights Movement,” 105–106. Martin Delany championed women’s access to education among other rights. Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke,” 71. 142 LM to ECS, October 3, 1848, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 173 (emphasis in original). She added, “I can do no less, with the interest I feel in the cause of the Slave, as well as of Woman, than be present & take a little part.” 143 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 77. 144 Ibid., 71. Jermain Loguen was born an enslaved man in 1813. He escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist and a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church after the Civil War. William C. Nell was an abolitionist and journalist. In 1847, he moved to Rochester and worked with Douglass at the North Star until 1849. On Nell’s relationship with Douglass and Garrison, see Patrick T.J. Browne, “‘To Defend Mr. Garrison’: William Cooper Nell and the Personal Politics of Antislavery,” The New England Quarterly 70.3 (September 1997): 415–442. 145 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 64–65.

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146 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 70, 84. Also see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 30. 147 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 73. 148 Report of the International Council of Women, 323–324. 149 Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 80, 83. On the widening of the franchise in the frst half of the 19th century, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 26–52. 150 Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 26. 151 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 86–87. 152 In her address on women’s condition in 1849, Lucretia Mott eventually rallied to the idea of suffrage but with some reluctance: “Far be it from me to encourage woman to vote, or to take an active part in politics, in the present state of our government. Her right to the elective franchise however, is the same, and should be yielded to her, whether she exercise that right or not,” she argued. LM, Discourse on Woman, 15. 153 Lori D. Ginzberg also notes the “strong Free Soil presence” at Seneca Falls. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 62. 154 Ibid., 60. 155 On Lucretia Mott’s evolution on woman suffrage, see Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 147. 156 FD, “The Rights of Women,” The North Star, July 28, 1848. 157 LM to Thomas McClintock and Mary Ann McClintock, July 29, 1848, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 164. 158 LM to George Combe and Cecilia Combe, September 10, 1848, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 169. 159 LM to Edmund Quincy, August 24, 1848, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 166, 167. 160 Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 40. Nancy A. Hewitt, however, notes what she sees as a “greater emphasis on rights” at the Rochester convention. Ibid., 41. 161 Lucretia Mott was one of them. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 75. As mentioned by Ellen Carol DuBois, this shows that female activists “did not begin their political activities already ‘emancipated,’ freed from the limitations that other women suffered.” DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 24. 162 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 75. 163 Ibid., 76. 164 The records of the convention mention that Sarah Anthony Burtis, a Quaker teacher, who was used to speaking in public, read reports and documents “with a clear voice and confdent manner, to the great satisfaction of her more timid coadjutors.” In 1886, Douglass recalled women’s diffdence then: “When [woman] attempted to speak she started at the sound of her own voice.” FD, “Woman Suffrage, Address at Tremont Temple, Boston, May 24, 1886,” FDP/LOC. 165 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 76. 166 “Women’s Rights Convention: Insurrection of the Ladies against the Lords of Creation,” Christian Observer, August 19, 1848, 136. 167 Ibid., 136. 168 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 79. Another husband supported his wife during the convention. A young bride spoke in favor of women’s rights while her husband “seemed a most delighted, nay, reverential listener.” History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 77–78. 169 Hewitt, “Feminist Friends,” 41. A report “on the wages paid for female labor” was read. “Women’s Rights Convention: Insurrection of the Ladies against the Lords of Creation,” 136. 170 Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, edited by John W. Blassingame (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979– 1985), 2: 451.

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171 Fought, Women, 222. 172 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 144. The two women had been encouraged by Stanton to seek employment. On the controversy that followed, see Sylvia Hoffert, “Female Self-making in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Women’s History 20 (September 2008): 34–59. 173 Edward M. Davis to LM, October 10, 1849, GFP/SSC. 174 “Abstract of the discussion among the employees of E.M. Davis & Co., upon the expediency and right of admitting women into the store,” October 2, 1849, GFP/SSC. 175 Ibid. 176 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 145. 177 LM to ECS and Elizabeth McClintock, November 27, 1849, GFP/SSC. 178 Elizabeth McClintock to LM, November 11, 1849, GFP/SSC. 179 LM to ECS and Elizabeth McClintock, November 27, 1849; Martha C. Wright to Elizabeth McClintock, 8 January 1850, GFP/SSC. 180 Elizabeth McClintock to LM, November 11, 1849, GFP/SSC. 181 Brian P. Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in NineteenthCentury America (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 13. 182 Ibid., 6, 49. 183 For a description of the drawings and the play, see Hoffert, “Female Selfmaking,” 46–48. 184 LM to ECS and Elizabeth McClintock, November 27, 1849, GFP/SSC. 185 Hoffert, “Female Self-making,” 51–52. McClintock also maybe unwittingly transgressed another boundary when she drew the caricatures, as cartooning was “men’s-only domain” in the frst half of the 19th century. Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 28. 186 About Stanton, Christine Stansell thus writes that “unlike the frst generation of women reformers—a group that included Lucretia Mott, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Lucy Stone, and Abby Kelley Foster—she never worked politically with black women.” Christine Stansell, “Missed Connections: Abolitionist Feminism in the Nineteenth Century,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 35. 187 LM to ECS, October 3, 1848, in Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn Mott, 172. She also mentioned Elizabeth McClintock as one of the “pioneers” of women’s rights.

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Stephen S. Foster and Henry B. Blackwell Women’s rights as men’s rights

In the 1850s, the women’s rights movement solidifed organizationally and ideologically following the First National Woman’s Rights Convention, which took place in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1850.1 During the local and national conventions that were held throughout the decade, women’s rights activists gave lectures and speeches, wrote articles, petitions, and tracts, allowing the movement to form autonomous discourses.2 Although woman suffrage was a central demand, they addressed and very often disagreed on a wide range of issues, including marriage and divorce, free love, the articulation between race and gender discriminations in their fght, dress reform, women’s employment and education, as well as the roots of patriarchy. Those debates were however not limited to the meetings dedicated to women’s rights as they also permeated other reform conventions, where the question kept being raised. While women’s rights activists were aware of the diffcult road that lay ahead of them, optimism dominated the frst half of the decade.3 In 1852, Garrison acknowledged the progress made since 1840 and the emergence of the “woman question,” and expressed the belief, shared by many activists, that women’s equality was within reach because of women’s “talent.”4 Two important women’s rights partnerships were formed in the 1850s. In May 1851, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony met in Seneca Falls, an event that profoundly altered the course of their lives and the feminist movement in the United States.5 Four years later, Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell married in a ceremony celebrated by Higginson. Although the infuence of their relationship on the American women’s rights movement has sometimes paled in comparison with Anthony’s and Stanton’s prominent work, the couple was an important fxture of feminist agitation until Stone’s death in 1893. When they met, she was a wellknown reformer and successful lecturer and it was through his relationship with her that Blackwell became a full-fedged women’s rights activist. He made his frst speech on the topic “for nearly an hour” at the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention in Cleveland on October 6, 7, and 8, 1853, thus marking the beginning of a 40-year marital and political collaboration.6

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Women’s rights unions were important in shaping the movement. Committed to women’s rights both as individuals and as couples, they agitated together publicly while still seeking to retain an independent voice, an often diffcult task for women, as the cases of Abby Kelley Foster and Lucy Stone show. Abby Kelley and Stephen S. Foster often attended conventions together and addressed them equally, and they never shied away from making their disagreements on political issues public. Several years older than Blackwell and Stone, they infuenced them in several respects and had many characteristics in common. In 1846, a few years before he became an active reformer, Blackwell attended the Fosters’ antislavery lectures in Cincinnati, praising “the earnest eloquence of Abby Kelley Foster, then in her prime.”7 As one of the frst female abolitionist lecturers and the woman who was accused of splitting the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, Kelley was a major inspiration for Stone. “The movement for the equal rights of women began directly and emphatically with her,” Stone thus claimed about her female colleague.8 Kelley and Stone were accomplished reform activists when they met their future husbands. For reasons both personal and political, they resisted the idea of marriage, leading to rather long periods of courtship, during which they and their future partners discussed their feelings as well as marriage and the limitations it imposed on women. Stephen S. Foster (1809–1881) and Henry B. Blackwell (1825–1909) ended up marrying women who were more successful and respected than they were and who had a strong sense of the limitations imposed on them by laws and mentalities, a situation they dealt with differently. Foster ended up spending more time at home than his wife, looking after their only daughter when she was young, while Blackwell often tried to outdo his spouse by entering multiple business ventures and becoming a women’s rights activist in his own right. Men’s regular attendance at women’s rights conventions in the 1850s shows that their presence was virtually unquestioned at that time. Although they did not chair conventions after Seneca Falls, they did sign calls, were members of organizing committees, and gave speeches, some of which were considered as landmarks for the women’s rights movement. When, in the mid-1850s, Stone compiled fve tracts about women’s rights into a small book to sell at her lectures, she selected three texts written by men out of the fve she published: Phillips’s speech at the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1851, Unitarian minister and reformer Theodore Parker’s 1853 sermon on “the public function of woman,” and Higginson’s 1854 “Woman and Her Wishes.”9 Men’s role in the movement as well as their responsibility for female oppression, however, were the topics of intense conversations among activists in the 1850s. The Fosters married ten years before Stone and Blackwell, a period during which women’s rights discourses coalesced around important issues, including marriage. The interval is important to grasp the different terms of their courtships, but it does not necessarily account for differences between their

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marital arrangements. Despite displaying more radical elements, Stone and Blackwell struggled throughout their married life to achieve what activists called an “equal marriage,” in part because of their desire to conform to the women’s rights ideology that developed in the 1850s. On the contrary, the Fosters had an unusual marriage for the time. He became their daughter’s primary caregiver while his wife continued her career as an activist. Women’s rights discourses offered a validation of their choices and allowed them to fnd comfort in models of behavior that might have been less common at the time.

Reform as family business Foster and Blackwell came from families committed to activism. The 9th of 13 children, Foster was born in Canterbury, New Hampshire, in 1809. His father Asa fought in the American Revolution. He was a farmer and a convinced reformer and attended the 1850 First National Woman’s Rights Convention. Stephen fully embraced his family’s call.10 After training as a carpenter, he joined Dartmouth College at the age of 22 in order to become a Congregationalist minister. While in college, he became increasingly critical of the American clergy’s position.11 It was also during that time that he was jailed, the frst of a long series of subsequent stays in prison.12 After Dartmouth, he entered the Union Seminary in New York but in 1839 he chose to dedicate his life to abolitionism.13 The religious nature of Foster’s activism was clear from the very beginning and he became an abolitionist in the same way that he would have embraced the ministry. Very quickly, he became known as an uncompromising and tireless activist whose controversial tactics alienated him from his opponents as well as his allies. In 1841, he initiated a mode of action that consisted of interrupting church services, which cost him several nights in prison and the remonstrances of the clergy.14 He was excommunicated by the Church Committee of Dartmouth College, who accused him of “fanaticism,” a criticism that was frequently leveled at him.15 Throughout his career as an activist, he distinguished himself by his defant spirit and unpredictability. Foster became an abolitionist at a time when the antislavery movement was torn asunder by the “woman question” and other political issues. When studying at Dartmouth College, he had helped form the New Hampshire Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society and invited Angelina E. Grimke to lecture.16 Later on, he became a member of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, which sided with Garrison in the late 1830s and whose leading fgure, Nathaniel P. Rogers, was one of the men who forfeited their credentials at the London convention in 1840.17 Foster participated in several campaigns and tours with Kelley in the early 1840s, which shows he welcomed women’s equal participation in the movement.18 He attended the frst women’s rights conventions. The frst two national meetings conveniently took place in Worcester, at the time a center of reform, where Kelley’s family had moved in 1811 and the couple had bought a farm in April 1847.19

80 Women’s rights as men’s rights As in Foster’s case, the roots of Blackwell’s activism are to be found in his family. The seventh of nine children, he was born in Bristol, England in 1825. In 1832 his family moved to the United States after his father Samuel’s sugar refneries burned down.20 They frst settled in New York, where Samuel became the manager of a sugar refnery that also burned down in September 1836. He rebuilt it but sold it in March 1837.21 He and his family then moved to Cincinnati, where he died shortly after.22 Despite his professional activities, which were highly dependent on slavery, Samuel was, according to his son, “a Clarkson abolitionist.”23 Even if he often kept his opinions to himself—probably for business reasons—he still referred to slavery as the “dreadful system.”24 Samuel Blackwell’s children were interested in the different reforms of their time, including abolitionism, women’s rights, and Fourierism.25 His daughter Anna was drawn to Associationism, the U.S. brand of Fourierism, and was a friend of Albert Brisbane, Fourier’s translator, who became notorious for his advocacy of free love.26 In 1845, her sister Elizabeth, the frst American woman to graduate from medical school, wrote of her admiration for the members of the utopian community of Brook Farm, Massachusetts.27 Their sisters Marian and Ellen were present at the First National Woman’s Rights Convention of 1850.28 In January 1854, after meeting some of the Blackwells, Stone described them as “good and noble” and “friends of reform.”29 Despite being independent women, however, Blackwell’s sisters were never really active in the women’s rights movement, which Elizabeth criticized in 1850 for being “an anti-man movement” lacking in “strong, clear thought.”30 It was through his relationship with Stone that Blackwell became a women’s rights activist. When they met for the frst time in 1850, she was an abolitionist lecturer, and, according to Blackwell’s reminiscences, “a young middle-aged woman”—she was 32 at the time—with a “sweet voice, bright smile, pleasant manner and simplicity of dress and character.”31 They became reacquainted in 1853 after an abolitionist meeting in New York, which they both attended and she addressed.32 Soon after, she spoke in favor of woman suffrage at the Constitutional Convention in Boston. Decades later, Blackwell recalled Stone’s “beauty, charm and eloquence” on that occasion.33 His courtship coincided with her decision to redirect her energy from abolition to women’s rights.34 Unlike many woman’s rights men at the time, Blackwell had not been a committed abolitionist before becoming a feminist activist and his sentiments for Stone account in part for his joining the women’s rights movement.35 He recalled years later that when he gave his speech at the Cleveland convention, he “certainly had every inducement to do [his] best in the presence of the woman [he] hoped to marry.”36 In his conversion to women’s rights, feelings of love also interacted with the need to participate in collective action.37 In April 1853, he confded to Theodore Parker, describing his life as “a series of blunders and weaknesses” and expressing his resolve “to redeem the time still left.”38

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A few weeks later, he made up his mind to court and marry Stone after seeing her at the Boston meeting. He enrolled the help of Garrison, who gave him a letter of introduction for Stone but warned him about her “determination not to marry.”39 As a newcomer at the Cleveland convention, Blackwell was immediately attracted to the atmosphere he witnessed there. He remembered running into Stone and the Motts on the train on his way to the meeting and being impressed by the “fresh, cheerful, intellectual life of the little circle.”40 He also recalled swimming in Lake Erie with Foster on one of the mornings of the convention. “A fresh northwest wind brought in quite a swell and the water and air were cold enough to give Mr. Foster the combative sense which he so greatly enjoyed,” he later wrote.41 Foster became an abolitionist in the 1830s, when the “woman question” was being discussed within the antislavery movement, but also at a time when the women’s rights movement had not acquired autonomy yet. Even though he and his wife regularly attended women’s rights conventions in the 1850s, abolitionism remained their primary commitment.42 Blackwell, on the other hand, became an active reformer when the movement was gaining prominence and his future wife was transitioning from abolitionism to women’s rights, which explains in part the differences in the contents of their discussions at the time of their courtships.

The test of courtship For abolitionists and women’s rights activists, courtship was often “a testing ground,” even more so as women’s rights ideas became more widespread.43 It was a time when not only personal feelings but also political convictions were expressed and confronted. As the two couples show, it was an important moment that allowed them to test the views they defended in public.44 The ten-year interval between Foster’s and Blackwell’s courtships shows the evolution of the infuence of women’s rights ideas on activists’ decision to form unions. Foster and Kelley got acquainted in June 1841, when she traveled to New Hampshire to lecture on slavery.45 When they met, she was a renowned antislavery lecturer who was very much in demand, while he had earned a reputation for himself as a passionate, and somewhat diffcult colleague. After their initial encounter, they met frequently, campaigning in Rhode Island with Douglass later that year, attending the same conventions, and traveling together, as was common among abolitionists at the time.46 They got engaged in the winter of 1842–1843 under the auspices of another abolitionist couple, Paulina Davis and Francis Wright, whom Kelley swore to secrecy.47 For more than two years, Foster was placed in the disturbing situation of overcoming the hesitation of a woman who had agreed to marry him but refused to set a wedding date and make their engagement public. Kelley and Foster’s courtship took the form of a power struggle happening mostly through the letters.48 The exchange was so intense and

82 Women’s rights as men’s rights the memory of it so vivid that, fve years into their marriage, Kelley wrote her husband, Your last letter is so much like that of a lovers (sic) to his mistress, in the matter of fattery, that I have come to the conclusion that you are trying to make up at this last hour for your entire lack of that quality in the days of our courtship.49 Kelley was afraid of the personal and public consequences if her engagement came to be known. In March 1843, she expressed her worries that their frequent correspondence would raise their friends’ suspicion.50 Four months later, she explained her wish “to conceal [their] connexion” for two reasons. She was not prone to public displays of affection and was concerned that the news of her engagement would disrupt her work as an activist. “People wish me married to get rid of me,” she confded to him, “and did they know of one relation, they would say I was under obligations to take care of your feeble constitution and nurse you, and if I did it, (sic) not they would call me unfeeling and brutal.”51 Kelley was aware that her authority as an activist rested in part on her public image as an independent woman, which she felt would be threatened if her “ardent” feelings for Foster came to be known.52 For her, marriage and activism were exclusive rather than complementary commitments. His fancee’s hesitations destabilized Foster greatly.53 He was concerned that his own reputation accounted for her reluctance to marry him and was beset by doubts and moments of depression, a trait that Kelley deplored.54 Both Kelley and Foster were intent on making absolute honesty the basis of their relationship, a characteristic they shared with other women’s rights activists.55 Foster was a proud man, who refused to be what he called “a conjugal beggar” and submit to “the wily arts of courtship,” which he associated with “deception & fraud.”56 Absolute honesty and transparency both in private and in public, however, were more diffcult to sustain for a woman like Kelley, for whom privacy meant autonomy. “My heart is covered by a glass window to the world,” she confded to Foster, “but to you the glass has been removed.”57 Blackwell’s courtship of Stone also involved intense discussions on issues related to female autonomy and male control at a time when married women’s options were still limited by the coverture system.58 Taking place ten years after Foster’s courtship, it was clearly infuenced by women’s rights agitation, which was gaining ground. When they met, Stone was favorably impressed by Blackwell because of his connection with his sister Elizabeth, whose professional achievements was a reference for women’s rights activists.59 She, however, refused his frst proposal because it was sudden, she might not have had strong feelings for him, and she had promised never to marry so she could dedicate herself to woman’s cause.60 They then started a correspondence, in which they confronted differing visions of marriage and

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its signifcance for women. Blackwell tried to prove to Stone that marrying him would not be detrimental to her activism, but would on the contrary enhance it. Her resistance prompted them to refect over the institution of marriage and married women’s situation at the time, and ultimately led to the idea that matrimony could be a tool to implement change.61 Before 1855, Stone’s view on marriage was that it would impede her activities as a reformer, making single life the only option if she wanted to remain an independent and effcient activist. She was aware of the inequality between men and women in marriage. She was torn between her political convictions, which required her to stand out of reach of the corrupting infuence of marriage legislation and retain her autonomy, and the idea that married life was the natural state to which human beings aspired.62 This explains why, among the many arguments Blackwell developed to convince Stone, the notion that marriage was a natural aspiration must have been the most persuasive.63 She was also encouraged in this view by other activists, including James Mott.64 In keeping with antebellum reformers’ discourse, “symmetry” was central to Blackwell’s argumentation in favor of an equal partnership.65 “My idea of the relation,” he confded to Stone, “involves no sacrifce of individuality but its perfection—no limitation of the career of one, or both but its extension.”66 According to him, however, this need for balance, while central to every individual, was even more crucial for women, whose lives were supposed to take place mostly in the domestic sphere to the detriment of public engagement. He thus claimed that Stone’s choice to sacrifce her private life by not getting married in order to play a greater part in the public sphere showed that women could not be active in both spheres equally.67 Through his correspondence with Stone, he came to develop the idea that the key to happiness was not just any marriage but “equal” marriage. To prove his trustworthiness, he promised she would make the decision of “when, where and how often” she would “become a mother” and would have perfect autonomy, to the point that he suggested that they did not have to “live together” if she did not want to.68 After months of courtship, Stone fnally agreed to marry Blackwell. The ceremony took place on May 1, 1855. A declaration was read by Blackwell on the occasion, giving special status to an act that, if made public, could potentially change the American public sphere.69 Both newlyweds expressed the wish that their marriage would serve as a model for others: “We will try to be true to universal interests and not to forget the Race in our own little objects and cares.”70 The ceremony was performed by Higginson, who was then a minister in Worcester.71 Stone’s father, mother, and siblings attended the ceremony; none of Blackwell’s relatives were present.72 While Elizabeth pretexted “motives of economy” and Marian was “being tied to the house,” their absence can probably be accounted for by their antipathy for Stone.73 In 1845, Kelley and Foster had shunned the wife’s vow of obedience at their ceremony and had instead made the mutual promise “to perform

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faithfully all the relative duties of husband and wife.”74 Celebrated ten years later, Stone and Blackwell’s union was infuenced by the emergence of women’s rights discourses which exposed women’s oppression due to unjust laws. The protest was based on the vision, already present in Kelley and Foster’s courtship correspondence, of the joint personal and political nature of the institution of marriage.75

Marriage, divorce, and free love In the 1850s, woman suffrage was considered by women’s rights activists as “the very central nucleus of the whole cause.”76 Despite the initial reluctance of some women’s rights supporters, it quickly became a demand central to women’s equal citizenship.77 At the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1856, it was called “the symbol and the guarantee of all other rights.”78 Marriage was also an important issue at those conventions but eventually proved to be more controversial than the franchise.79 The Declaration of Sentiments of 1848 had condemned the laws that made the married woman “civilly dead,” depriving her of her property rights and turning her into an “irresponsible being” and, in the 1850s, marriage continued to be a central topic at women’s rights conventions.80 Although married women’s property rights were often mentioned at those meetings, they did not represent the only issue to be discussed in relation to marriage. At the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1851, a report of the “committee on the social relations” read by Unitarian clergyman and reformer William Henry Channing reaffrmed woman’s “natural right to the development of all her faculties, and to all the advantages that insure this result,” which included her right to choose whether “to marry, or remain single.” “There should be no stigma attached to the single woman,” Channing claimed.81 Stone and her college friend Antoinette Brown were present at the convention and they must have found in this text a confrmation of the idea they had been discussing in private, namely that single life was a legitimate option for women who aimed at leading independent lives. Stone, who attended many women’s rights conventions in the early 1850s at a time when she was single, was well aware of the limitations that legislation imposed on married women and she took every opportunity, whether in public or in private, to denounce the situation. At the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, she launched a scathing attack on marriage laws for assigning “the ‘custody’ of the wife’s person to her husband.”82 For her, as for other activists, the question of marriage was not a superfcial but a deeply personal one.83 This explains why Blackwell’s frst speech on women’s rights, made at the Cleveland convention in 1853 in Stone’s presence, focused on this issue. He advocated “higher ideas of marriage” and urged men “to select women worthy to be wives,” ideas that he came to develop in his courtship correspondence with Stone.84 Three years

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later, at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, which his wife chaired, he focused again on marriage and the necessity for man to be “well and worthily married,” lest he became “half a man.”85 Foster similarly expressed general views on matrimony and commented on his own marriage in public. He addressed the topic at the Free Convention in Vermont from June 25 to 27, 1858.86 When a resolution stating that “the only true and natural marriage is an exclusive conjugal love between one man and one woman, and the only true home is the isolated home, based upon this exclusive love,” he moved to write instead “an exclusive conjugal love between one man and one woman, based upon the principle of perfect and entire equality.”87 He argued that the addition had been motivated by the claim made by the previous female speaker, free lover Julia Branch, that marriage only gave women of the 19th century “the right to bear children.”88 Foster also went as far as stating that he was ready to exchange positions on marriage, as he preferred to “be the sufferer of the wrong than the infictor.” Alluding to his own experience as a married man, he spoke of “the blessedness of wedded life” with a woman he considered as an “equal partner.” In an allusion to free love advocates, however, he refused to endorse divorce or the abolition of the marriage institution, probably because his experience of matrimony had been fulflling.89 Divorce was seen as the corollary of marriage in most discussions. The document read by Channing in 1851 mentioned it as an “honorable” solution to end “uncongenial marriages.”90 A few years later, it became a topic of importance among women’s rights activists. In July 1853, Anthony informed Stone that Stanton had started writing a text on the question.91 The terms of the debate over divorce were heavily infuenced by the temperance movement and its claim that women married to intemperate men should be allowed to dissolve their marriage.92 In 1857, Stone wrote again about her support for divorce laws, arguing that divorce was the solution for men and women married to “bad” partners.93 Despite the moral ground provided by temperance, divorce was still considered as a controversial topic for most women’s rights activists. Reacting to Channing’s letter at the Cleveland convention, Antoinette Brown claimed that she preferred the phrase “legally separated” to the word “divorce,” which showed that the term itself was polemical.94 The question became intertwined with the debate surrounding free love in the 1850s, which affected Blackwell and Stone directly.95 On September 17, 1855, a little more than four months after their wedding, he wrote her a long letter, mentioning a book he had been reading, Mary Lyndon, or Revelations of a Life. An Autobiography, by Mary Gove Nichols, a free love advocate.96 His opinion on the book was mixed. While he praised it for its “power,” he also called it “morbid” and “not very truthful.”97 He was intrigued by the characters, whom had been given pseudonyms, and was intent on fnding who they were in real life. According to him, however, there was no doubt about the identity of one of them, his sister Anna, who had shared a house with Mary Gove Nichols in New York City. He was outraged that Nichols

86 Women’s rights as men’s rights had brought his sister in the public eye, alluding to her and her husband’s notoriety as free love advocates.98 Blackwell’s letter to Stone was ambiguous. On the one hand, he clearly enjoyed the book and called Nichols “no ordinary woman” with “a great deal of talent & a little genius.” On the other hand, he also took the opportunity to warn his wife against free lovers’ plan to use what he called the “‘Womans Rights’ disguise” to advance their ideas.99 While Associationism and Fourier’s ideas were topics of discussion among the Blackwells, not everyone in the family condoned them. The mother, Hannah, was not thrilled by Anna’s interest in Fourier because of the threat his project posed to the institution of marriage. Hannah was clearly worried about her children, and she invoked her dead husband’s memory in order to try and convince her son Henry to stay away from Fourierism.100 Six years after his mother’s letter, Blackwell, then a married man, seemed to have rallied to his mother’s side. In September 1855, he expressed his wish to see Stone, as well as other well-respected women’s rights activists such as Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Lucretia Mott, Phillips, and Higginson, counter free lovers’ “conspiracy against purity & virtue & all the holiest relations of life” to take over women’s rights.101 He thus gave his wife and other women’s rights activists of seemingly irreproachable reputation the role to stop the free love threat, a mission that Stone apparently agreed to fulfll.102 In their writings on the topic, the Nicholses addressed women’s rights activists directly, accusing them of hypocrisy, and criticizing the inconsistency of asking for the right to vote without advocating the abolition of marriage. “You cannot dodge it much longer. When you demand Woman’s Rights, you demand the abrogation of the civilized marriage,” they wrote in 1854.103 Without advocating “omnigamy,” or community marriage, as did the Nicholses, Stone had been concerned with the question of divorce before marrying Blackwell.104 In a letter probably written in 1853, she defended the idea that love had to be free of legal considerations, a notion close to free lovers’ arguments against marriage. She then advocated that “a true love may grow up in the soul of the injured one, from the full enjoyment of which, no legal bond has a right to keep her.”105 Three years later, however, she informed Anthony that she had spoken about marriage and “dealt faithfully by the Free Lovers.”106 This had clearly become a personal battle for her, probably a result of married life. Blackwell and Stone’s attacks on free love after their wedding may have originated in their fear of linking women’s rights to a movement that was seen as scandalous by the vast majority of Americans. But this might also have resonated with more intimate issues that had to do with their own relationship. In the letter he wrote about Mary Lyndon, Blackwell found one passage particularly outrageous, the correspondence between Mary Lyndon and “Vincent,” which he called “wretched trash.”107 It is diffcult to see what he found so scandalous in the letters that were reproduced as

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they merely expressed feelings and views on what a union between a man and a woman should be. We also fnd some similarities between them and those exchanged by Stone and Blackwell at the time of their courtship.108 Blackwell might have been shocked by the fact that an intimate correspondence between two lovers should have been exposed in such a way and by the free love ideas that were conveyed in some of these letters. Another cause for outrage might have been found in the allusions to physical love we fnd in the correspondence and possible echoes with the couple’s situation at the time.109 This might show that the relation between the women’s rights movement and free love took different forms: similar ideals pertaining to the union between a man and woman; a stigma used by the opponents of women’s rights, which women’s rights activists were very well aware of; fnally, as shown by the relationship between Blackwell and Stone, a way to deal with intimate, mostly sexual, issues that arose in critical times—here, the frst months of their marriage. These personal questions also infuenced women’s rights discourses conservatively, as public discussions over marriage and divorce show. The question of divorce divided the movement throughout the decade, as in the case of the debates over Stanton’s resolutions on marriage law reform at the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention of May 1860. Phillips was one of her most vocal opponents, objecting to their relevance at a meeting where, he claimed, only questions regarding women’s unequal condition were to be discussed. He insincerely argued that since marriage concerned men and women equally, it had no place on a women’s rights platform.110 The reluctance of activists who were well aware of the injustice of marriage laws to deal with the issues of marriage and divorce at women’s rights conventions might have come from both personal and political reasons—their own experience of marriage as well as their realization of the dangers of associating with free love. Both their marriages and women’s rights conventions were too important to be disrupted by this controversial issue, a clear example of the infuence of the personal on public debates. The controversies also show men’s conservative infuence on the movement, as in the case of Phillips, who was intent on controlling the movement’s agenda.

“The comparison of opinions” Women’s rights conventions were understood as occasions that promoted the confrontation of ideas and “participatory politics” for the disenfranchised.111 At the beginning of the Cleveland meeting in 1853, the chair Frances D. Gage thus reaffrmed the absolute right to free speech, “both for and against.”112 She urged opponents to speak up during the debates instead of feeding newspapers with “gross misrepresentation.”113 In May 1860, Martha C. Wright claimed that it was “the comparison of opinions, that gives life to a Convention.”114 As chair of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1856, Stone opened the meeting by acknowledging

88 Women’s rights as men’s rights the presence of “men and women irrespective of creed, country or color; those who dissent from us as freely as those who agree with us.”115 The diversity that Stone extolled, however, did not always include race despite black activists’ presence at women’s rights meetings. At the Fifth National Woman’s Rights Convention, which took place in Philadelphia in 1854, Robert Purvis was appointed as one of the ten vice presidents while his wife Harriet Forten Purvis and his sister Margaretta Forten participated in its organization.116 Both Sarah Parker and Charles Lenox Remond spoke at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City, two of the few black voices recorded on the occasion. Sarah took the foor to claim women’s right to their autonomy and express her decision “to identify herself with this movement.”117 Her brother’s specifc contribution was to link abolition and women’s rights—“On the matter of women’s rights and complexion there seemed no progress in this country,” he noted. He also warned against “separating the interest of the two movements by private jealousies,” a sign that at least one activist had become aware of the tensions that became more visible after the Civil War.118 In the 1850s, women’s rights conventions were described as places of chaos and unrest as well as radicalism.119 Such misrepresentation echoed in large measure the ridicule that continued to target activists.120 Female reformers were still then seen as controversial fgures that had to rely on the support of their male allies.121 This was the case with the two temperance meetings that took place in May and September 1853 in New York City.122 Several women’s rights activists were present on one or both of those occasions. A preliminary meeting had been called in New York City on May 12, 1853, in order to prepare the organization of a temperance meeting that was going to take place during the World’s Fair.123 The frst motion accepted the male and female delegates who had been sent by temperance societies but no woman was appointed to the business committee.124 The debates that ensued were reminiscent of the events in London in 1840, which shows that the idea of women’s rights was not as popular as some activists expected and the “woman question” was still being debated at reform meetings. When a female delegate from New York, Lydia F. Fowler, presented the credentials of other women, among whom were Stone and Foster, “loud demonstrations of disapprobation” were heard.125 It then fell on men to defend women’s participation with arguments reminiscent of the debates of the late 1830s. “I am not here,” Higginson claimed, “as a gentleman or as a lady, but as a friend of temperance,” adding that “in a World’s Convention woman should be represented, otherwise it would be only a Semi-World’s Convention,” a criticism that had been leveled at the organizers of the London meeting in 1840. When Abby Kelley Foster rose in order to defend her position, she was interrupted by loud cries, and was asked by the chairman “to take her place.”126 After deliberations, the Committee on Credentials decided not to receive “the ‘Women Delegations.’” Higginson then argued that it was women’s participation, not “woman’s rights,”

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which they had to discuss, a clear attempt at depoliticizing the question.127 The female delegates present and their male allies then withdrew from the meeting.128 This led to further discussions among the delegates that stayed, with insults being fung at the advocates of women’s participation. At the time of the split of the abolitionist movement, Abby Kelley Foster had been compared with Eve and Delilah.129 Thirteen years later, she was accused of “outraging the proprieties of her sex, trampling the very Son of God under her blasphemous feet.”130 The World’s Temperance Convention, which took place in September of the same year, confrmed women’s exclusion from the proceedings. Antoinette Brown presented her credentials, which were rejected at the same time as those of a black physician, intellectual and activist James McCune Smith.131 In order to fght against the expected exclusion of women, male allies had formed a temperance society just before the meeting and appointed three male delegates, including Phillips. When one man present exclaimed that women and blacks—described with a racist slur—“had already met in Convention, and that he desired that white people might be let alone,” Phillips answered “that such language d[id] not beft the lips of a gentleman.” He used the term “gentleman” again later when he was criticized for his own language. “I have never yet spoken, and I never mean to speak, so that any man can say that I have not conducted myself in a manner becoming a gentleman.”132 The remark, which is reminiscent of the discourse that dominated male abolitionists’ rhetoric in the late 1830s, when women had been the targets of similar insults and mob violence, shows Phillips’s consistency when defning proper manly behavior. Women activists and their male allies decided to leave the meeting and immediately hold a Whole World’s Temperance Convention.133 The debates were heavily infuenced by the violent atmosphere surrounding the meeting, which led the participants to reaffrm their determination. Charles C. Burleigh, a tireless supporter of women’s rights and abolition, opened the convention with an indictment of opponents, both within and outside of the temperance movement.134 Stone showed similar determination in an impassioned speech, in which she quoted from Douglass and Emerson and reaffrmed the necessity to stand up to opposition. “No matter if the cause be unpopular,” she claimed, “to side with truth is noble.”135 Higginson, who was appointed president of the convention, repeated that this was not a “Woman’s Rights Convention,” but “simply a Convention in which Woman is not wronged.”136 The Whole World’s Temperance Convention was a powerful reminder of the opposition women’s rights supporters still faced and of the importance of male allyship. Confict was, it seemed, as strong then as it had been more than a decade before during the split of the abolitionist movement. At the preliminary meeting that took place in May, one of the opponents to women’s participation had thus reminded his audience that the women present “were in the habit of disturbing the Anti-Slavery meetings in the same way,

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with their stuff and nonsense about ‘Women’s Rights.’”137 In the 1850s, as in the late 1830s, men’s role in support of women’s rights was considered as crucial and the “woman question” was accused of intruding on and threatening other reform movements.

“I am the son of a woman, and the brother of a woman” The topic of men’s place in the movement in relation to women was addressed at several women’s rights meetings, but was never given a defnite answer throughout the decade. It was frst explicitly raised during the Salem, Ohio convention of April 19–20, 1850, which was meant to prepare for the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1850–1851. It was unique among antebellum women’s rights meetings in that men were not allowed to speak during its proceedings.138 The authors of The History of Woman Suffrage argue that male participants “implored just to say a word,” which might have been an exaggeration, but the decision to exclude men from the debates is important as it was an uncommon occurrence.139 We fnd some clues as to what might have led the organizers to this choice. In the call to the meeting, the upcoming Ohio Constitutional Convention was described as “a convention of men.”140 In a letter that was read at the meeting, Stanton underlined one of the main arguments in favor of woman suffrage, i.e. “Men cannot represent us” and “Man cannot legislate for us.”141 This assertion might have resonated differently with the women who attended the convention. Probably meant to show that men could not reasonably represent women in the political sphere, they also highlighted the fact that male voices could not be substituted for female voices in the fght for women’s rights. However, the fact that the experiment was not repeated before the Civil War is indicative that women were not ready to exclude men from their fght, maybe because their support was still needed but also because men’s contribution was still considered important to the construction of women’s rights discourses. The question of men’s place in the movement was discussed at the 1853 Cleveland convention. In a letter, newspaper editor Horace Greeley argued that “woman alone can, in the present state of the controversy, speak effectively for woman, since none others can speak with authority, or from the depths of a personal experience.”142 Greeley’s remarks echoed Stone’s claim two years earlier that men “cannot speak what we have felt.”143 Greeley and Stone as well as other activists believed that the direct experience of gender oppression could not be bypassed and the nature of women’s rights activism was different whether you were an ally or not.144 They, however, sometimes forgot that not all men were immune to discrimination and that black men in particular were disenfranchised at the time. Stone thus argued that some men understood women’s needs better than others.145 Men’s lack of direct experience of gender oppression and their position as allies were linked to the question of the legitimacy of a movement that

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did not have women’s full support. In the speech he gave in Worcester in 1851, Phillips argued that women had to stand for and “TAKE” their own rights.146 The question of whether women actually wanted women’s rights was also raised in Higginson’s frst essay on the question published in 1853, Woman and Her Wishes. In it, he discussed men’s and women’s respective roles in the movement: “This essay is entitled ‘Woman and her Wishes,’” he wrote, “because I conceive that to be, for men, the main point at issue. The fnal choice must be made by women themselves.”147 The ambiguity of this discourse, however, lay in the fact that men kept on occupying the public space to argue that women should speak for themselves, thus leaving them less space to do so. Some male activists, however, believed that their voices were essential. In his frst public words on women’s rights, at the Cleveland convention, Blackwell answered Greeley’s belief that “woman’s cause should be advocated by women only.” “I feel I owe you no apology for standing on this platform,” he claimed defantly. Encouraged by Stone’s presence, he was intent on both asserting his legitimacy on the platform and his worthiness as a prospective husband. Relying on a common argument used by male allies to give legitimacy to his words, i.e. that he was “the son of a woman, and the brother of a woman,” an implicit reference to his admired sister Elizabeth, he claimed a complete identifcation with women: “I know that this is their cause, but I feel that it is mine also. Their happiness is my happiness, their misery my misery.”148 To emphasize his point, he used one of the most common tropes of women’s rights discourses, and one we also fnd in his courtship letters to Stone, i.e. the need for the two sexes to work together. “Whenever the sexes have been severed in politics, in business, in religion, the result has been demoralization,” he maintained, comparing the political collaboration between women and men with marriage.149 Foster also spoke at the Cleveland convention, but he made a different impression than Blackwell. In keeping with his reputation as a troublemaker, he interrupted one of the male speakers for not dealing with the business at hand. He was called “out of order” by the president of the convention and “sat down,” which shows that men were not given special status at women’s rights conventions but also that Foster was willing to comply with a woman’s injunctions.150 Men’s ally activism was discussed again with particular force three years later, at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in New York City on November 25 and 26, 1856, and chaired by Stone. It was Higginson who argued in favor of a male presence at women’s rights meetings for men’s own sake, claiming that “there was no place where a man could redeem his manhood better than on the Woman’s Rights Platform.”151 Phillips suggested men take a backseat in the movement—“It is the efforts of woman frst, and the co-operation of men in holding her as respectable, that is to wield the public opinion and to control legislation.”152 Higginson disagreed with this vision “that man’s duty is only to stand aside and let woman

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take her rights.”153 He argued that men’s responsibility in the movement was commensurate with the extent of women’s oppression in the hands of men. As oppressors, he powerfully claimed, men had a peculiar responsibility in helping women in this fght it is not so easy, after we have cramped, dwarfed, and crippled her, to get rid of our responsibility by standing back at last, and saying, ‘There, we will let you go; stand up for yourself.’ If it is true, as these women say, that we have wronged them for centuries, we have got to do something more than more negative duty.154 This led activists to argue over the meaning of women’s rights for both women and men throughout the decade. Speaking at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, reformer Ernestine L. Rose preferred to speak of “human rights” because “there was no claim set forth by woman that did not embrace the rights of man as well,” an idea which Stone corroborated.155 In a letter to Phillips in 1855, Liberty Party presidential candidate Gerrit Smith had claimed “the identity of woman’s rights with man’s rights.”156 The main function of the discourse that equated “woman’s rights” with “man’s rights” and “human rights” was that it provided a justifcation for men’s presence in the movement and gave legitimacy to their action, while at the same time respecting women’s primacy in the fght for their own rights. It also served to emphasize that both genders shared similar qualities and deserved equal treatment.157 The issue of men’s place in the movement was inevitably connected with the question of responsibility for women’s oppression, which explains in part that abolitionists’ analysis of slavery continued to inform women’s rights discourses in the 1850s. The issue was addressed extensively by both women and men in Cleveland in 1853, and some drew their arguments from the parallel with slavery.158 Garrison’s comments were infuenced by his primary commitment as an abolitionist, as he noted that women, because they were victims, could not be held responsible for their own oppression.159 Unlike Rose, he was not ready to “talk of the guilt of society.” “Society!” he exclaimed, “I know nothing of society. I know the guilt of individuals.”160 Aware that such a discourse might alienate the men present at the convention, Rose tried to mitigate the extent of Garrison’s radical remarks, arguing that, “We do not fght men, we fght bad principles.”161 Questions related to the intersection of race and gender both shaped women’s rights rhetoric and challenged the unity of the movement in the 1850s, but too rarely in black women’s presence, a fact which was never really noted and discussed, at least publicly, at women’s rights conventions. The controversy that followed Phillips’s introduction in 1850 of a resolution advocating the joint fght for free and enslaved women’s rights as well as the denunciation by Douglass of Stone’s 1854 decision to speak

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in Philadelphia in front of an audience from which black participants had been banned show that, as mentioned by Martha Jones, “sex and color were emerging as the roots of two mutually exclusive political movements” in the 1850s, leading to the “marginalization” of black women.162 This evolution, which infuenced in great part the debates after the Civil War, was already present during the antebellum era.

The plurality of “woman’s rights marriages” As regular participants of women’s rights conventions, the Fosters, Stone, and Blackwell were well aware of all the controversies that dominated the movement, especially those that centered on marriage. Once married, the two couples had to adjust to the consequences of matrimony on their activism and the demands of companionate marriage, akin to a partnership between the spouses.163 At the time, marriage was often viewed as the end of women’s militant careers, a perspective that both Stone and Kelley dreaded. The example of Angelina E. Grimke Weld, who had left reform work after getting married, was a strong reminder that marriage and activism were diffcult to reconcile for women and that, in a way, a single life protected women’s engagement with the public sphere.164 In May 1854, Anthony wrote a worried note to Stone. “Report says Lucy Stone is to be married, and that she has put on the long dress again. Is it true Lucy?” she asked.165 The confation of the news of her imminent wedding and her giving up the Bloomer costume, which she had adopted in 1852, suggested to Anthony that Stone was deserting the cause. A little more than a year after her wedding, Higginson wrote about his similar feeling that Stone’s marriage was going to be detrimental to the movement.166 The opponents of women’s rights also often mocked the partners of female women’s rights activists.167 The choice of a married name was an important decision to make for women with such an acute sense of their autonomy.168 While Kelley added her husband’s name to hers as several female activists had done before her, Stone did not fnd it a satisfying choice but still hesitated for several months before making a fnal decision.169 She consulted with several friends of the cause.170 Higginson’s answer was supportive but he also noted his surprise “that women did not feel as indignant about the merging of their own individuality, as I felt for them,” a condescending remark.171 He, however, reminded her that her “legal name” would remain Blackwell, which would make her life diffcult.172 In the spring of 1856, Stone fnally settled for her birth name.173 Once the decision was made, she was intent on making people respect it. Sending instructions about her bank dividends, she asked that they should be addressed to Lucy Stone without the addition of Blackwell.174 She reacted violently when her fellow activists attached Blackwell to her name in the call to the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, which prompted her to write Anthony a protest letter. In it, she claimed that the uproar

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caused by her decision to keep her birth name had started to subside and she resented the fact that “the war” would start “over again” because of this blunder. She was “grieved and hurt,” which manifested physically. “At frst it made me faint and sick, until a food of tears relieved me,” she wrote Anthony. The grief was all the more intense as it had been caused, not by “an enemy” but by friends.175 Stone’s intense reaction refected her acute sensitivity to the possible consequences that marriage would have on her autonomy and activism, a feeling that Blackwell tried to alleviate. One month after their wedding, she marveled at the fact that her husband refused to “govern” her and “told me to ask Lucy Stone” for permission to travel.176 Despite her husband’s respect for her independence, however, she was afraid of what others might think about the infuence of marriage on her activism. In July 1857, she accused Anthony of spreading gossip about her health and suggesting that her commitment as an activist had been curtailed by marriage. Anthony’s insinuation was a strong reminder of Stone’s status as feme covert and she listed all the restrictions imposed on her by marriage legislation, including fnancial dependence. She ended the letter with the claim for autonomy, “I must make the path for my own feet. I have no advice or explanation to make to anybody.”177 Both Foster and Blackwell married independent women in their thirties, who were used to leading independent lives before meeting them, which might explain why their marriages required more adjustments and negotiations than others.178 Matrimony was clearly fulflling to both couples at frst. A few months after his wedding, Foster claimed that he was “very happy.”179 “Had I time I would tell you the advantages of marriage even to myself—Those to the cause are too numerous to mention,” Abby Kelley Foster wrote Phillips in April 1846.180 Just a week after the wedding ceremony, Blackwell also assured his sister Emily that he was “forishing in all the happiness of married life.”181 Not long after, Stone wrote about the joys of domestic life—“My home is very pleasant.”182 The demands of marriage and activism were, however, diffcult to reconcile, and the two couples experienced similar diffculties in bridging the gap between the reality of married life and their expectations.183 During her frst years as a married woman, Abby Kelley Foster worked at maintaining her autonomy as a woman and an activist.184 On May 19, 1847, she gave birth to a daughter named Paulina (aka Alla) Wright Foster, and resumed antislavery work shortly thereafter. When Alla was less than two years old, she and her husband started leaving her in relatives’ care while they were lecturing and carrying on antislavery work, something for which Abby was criticized.185 Although she often expressed her desire to be home, she did not want to give up her antislavery public activism, often appealing to her responsibility to enslaved mothers.186 The letters exchanged by Kelley and Foster before they were married show that they both had domestic aspirations.187 Kelley was, however, uncertain about her success in that feld, mentioning her inadequacy as a “housekeeper.”188

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Foster, who was less in demand than his wife as a lecturer, started withdrawing from public life, focusing on managing his farm and taking care of their home.189 When in August 1857 his wife asked him to attend several meetings, he turned down the proposal because he was “very unwilling to leave [their] daughter for so long a period,” adding “your presence is my home, & my heart know (sic) no other.”190 He tried to reconcile his domestic aspirations, his work as a farmer, and his convictions, making of his farm a stop on the Underground Railroad. In marriage as during his courtship, Foster was prone to periods of depression and frequent health problems, which might also explain his emotional investment in domesticity.191 In December 1857, he powerfully wrote to his wife about feelings of intense depression When I wrote the letter to which yours is an answer, I was unusually sad. I saw before me a long winter of the most intense suffering, & not very strong probability that the return of Summer would bring permanent relief. Those cold night sweats, that terrible cough were more than I felt capable of enduring, & yet I saw no way of escape.192 Confronted with the same desire of autonomy as Abby Kelley Foster, and despite promises to the contrary, Stone reacted differently. After the birth of their daughter Alice in 1857, she abandoned public activism for ten years or so, which shows that her approach of women’s role within the domestic sphere conformed to a certain extent to the dominant ideology and that motherhood probably changed her perspective.193 She was the one who was expected to look after their daughter and she had to recover from a miscarriage in the winter of 1858.194 Ironically enough, Stone and Blackwell’s marriage signaled a reversal for both of them, as he certainly became the more active publicly of the two regarding women’s rights for the next few years.195 As with many men of his time, Blackwell’s participation in household chores was limited but, despite his frequent absences, he enjoyed domestic life and fatherhood.196 Both Foster and Blackwell had to struggle with the same masculine ideals that dominated American society at the time, especially regarding breadwinning.197 Despite his hard work, Foster was not always able to provide for his family and had to rely on the solidarity of some of his friends, something about which his wife worried.198 Concerned with their situation, she tried to secure an agency for her husband with the American Anti-Slavery Society.199 She also sought fnancial advice outside of her family, for instance from Phillips. Afraid that she would die before her husband, she inquired about the steps in order to make sure that he would be able to keep the farm.200 It is probable that, despite his affection for his wife, what he perceived as his own inadequacies and her success as a lecturer and activist might have fueled his depression.201 In that sense, his withdrawal from public life could also be read as a validation of his manhood through manual work and parenting.202

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Financial independence also proved to be an important matter in Stone and Blackwell’s couple. During his courtship, he had described his idea of an egalitarian marriage as a “business partnership,” meaning that they would own equal shares of their wealth, except for their revenue before they were married.203 Stone, however, never truly achieved fnancial independence. In 1864, she wrote to her husband that it was essential for her that their properties be “separate.”204 She reiterated her demand in 1893, on their 38th anniversary, and suggested that she had somehow made concessions concerning her ideas of equality between men and women and relinquished part of her fnancial independence because of her husband’s commitment in favor of women’s rights.205 Despite his promises, Blackwell used Stone’s income as he wished. In a letter written in 1891, he admitted that her money had “been freely shared” with him.206 Blackwell’s vision of breadwinning was probably infuenced by his father. He spent his life entering a great number of ventures, including real estate, sale, and his father’s trade, sugar, but he often had to rely on his wife’s and his brother George’s money.207 He also wrote about his wish to be his extended family’s breadwinner but did not always succeed at least until the Civil War.208 He alternated periods of excitement and depression, following the ups and downs of his business schemes. Although apparently devoted to his wife, his frequent absences and pursuit of business ventures show his insecurities. During the 1850s, men consolidated their place as legitimate actors in the women’s rights movement. In the debates that divided the movement during the decade, however, they were not a stabilizing force. Like women, they disagreed on several issues that came to tear the movement even further apart after the Civil War, including marriage, intersections of race and gender, and . . . men’s role in the movement. Foster and Blackwell understood their roles as personal and political allies differently. Foster became his daughter’s primary caretaker due to his wife’s absences, his own predisposition, and his work on their farm, which required his presence at home. Blackwell was frequently absent in the frst years of his marriage to Stone and he tried to make up for his lack of support at home by defending women’s rights publicly and insisting on men’s crucial voice in the fght, an inconsistency which gradually alienated him from some women’s rights activists after the Civil War. Unresolved questions around the articulation between blacks’ and women’s rights as well as allies’ role marred the feminist movement after the Civil War.

Notes 1 Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 5. 2 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 191. 3 This feeling of optimism contrasted with what some viewed as a gloomier outlook for the movement in the second half of the 1850s. In 1856, Lucretia

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Mott was worried that all the work had fallen almost entirely on Anthony’s shoulders. LM to Martha C. Wright, February 9, 1856, GFP/SCSC. The same year, Higginson wrote Phillips to chide him because he did not attend women’s rights conventions. TWH to WP, September 3, 1856, WPP. The gloomy mood of the late 1850s might also be due to developments regarding slavery and the state of the Union. WLG to Samuel J. May, September 16, 1852, in Ruchames, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 4: 215. In the same letter, he rejoiced over the organization of women’s rights conventions and their results: “In every instance,” he wrote May, “the result has far surpassed the most sanguine expectations. They have conducted their meetings with a dignity, a propriety, and an amount of talent, seldom equalled by the other sex. The effect on the public mind has been very striking.” Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 77. The two women were introduced by Amelia Bloomer. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 126. HBB Autobiographical Papers (transcribed by Alice Stone Blackwell), BFP/LOC. “Abby Kelley Foster,” Woman’s Journal, January 22, 1897, 28, GFP/SCSC. Blackwell’s and Stone’s remarks were made at Abby Kelley Foster’s funeral services on January 17, 1887. On the same occasion, Samuel J. May depicted Foster as a pioneer. “She broke the ice; she cleared the waste and untrodden way; she cast up the highway of freedom, the highway of the Lord of truth and right. Her example aroused and animated thousands to efforts they had not believed themselves capable of. To women, especially, she showed how the impossible (as they thought) could be brought to pass through faith and faithfulness.” Douglass praised “her wonderful earnestness, her large knowledge and great logical power.” Douglass, Life and Times, 224. Lucy Stone, ed. Woman’s Rights Tracts (Rochester?: Steam Press of Curtis, Butts?, 1854?), MHS. The other two tracts were Harriet Taylor’s “Enfranchisement of Woman” of July 1851 and Clarina I.H. Nichols’s “Responsibilities of Women,” a speech delivered at the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention of 1851. Phillips’s speech was considered as the perfect synthesis of reformers’ views on the antebellum movement. Austin, The Life and Times, 156; Curtis, Wendell Phillips, 32. About Foster’s activism, see Joel Bernard, “Authority, Autonomy, and Radical Commitment: Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 90 (part 2, annual meeting, Worcester, October 15, 1980): 350–352. When Stephen was imprisoned in June 1842, his brother Henry expressed his support: “My whole soul is with you, dear brother, in this great struggle for Liberty and truth. And I would I could be with you not only in Spirit but in person.” Henry Foster to SSF, June 11, 1842, AKFP/AAS (emphasis in the original). Parker Pillsbury, “Stephen Symonds Foster,” From the Granite monthly for August. [1882], (Concord, NY, 1882), 370. AAS. While Foster’s close friend and reformer Parker Pillsbury claimed that he was imprisoned because he refused to answer the call to military service due to his “Christian principles,” contemporary historians have argued that he was more probably arrested for debt. Pillsbury, “Stephen Symonds Foster,” 370; Bernard “Authority,” 353; Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), 130–131. Pillsbury and Foster met in 1834, when they were young teachers. Pillsbury, “Stephen Symonds Foster,” 371. On Foster’s infuence on Pillsbury, see Stacey M. Robertson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 12.

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13 Pillsbury, “Stephen Symonds Foster,” 371. 14 Ibid., 373. 15 Church Committee of Dartmouth College to SSF, October 4, 1841, AKFP/AAS. Bernard, “Authority,” 355. Foster had diffcult relations with Garrisonians and Maria Weston Chapman, the soul of the Boston clique, disliked him. Nancy H. Burkett, Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Foster (Worcester: Worcester Bicentennial Commission, 1976), 19. Stacey M. Robertson describes the same “alienation” from the abolitionist movement’s mainstream in Pillsbury. Robertson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, 24. In a letter written in 1870, Higginson described an incident during which Julia Ward Howe “shook her small fst in S.S. Foster’s face” at a women’s rights convention. He reported that another woman present supposedly said: “It’s what some women ought to have done, years ago, and will do him good.” Cited in Mary Thatcher Higginson, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1846–1906 (Boston: Houghton Miffin Company), 259. American poet James Russell Lowell called him “the reviled and pelted Stephen” in a poem. Cited in Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 1: 36. 16 Burkett, Abby Kelley Foster, 12. 17 Nathaniel P. Rogers, “To the Abolitionists of New Hampshire,” Liberator, May 15, 1840, 79. Pillsbury was appointed to several committees at the May 1840 annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. “Business Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, May 22, 1840, 82. 18 In June 1841, Kelley spent a few weeks lecturing in New Hampshire with Foster and Pillsbury. Sterling, Ahead of her Time, 139–141. 19 Kelley’s father was also a farmer. On life in Worcester at the time in the 1850s, see TWH to Alfred E. Roe, November 12, 1903, TWH Papers, AAS. 20 Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells: The Story of a Journey to a Better World (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 17. 21 Margo Horn, Family Ties: The Blackwells, A Study in the Dynamics of Family Life in Nineteenth-Century America, dissertation, Tufts University, 1980, 21–22. 22 Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells, 31. 23 HBB Autobiographical Papers. Samuel Blackwell’s reformist convictions were not confned to abolitionism. Alice Stone Blackwell wrote that he once attended one of the talks given by Scottish author Frances Wright in the United States in the 1820s. Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 138. Wright arrived in the United States in 1824. She lectured on women’s rights and other controversial issues at the time and in 1825 started a utopian community composed of free and enslaved blacks and whites in Indiana, after the model of Robert Owen’s New Harmony. She closed the community in 1830. On her life in the United States, see Celia Morris, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). 24 Samuel Blackwell to H.C. Howells, January 13, 1838, BFP/SL. Alice Stone Blackwell wrote that his interactions with enslavers because of his job led him to adopt antislavery views. Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 137–138. 25 In his recollections, Blackwell mentions that his family read abolitionist newspapers such as the Liberator. HBB Autobiographical Papers. 26 According to Carl J. Guarneri, Associationism was “neither a totally alien presence in American life nor a typical expression of antebellum reform.” Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in 19th-Century America (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991), 93. 27 Elizabeth Blackwell to Marian Blackwell, October 10, 1845, BFP/LOC. Brook Farm was a transcendentalist and Fourierist community founded in Massachusetts in 1841. It ended in 1847 when the building which was supposed

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to accommodate a phalanx was destroyed in a fre. Blackwell mentioned his family’s interest in Associationism, which he also linked to other reform ideas at the time such as abolitionism and women’s rights. HBB Autobiographical Papers. HBB Autobiographical Papers. A letter by Marian Blackwell was read at the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention of 1851. LS to Anna Parsons, January 12, 1854, BFP/LOC. Elizabeth Blackwell to Marian Blackwell, December 24, 1850, in Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895), 178. HBB Autobiographical Papers. According to Blackwell, Stone then “described a slave-mother with her baby on her shoulder feeing from her pursuers, when a shot struck the baby’s head, scattering its brains upon the poor mother’s face and neck as she ran.” Ibid. Ibid. See the statement made by the General Agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January 1855. Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at the annual meetings held in 1854, 1855, & 1856; with the treasurer’s reports and general agents’ annual statements (Boston: Offce of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1856), 26. Stone’s daughter notes that even as an abolitionist, she included women’s rights in her lectures. At one point, the American Anti-Slavery Society asked her to lecture on women’s rights at weekends. Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 89, 90. In 1870, he explained to his sister Elizabeth why he had chosen to become an activist: “The fact is that Lucy’s occupation is so absorbing to her that I am less in earnest to fnd a feld of activity of my own, because the practical effect of doing so would be to separate us almost entirely or else to involve her withdrawing from active work in which she is unquestionably very useful and for which she has agencies.” HBB to Elizabeth Blackwell, May 3, 1870, BFP/LOC. HBB Autobiographical Papers. In 1849, he opened a hardware store in Cincinnati with his brother. By 1853, the business was failing and he was investing in land purchases and had gone into debt. Kerr, Lucy Stone, 74. HBB to Theodore Parker, April 16, 1853, BFP/SL. HBB Autobiographical Papers. Ibid. Eleven years later, in a letter to Blackwell, Martha C. Wright recalled the “pleasant” convention of 1853, where they were both appointed secretaries. Martha C. Wright to HBB, November 13, 1864, GFP/SCSC. HBB Autobiographical Papers. Bernard, “Authority,” 373. Abby Kelley Foster was, however, committed to women’s rights. Before the First National Woman’s Rights Convention, she wrote Phillips to ask him about “information of Woman’s political and legal position.” She also mentioned her great expectations for the meeting. AKF to WP, October 6, 1850, WPP. Bernard, “Authority,” 349. Leach, True Love, 4. Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, 129. Ibid., 140. Both belonged to the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “feld workers,” who traveled the country in order to help build antislavery sentiment. Stacey M. Robertson, “‘A Hard, Cold, Stern Life’: Parker Pillsbury and Grassroots Abolitionism, 1840–1865,” The New England Quarterly 70.2 (June 1997): 182; Louis Filler, “Parker Pillsbury: An Anti-Slavery Apostle,” The New England Quarterly 19.3 (September 1946): 323. Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, 162.

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48 On the correspondence exchanged by Kelley and Foster, see Bernard, “Authority,” 366. 49 AKF to SSF, September 18, 1850, AKFP/AAS. 50 Abby Kelley to SSF, March 28, 1843, AKFP/AAS. 51 She added that her “infuence” had been damaged by “the reports” that she had “neglected” her dying mother, who had passed away in February 1842. Abby Kelley to SSF, July 30, 1843, AKFP/AAS. In another letter, she warned him that she was not a great talker in private. Abby Kelley to SSF, November 22, 1843, AKFP/AAS. She also wrote about her “distaste of writing.” Abby Kelley to SSF, March 28, 1843, AKFP/AAS. 52 Abby Kelley to SSF, July 30, 1843, AKFP/AAS. 53 He described to her what reads like love at frst sight. Abby Kelley to SSF, August 10, 1843, AKFP/AAS. In one letter, he answered her remark that “we ‘men dont know what is in a woman’s heart!,’” concurring with her opinion but assuring her, “I wish you to know that I now had myself readiness to take lessons in this important department of science, whenever my own Abby will consent to become my teacher,” and wishing in “a few months to become an adept in all the peculiarities of the sex.” SSF to Abby Kelley, August 10, 1843, AKFP/AAS (emphasis in the original). 54 Abby Kelley to SSF, July 30, 1843; Abby Kelley to SSF, March 28, 1843, AKFP/ AAS. Kelley worried about his health and what she saw as his negligence. Abby Kelley to SSF, January 30, 1843, AKFP/AAS. He was concerned that she had fallen for “a few of the brightest traits in my character, while its dark shades had been entirely overlooked.” Abby Kelley to SSF, August 10, 1843, AKFP/ AAS. 55 Leach, True Love, 42. See Abby Kelley to SSF, July 30, 1843, AKFP/AAS. 56 Abby Kelley to SSF, August 10, 1843, AKFP/AAS. 57 Abby Kelley to SSF, July 30, 1843, AKFP/AAS. 58 On coverture, see Cott, Public Vows, 11–12. 59 HBB Autobiographical Papers. 60 This vision was shared by other women at the time, including Stone’s college friend, Antoinette Brown, the frst woman to be ordained as a minister in the United States. In 1847, Brown suggested she and Stone should never get married. Antoinette Brown to LS, September 22, 1847, in Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846–1893, eds. Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 31. Although male abolitionist activists like Theodore D. Weld had also vowed never to get married before slavery was abolished, it took on another dimension in the case of women, who were confronted with the injustice of marriages laws. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 210. Both Brown and Weld ended up marrying, Brown to Blackwell’s brother Samuel in 1856, and Weld to Angelina E. Grimke in 1838. On the fgure of the bachelor in the 18th and 19th centuries, see Christopher Looby, “Republican Bachelorhood: Sex and Citizenship in the Early United States,” Historical Refections/Réfexions Historiques 33.1 (Spring 2007): 89–100. 61 Helene Quanquin, “La correspondance de Lucy Stone et Henry Blackwell: le couple et son histoire à l’epreuve de la lettre,” in Mireille Bossis et Lucia Bergamasco, ed., Colloque Archive épistolaire et Histoire, Centre Culturel de Cerisy-la-Salle (Paris: Editions connaissances et savoirs, 2007), 282. Andrea Moore Kerr compares his courtship with a “campaign.” Kerr, Lucy Stone, 71. 62 LS to Antoinette Brown, August 1849, in Lasser and Merrill, Friends and Sisters, 56. In the same letter, she wrote, “It seems to me that no man who deserved the name of MAN, when he knows that a mere thing, the law, makes a married

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woman, would ever insult a woman, by asking her to marry” (emphasis in the original). See HBB to LS, May 5, 1854, in Loving Warriors: Selected Letters of Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell, 1853 to 1893, ed. Leslie Wheeler (New York: Dial, 1981), 85. In 1891, Blackwell wrote about his sister Marian: “Poor Marian! What a sad, dull, lonely, defeated life she has had. I think with horror of Alice, without brothers or sisters, passing into the same hermitage of singleblessedness which is as unnatural and unlovely as any other kind of convent or nunnery.” HBB to George Blackwell, November 22, 1891, BFP/SL. JM to LS, Philadelphia, June 29, 1853, BFP/LOC. Leach, True Love, 3. HBB to LS, July 2, 1853, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 45. “If it be true that a woman cannot be a wife and mother consistently with the exercise of a profession,” Blackwell wrote Stone, “it justifes to a great extent the argument of our antagonists who say that very thing.” HBB to LS, June 13, 1853, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 38 (emphasis in the original). HBB to LS, December 22, 1854, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 110. Cited in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 135. HBB to LS, December 23, 1854, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 112 (emphasis in the original). Blackwell had shown the protest to his sister Elizabeth, who opposed it because it went against her “doctrines of good taste,” and interpreted it as the result of “a chivalric feeling, but out of place” on her brother’s part. Elizabeth Blackwell to HBB, February 22, 1855, BFP/LOC (emphasis in the original). Higginson had accepted to perform the ceremony a week before, claiming it would be “a privilege to be with you on your bridal day—far greater than if Victoria or Jenny Lind had invited us.” TWH to LS, April 23, 1855, LOC. In a letter written on the day of the ceremony, Blackwell thus described the wedding as follows: “1st reading of protest by the Unenviable H.B.B. 2d Remarks by T.W. Higginson 3d Promises to look after each other, by the Unenviable & the Bride 4. Pronunciamento of our matrimonial status by the Rev Higginson 5th prayer by Rev Higginson—small oration & solemn benediction by Chas. C. Burleigh 7th tears & wedding cake by all the Company.” HBB to Ainsworth Spofford, May 1, 1855, BFP/LOC. HBB to Emily Blackwell, May 9, 1855, BFP/SL. Higginson’s wife also attended the wedding. In 1854, Elizabeth had expressed her feelings about Stone in a letter to her brother. She was very critical of her activism, including what she called “woman’s rightism.” She, however, added, “she is your wife, and the woman whom I will joyfully meet when I can.” Elizabeth Blackwell to HBB, December 27, 1854 (?), BFP/LOC. One week after the wedding, Blackwell wrote his sister Emily about his confdence that she was going to “like Lucy very much.” HBB to Emily Blackwell, May 9, 1855, BFP/SL. Burkett, Abby Kelley Foster, 5. Cott, Public Vows, 1. This also explains in part the importance of the slavery metaphor in both couples’ courtship correspondence, as a way to mediate insecurities stemming from personal life and marriage. Quanquin, “There Are Two Great Oceans,” 87–92. Committee of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in NYC, at the Broadway Tabernacle, on Tuesday and Wednesday Nov. 25th and 26th, 1856 (New York: Edward O. Jenkins, 1856), 20. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 63. On the conservative dimension of the demand for woman suffrage, see Lori D. Ginzberg, “Re-Viewing the First Wave,” Feminist Studies 28.2 (Summer 2002): 432.

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78 Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 7. 79 Cott, Public Vows, 64. Stanton saw more reaction among women when she spoke about marriage than suffrage. Ibid., 67. 80 Declaration of Sentiments, Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Seneca Falls, July 19–20, 1848. 81 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 233. 82 Ibid., 524. 83 Cott, Public Vows, 66. About the use of the slavery metaphor by women’s rights activists to describe the marriage relation, see Cott, Public Vows, 64–65; Quanquin, “There Are Two Great Oceans.” 84 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 127. 85 Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 46. 86 The convention gathered “the friends of Free Thought.” Proceedings of the Free Convention, 5. 87 Ibid., 56 (emphasis in the original). 88 Ibid., 55 (emphasis in the original). 89 Ibid., 57. 90 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 233 (emphasis in the original). The report also suggested the creation of a “social order” modeled after religious orders in order to help “unfortunate women,” among whom those who had left “false marriages and illegal social relations.” Ibid., 234. 91 SBA to LS, July 18, 1853, BFP/LOC (emphasis in the original). 92 In 1853, Stone mentioned “that drunkenness so deprave[d] a man’s system that he wa[s] not ft to be a father.” LS to SBA, March 22, 1853, BFP/LOC. At the Whole World’s Temperance Convention of 1853, she maintained that “the prospect of having bonds separated, as a result of intemperance, would be a check against the acquirement of such habits.” The Whole World’s Temperance Convention Held at Metropolitan Hall in the City of New York on Thursday and Friday, Sept. 1st and 2d. 1853 (New York: Fowlers and Wells, Publishers, 1853), 35. At the National Woman’s Rights Convention in Cleveland, a letter by Channing asked that “confrmed and habitual drunkenness, of either husband or wife, be held as suffcient ground for divorce; and that the temperate partner be appointed legal guardian of the children.” History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 131. 93 LS to SBA, July 4, 1857, BFP/LOC. 94 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 131. Divorce was seen as “an open incentive for a husband or wife to become dissatisfed and seek another partner.” Cott, Public Vows, 107. 95 Free love was a set of ideas embraced by some middle-class reformers, who rejected the institution of marriage. For a study of “the free love network” in the United States, see John Spurlock, “The Free Love Network in America, 1850 to 1860,” Journal of Social History 21.4 (Summer 1988): 765–779; John C. Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1988). Women’s rights activists’ reluctance to be associated with free lovers did not change the fact that their criticisms of the marriage institution were made in similar terms. Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 106–107. 96 Mary Gove Nichols, Mary Lyndon, or Revelations of a Life. An Autobiography (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855). 97 HBB to LS, September 17, 1855, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 146 (emphasis in the original). 98 HBB to LS, September 17, 1855, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 147 (emphasis in the original). Anna Blackwell (1816–1900) spent some time at Brook Farm

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in the summer and fall of 1845. She met Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, who wrote an essay against marriage, Love vs. Marriage, in 1852. HBB to LS, September 17, 1855, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 147. Hannah Blackwell to HBB, February 12, 1849, BFP/LOC. Hannah was particularly concerned with Fourier’s idea that children should be raised not by their parents but by the community. Ironically, she started the letter with the suggestion that her son “go over and see Henry Beecher,” a man who became associated with free love in the 1870s because of the Beecher-Tilton scandal. HBB to LS, September 17, 1855, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 147. Garrison was infuenced by the Perfectionist ideas of John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, whom he met in 1837. Douglas M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 38. Noyes was known for his advocacy of “complex marriage,” which implied that members of the community had to relinquish their “sexual loyalties” to the group. Lawrence Foster, Woman, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 85. On sexuality in the Oneida community, see Foster, Woman, 75–102. T.L. Nichols and Mary S. Gove Nichols, Marriage: Its history, character, and results; its sanctities, and its profanities; its science, and its facts. Demonstrating its infuence, as a civilized institution, on the happiness of the individual and the progress of the race (New York: T.S. Nichols, 1854), 119. Some reformers close to women’s rights were inclined to follow free love ideas. In 1854, Henry C. Wright published a book in which he advocated “MARRIAGE-LOVE,” outside of “human laws.” Henry C. Wright, Marriage and Parentage: or, the Reproductive Element in Man, as a Means to His Elevation and Happiness (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1854), 171. On Wright’s notion of marriage and sexuality, see Lewis Perry, “‘Progress, Not Pleasure, Is Our Aim’: The Sexual Advice of an Antebellum Radical Author,” Journal of Social History 12.3, (Spring 1979): 354–366. Free lovers Stephen Pearl Andrews and Julia Branch were present at the 1858 national woman’s rights meeting in New York City, which caused great controversy. Faulkner, Unfaithful, 103–105. Nichols, Marriage, 21. LS to Anna Parsons, July 8, 1853 (?), BFP/LOC (emphasis in the original). LS to SBA, November 25, 1856, BFP/LOC (emphasis in the original). HBB to LS, September 17, 1855, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 146 (emphasis in the original). On the values shared by free lovers and other reformers in the 1850s, see Spurlock, “The Free Love Network in America, 1850 to 1860,” 766. Nichols, Mary Lyndon, 370–371. Andrea Moore Kerr argues that, at the time when the letter was written, Blackwell and Stone had not consummated their marriage yet and that Blackwell was growing frustrated about the situation. Based on the two spouses’ correspondence, she writes that the marriage was probably consummated in November 1855. Kerr, Lucy Stone, 91. The delay might have been due to periods of separation between them and Stone’s reticence. Another literary female victim was alluded to by Blackwell in a letter to Stone in October 1855, that of Ruth, the main character of the eponymous novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, published in 1853, the story of redemption of a young, though pure, fallen woman, who was seduced at a young age. Blackwell compared Stone to Ruth. HBB to LS, October 15, 1855, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 148–149. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 732. On the debates at the 1860 Woman’s Rights Convention, see Dudden, Fighting Chance, 35–37; Robertson, “Aunt Nancy Men,” 52–53; Quanquin, “The Rights of Others,” 221–222.

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Women’s rights as men’s rights Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 29. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 124. Ibid., 125. Martha C. Wright to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, May 26, 1860, GFP/SCSC. On the signifcance of conventions, see Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 16. Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 6. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 376, 387. Also see Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 16–18. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn notes that black women’s participation in the women’s rights movement became more visible after 1854. Ibid., 16. About black women’s role in black conventions, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 30. “The Petticoats in Council,” New York Herald, May 14, 1858, 3. The uncommon occurrence of a black female speaker might have prompted the author of the article to add “colored” to Remond’s name. On Sarah Parker Remond as a transnational activist and intellectual, see Salenius, An Abolitionist Abroad. “The Petticoats in Council,” New York Herald, May 15, 1858, 8. TerborgPenn, African American Women, 19; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 17. The New York Daily Times wrote that the resolutions adopted at the Cleveland convention were “characterized by the usual ultraism” and described “a stormy session,” during which “ABBY [Kelley] Foster declared she would not be put down, and amidst the direst confusion, a dozen women speaking at once, in the shrillest tones, a motion was made to adjourn.” “Woman’s Rights Convention,” New York Daily Times, October 8, 1853, 8. Participants disagreed with this account. WLG to HBG, October 8, 1853, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 4: 258–259. See for instance the book entitled Lucy Boston published in 1855, in which the heroine is modeled after Stone. It offered a scathing description of a women’s rights convention and a parody of the Declaration of Sentiments, representing female women’s rights activists as “masculine” women. Fred. Folio, Lucy Boston; or, Woman’s Rights and Spiritualism: Illustrating the follies and delusions of the nineteenth century (Auburn and Rochester: Alden and Beardsley, 1855), 9–10. A good example is the Bloomer costume, which some women’s rights activists decided to wear in the early 1850s and made them the target of ridicule. Stone adopted the costume for a few years but eventually gave it up to her husband’s relief. Helene Quanquin “‘yet the effort was not lost’: Bloomers, ideal et pratique de la liberation du corps feminin aux Etats-Unis dans les annees 1850,” Résonances 8 (2005): 147–162. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 16. New York City was considered by reformers as “unfriendly territory” because of the prevalence of mob violence fueled by Tammany Hall. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 154. The Whole World’s Temperance Convention, 1. The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations took place in New York from July 1853 to November 1854. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Higginson then offered his resignation from the business committee, which was turned down by a vote. Ibid., 4. A male delegate asked for Stone to be added to the Business Committee (4). Abby Kelley Foster made a second attempt but was interrupted again (5). Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. John Greenleaf Whittier to his sister, May 30, 1840, in John B. Pickard, “John Greenleaf Whittier and the Abolitionist Schism of 1840,” The New England Quarterly 37 (June 1964): 253. The Whole World’s Temperance Convention, 8.

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131 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 154. On the role of black activists in the temperance movement, see Yacovone, “The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement.” 132 “Disgraceful Scenes at the World’s Temperance Convention,” Liberator, September 16, 1853, 146. In Cleveland, Garrison, who had been present in New York, recalled the scene and also called it “disgraceful.” History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 160. 133 Abby Kelley Foster was not present at the September convention as she and her husband were lecturing in Michigan and Indiana at the time. Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, 286. 134 The Whole World’s Temperance Convention, 10. 135 Ibid., 63. 136 Ibid., 13. 137 Ibid., 8. The president of the convention “referred to ‘women in breeches’ as a disgrace to their sex.” Ibid., 8 (emphasis in the original). 138 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 15. 139 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 110. 140 Ibid., 104. 141 “Ohio Women’s Convention. Minutes,” The Anti-Slavery Bugle, May 1850. 142 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 126. 143 The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Worcester, October 15th and 16th, 1851, 27 (emphasis in original). American Memory, The Library of Congress. Accessed on June 1, 2016. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi -bin/query/r?ammem/naw:@feld(DOCID+@lit(rbnawsan8287div2. 144 On the primacy of the experience of oppression in women’s rights activism, see LM to ECS, November 9, 1851, GFP/SCSC. 145 LS to SBA, January 10, 1854, BFP/LOC. 146 “Speech of Wendell Phillips, . . . 1851,” 13. One year and a half later, Emerson wrote Phillips, “I do not think that wise & wary women wish to be electors or judges; and I will not ask that they be made such against their will,” adding, “let women go to women, & bring us certain tidings what they want, & it will be imperative on me & on us all to help them get it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson to WP, February 19, 1853, WPP. Phillips probably alluded to this exchange at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in one of his addresses: “One of the best men in America said to me, when I asked him to sign a call for a Woman’s Rights Convention, ‘I don’t hear woman asking for it.’ Said I to him, ‘Do you consult the dunces before you extend to them education? Do you consult the drunkard before you establish the cause of temperance?’” Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 52. On Phillips’s correspondence with Emerson, see Irving H. Bartlett, “The Philosopher and the Activist: New Letters from Emerson to Wendell Phillips,” The New England Quarterly 62.2 (June 1989): 280–296. On Emerson’s view of women’s rights, see Len Gougeon, “Emerson and the Woman Question: The Evolution of His Thought,” The New England Quarterly 71.4 (December 1998): 570–592. 147 TWH, Woman and Her Wishes: An Essay (New York: Fowlers and Wells, Publishers, 1853), 15 (emphasis in the original). Conventions were also understood as sites where women were supposed to show their desire to be enfranchised. For a discussion on the convention as performance, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 98. 148 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 126. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 140. 151 Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 9. Later on, he jokingly argued about men’s place on the women’s rights platform: “But

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Women’s rights as men’s rights there is one great advantage which men enjoy in speaking on a Woman’s Rights platform: they cannot help doing good to the movement no matter how they speak; for if a man speaks well, of course he helps it by his speech; and if he speaks ill on the subject, he still helps it, because there are women about him who won’t speak ill, and the comparison is useful.” Ibid., 59. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59–60. Ibid., 13, 16. Stone thus argued: “Our movement is nothing short of a claim for the equality of the human race. It is not to affect woman merely; it cannot by possibility be separated from the cause of humanity in general; and its success must make man and woman both more noble and perfect. The cause of woman is therefore the cause of man, and they are both bound to rise or fall together.” Ibid., 17. We fnd the same idea in Phillips’s speech at the convention. Ibid., 23. Also see WLG to Samuel J. May, Boston, September 7, 1852, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 4: 212. In her eulogy of Garrison, Stone concurred that Garrison considered the women’s rights issue as “a question of human rights.” Tributes to William Lloyd Garrison at the funeral services, May 28, 1879 (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company), 18, GFP/SCSC. Gerrit Smith to WP, February 20, 1855, Gerrit Smith Collected Printed Papers, volume 1: 1843–1874, AAS. See for instance Higginson’s comments in 1856: “There is not a man here who does not in his own highest moments, reverence in woman the same qualities he admires in himself, if he thinks he claims them.” Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 62. See the exchange between Ernestine Rose and the president of Oberlin College, Reverend Asa Mahan. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 133. For Rose, giving woman rights would be the only means “to secure her dependence upon herself.” Ibid. This position echoed similar ideas expressed by Stone and Abby Kelley Foster at the 1851 convention in Worcester. Women’s Rights Convention, 1851, 27–100. For an analysis of the topic, see Quanquin, “There Are Two Great Oceans,” 90. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 136–137. Also see Quanquin, “There Are Two Great Oceans,” 95. History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 139. Ibid., 144. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 92. On the debate over Phillips’s resolution, see Jones, All Bound Up Together, 92–93; Quanquin, “There Are Two Great Oceans,” 86. On Douglass’s criticism of Stone, see Quanquin, “There Are Two Great Oceans,” 88. Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 8. Lerner, The Grimké Sisters, 292. It was commonly held among abolitionist circles that marriage had been the primary cause of Angelina Grimke Weld’s withdrawal from militant life. Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 105. In reality, her sister and her husband also withdrew from activism soon after the wedding for other reasons, including health. Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina, 292. SBA to LS, May 22, 1854, BFP/LOC. When Stone was pregnant, Anthony expressed mixed feelings about the news. SBA to LS, August 2, 1857, BFP/SL. TWH to WP, September 3, 1856, WPP. An article of the Washington Union, which Stone quoted in a letter to Anthony, rejoiced, “We understand that Mr. Blackwell who last fall assaulted a Southern lady and stole her slave has lately married Miss Lucy Stone. Justice, though sometimes tardy, never fails to overtake her victim.” LS to SBA, May

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30, 1855, LS Papers, BFP/LOC. Stone added, “They evidently think him well punished.” On the question of names for both married women and the enslaved, see Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (1988), previously published in Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender, ed. John R. McKivigan (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 377. One week after the wedding, Stanton “rejoiced” over Stone’s decision, which she thought was linked to the claim for women’s autonomy and “self-respect.” ECS to LS, May 8, 1855. Cited in Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 171–172. In the same letter, Stanton drew a parallel with the enslaved, who did not have a right to their own names. Lucretia Mott suggested she become “Lucy Blackwell Stone.” LM to LS, October 31, 1856, BFP/LOC. TWH to LS, October 26, 1856, National American Woman Suffrage Association, LOC. He added, “I have always reproached my wife with not caring about it & I rejoice that you do.” Ibid. Stone had to sign legal documents and hotel registers as “Lucy Stone, wife of Henry Blackwell.” Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 3. Also see Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 171. LS to SBA, September 7, 1856, BFP/LOC. LS to James Buffum, October 6, 1856, GFP/SCSC. LS to SBA, September 7, 1856, BFP/LOC. She accused Anthony and Higginson of being responsible for the mistake. LS to SBA, May 30, 1855, BFP/LOC. LS to SBA, July 20, 1857, BFP/LOC (emphasis in the original). Anthony’s reply was rather curt. “Lucy, neither of us have time for merely personal matters. I pray the ‘Good spirits’ to keep me from saying an unkind or unjust word. I can assure you, no such feeling is with me. I love Lucy & Nette & Mrs. Stanton— yes, & Lydia Mott, as no other women in the movement—because I know them better, I suppose. Whatever may have annoyed you in the past, throw to the winds. That new existence, that is being stamped for all time, is too precious. May it meet your brightest hopes.” SBA to LS, August 11, 1857, BFP/ LOC (emphasis in the original). After she learned about Stone’s pregnancy, Anthony wrote her: “Lucy, for your own souls sake I rejoice at your prospects of becoming a mother—but, oh dear how I shall miss you. If you were not already tired of my mailing, I would tell you how sadly I feel about the prospect of success in a convention without Lucy Stone, or Antoinette Brown. You must let me feel lonesome, I can’t help it, no how—though I rejoice with you & Nette from the very bottom of my heart—and am exceeding glad that your souls may be warmed by a mothers loves. I nevertheless, cannot shut my eyes to the fact, that the public work will seem to suffer from your temporary withdrawal.” SBA to LS, August 2, 1857, BFP/LOC (emphasis in the original). Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 88. Albert M. and Mary P. Chase to SSF, February 2, 1846, ABFP/WHM. ABKF to WP, April 11, 1846, WPP. HBB to Emily Blackwell, May 9, 1855, BFP/SL. LS to SBA, May 30, 1855, BFP/LOC. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex, 244. Burkett, Abby Kelley Foster, 22. Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 110, Bernard, “Authority,” 369. Sterling, Ahead of her Time, 249. About Abby’s relationship to domesticity, see Bernard, “Authority,” 360–361. Abby Kelley to SSF, August 10, 1843, AKFP/AAS (emphasis in the original).

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188 Abby Kelley to SSF, March 28, 1843, AKFP/AAS. A few months later, she assured him, “My domestic feelings are strong, but my moral organization is stronger and far more active.” Abby Kelley to SSF, Waterloo, August 13, 1843, AKFP/AAS. 189 Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 108. Pillsbury praised Foster’s farm work. Robertson, “Aunt Nancy Men,” 36. 190 SSF to AKF, August 17, 1857, AKFP/AAS (emphasis in the original). 191 Bernard, “Authority,” 375. 192 SSF to AKF, December 2, 1857 AKFP/AAS (emphasis in the original). He was however happy about the prospect of a change of scenes and a planned trip to Jamaica. 193 Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 4. 194 Ibid., 185. 195 When Alice Stone Blackwell was ten, her parents started to leave her in the care of relatives. Marlene Deahl Merrill, Growing Up in Boston’s Gilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872–1874 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 6. 196 Alice Stone Blackwell’s diary describes the activities they shared, including games of all sorts. He read to her in the evening, made jellies, and played with her. Merrill, Growing Up, 7, 8. About men’s participation in home chores, see Steven M. Gelber, “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity,” American Quarterly 49.1 (March 1997): 69. On fathers as playmates in the 19th century, see Frank, Life with Father, 113–138; Johansen, Family Men, 75. 197 About Pillsbury’s views on male breadwinning, see Robertson, Parker Pillsbury, 39. 198 WP to AKF, May 31, 1855, WPP. 199 AKF to WP, July 24, 1857, WPP. 200 AKF to WP, July 28 (n.d.), WPP. 201 Bernard, “Authority,” 374–375. 202 Rural life was crucial for Pillsbury’s sense of manhood, see Robertson, Parker Pillsbury, 48. 203 HBB to LS, December 22, 1854, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 110 (emphasis in the original). 204 LS to HBB, August 9, 1864 in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 198. 205 LS to HBB, May 1, 1893 in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 345 (emphasis in the original). 206 HBB to George Blackwell, October 28, 1891, BFP/SL. Stone was nonetheless very informed about her fnancial situation, as her correspondence with her bank shows. See for instance LS to James Buffum, April 1, 1858, GFP/SCSC. 207 On Blackwell’s business failures, see Helene Quanquin, “Innovation as Moral Victory,” LISA 4.1 (2006). 208 “If the beet sugar enterprise can be made a success it will offer the best opening for a fortune ever afforded us, &, [. . .] somewhat late in life, I shall try to get enough out of it to make Anna, Marian, Eliz, Ellen & Sam’s children easy in their circumstances.” HBB to George Blackwell, July 8, 1878, BFP/SL.

4

Robert Purvis and Henry Ward Beecher Men v. women’s rights

Women’s rights activities were put on hold during the Civil War.1 Although it tested nonresistance ideas, most abolitionists and women’s rights activists supported the confict—Anthony summed up the common position according to which it was “a glorious revolution” out of which “emancipation must come out.”2 The war and its immediate aftermath, however, divided the antebellum reform coalition.3 In May 1865, the members of the American Anti-Slavery Society split again when Garrison advocated the organization’s dissolution due to the announced abolition of slavery.4 After his resolution was voted down by a majority of participants, who believed racial equality was the ultimate goal, he resigned from the association’s presidency and was replaced by Phillips. Their friendship, which had already been strained by Phillips’s support of John C. Fremont against Lincoln in the 1864 presidential elections, did not survive the episode.5 After the Civil War, reformers faced the challenge posed by the defnition of Reconstruction politics and the terms of the Civil War amendments. Despite the action of male activists such as Stephen S. Foster and Samuel J. May, the American Anti-Slavery Society and its auxiliaries refused to include woman suffrage in their platform, which Phillips said was “not broad enough”—an argument reminiscent of the ideas developed by the opponents of women’s equal participation in abolitionist organizations during the 1840 split.6 The question of the formation of a national women’s rights association had been dismissed before the war, but in 1866, activists founded the American Equal Rights Association meant to defend both blacks’ and women’s enfranchisement.7 An attempt to revive the antebellum reform coalition, the experiment signaled what Ellen Carol DuBois has called “the culmination of the abolitionist phase of American feminism.”8 It however was a failed attempt, as its meetings were marred by questions of precedence between black and woman suffrage as well as personal conficts.9 The debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, which defned U.S. citizenship and granted equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited disfranchisement on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” only deepened the disagreements that had been brooding since the 1840s. They led to the formation in 1869 of

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two competing woman suffrage associations, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The split that took place after the Civil War is a moment that historians of U.S. feminisms regularly go back to as they see it as a turning point that shaped the future of the movement, for the best—giving coherence and true independence to the women’s rights agenda—or for the worst—ending the promises of the antebellum reform coalition based on universal rights and allowing some activists’ racist rhetoric to pervade feminist agitation.10 Another way to read the post–Civil War rift is to analyze it in the light not only of its outcome but also of what preceded it. Focusing on men’s place in the women’s rights movement allows us to see continuities between antebellum and postbellum debates related to the intersections of race and gender within the reform coalition as well as the redefnition of the relations between abolitionism and the women’s rights movement.11 In many ways, Reconstruction did not represent a radical break from the period before the Civil War. It revealed the inconsistency of some aspects of antebellum women’s rights discourses developed by activists, who maintained that “woman’s rights” were also “man’s rights,” while at the same time claiming that only women could fght for their own rights.12 It was also the consequence of black women’s invisibilization right from the moment when women’s rights conventions were organized. In her autobiography, Stanton argues that “woman learned one important lesson” from the post-Civil War events, “namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women’s feelings or the humiliation of their position.”13 During the frst years of Reconstruction, the fght over the Fifteenth Amendment was recast by Stanton and Anthony’s supporters as a confict between the two genders, but even more specifcally between white women and black men.14 This narrative was told in the columns of the Revolution, the newspaper founded by Stanton and Anthony in 1868 with the help of Democratic ally—and notorious racist—George Francis Train, at the conventions of the short-lived American Equal Rights Association and the American Anti-Slavery Society, and later of the National Woman Suffrage Association. The study of men’s trajectories during that period contradicts the image of a women’s rights movement split along racial and gender lines after the Civil War.15 The debates over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments show the continuities before and after the Civil War and the evolution of the American women’s rights movement into a white women’s movement. Reformer Robert Purvis (1810–1898) was one of the men who supported the National Woman Suffrage Association’s refusal to endorse the Fifteenth Amendment for its failure to enfranchise women. Renowned minister Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was the frst president of the American Woman Suffrage Association, whose constitution provided for the equal participation of men and women in its leadership. In the early 1870s, he was embroiled in a scandal that involved women’s rights activists and showed

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the ambiguities, divisions, and contradictions pertaining to men’s and women’s place in the feminist movement at the time.

Families of power Purvis and Beecher were both members of powerful families. Purvis was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 4, 1810, the second son of William Purvis, a white cotton merchant, and his common-law wife Harriet Judah, a woman of mixed race whose genealogy is diffcult to ascertain.16 William Purvis was probably an enslaver.17 In 1853, Robert, however, protested the idea and called him “a friend and benefactor of the free and enslaved colored man,” who had educated him on the evils of slavery.18 In 1819, William Purvis moved his family to Philadelphia, where the city’s black communities were very active and funded educational and cultural institutions such as literary societies and schools for black children.19 He died in 1826, when Robert was 16 years old, leaving most of his wealth to his wife and their three sons. Shortly after his death, Harriet Judah married a black clergyman, Reverend William Miller, who was later involved in the Colored Conventions movement. Intent on giving her sons the best education, she arranged for Robert to attend Amherst Academy.20 It was in 1828 that Robert gave his frst address on the issue of slavery.21 Although he claimed he embodied “half a dozen races,” Purvis identifed with the black race strongly.22 He consistently described himself as a member of “that class who, at the South, are bought, sold, leased, mortgaged, and in all respects treated as absolute property” and “the class who, here at the North, are declared, by the highest tribunal known to your government, to possess ‘no rights that a white man is bound to respect.’”23 In 1837, he drafted the “Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania” to protest against blacks’ planned disenfranchisement and reaffrm their citizenship. The decision made by the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention the following year made Purvis painfully aware of his position as a second-class citizen.24 In 1842, the race riots that took place in Philadelphia also made a strong impression on him by confrming his vulnerability as a black man in a racist society.25 A decisive infuence on Purvis’s activism was that of James Forten, a central fgure of abolitionism.26 His marriage to his mentor’s daughter Harriet Davy, on September 13, 1831, made of the Fortens-Purvises one of the most infuential black families in Philadelphia’s reform activities.27 James Forten and his wife Charlotte were both active reformers, hosting many abolitionist guests, including Garrison.28 Purvis and Forten were involved in the same interracial and black organizations at the local and national levels, and they often attended the same meetings.29 Purvis was thus present at the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society of December 1833 and occupied different positions within the organization, including that of vice

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president from 1841 to 1865; Forten was elected as its vice president in 1834 and was chosen to be an offcer to its annual meetings.30 Purvis married into a family in which women were abolitionist activists in their own right. His mother-in-law and sisters-in-law were among the charter members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, founded just a few days after the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed.31 Once married, Harriet Purvis continued with her abolitionist activities, organizing annual bazaars and joining the Free Produce Society, which James Mott had helped found.32 She was a delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1838 and 1839.33 Compared with the Douglasses, where the asymmetry in the spouses’ public involvement was very visible, the Purvises were equally active, a probable result of their wealth. Their privileged situation, however, did not keep Harriet from being in charge of the household.34 Purvis always worked hand in hand with women, including his wife, with whom he had a strong collaboration.35 During his trip to England in 1834, he worked to establish communication between the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Glasgow and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.36 As the president of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee founded in 1837 to assist fugitives from slavery, he worked closely with the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.37 Along with other men, he was also invited to address its members.38 In 1836, at the annual meeting of the newly formed American Moral Reform Society, he proposed a resolution to thank “those women who are now pleading the cause of humanity, and devoting their times, talents, and industry to the cause of Universal Freedom.”39 This paved the way to women’s gradual integration as leaders of the society, which introduced “formal equality” in 1839.40 It is thus only logical that Purvis should have sided with the Garrisonians when the American Anti-Slavery Society split over the “woman question.” When attending the “conference of the pioneers,” organized in 1888 in honor of the veterans of the women’s rights movement, he expressed his pride at “being ranked as a pioneer in this cause” and recalled that he had voted for Abby Kelley to be appointed to the executive committee at the decisive May 1840 Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.41 In 1848, he was present at the Philadelphia meeting of a black abolitionist organization, during which women, including his wife, were elected offcials.42 He was also appointed vice president of the National Woman’s Rights Convention co-organized by his wife Harriet and his sister-in-law Margaretta Forten in Philadelphia in 1854.43 When the question of women’s enfranchisement arose with full force after the Civil War, he was one of its fercest supporters, advocating blacks and women’s joint enfranchisement and continuing to attend women’s rights meetings with his wife. The Purvises were an activist family, which explains why Robert often personalized the debate by alluding to his children. In the History of Woman Suffrage, it is thus described that after the Civil War he often

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“arose and declared, that he would rather his son should never be enfranchised, unless his daughter could be also, that, as she bore the double curse of sex and color, on every principle of justice she should frst be protected.”44 Beecher’s family was not as wealthy as the Purvises but it was one of the most prominent ones in the 19th century. He was born on June 24, 1813, in Litchfeld, Connecticut, the son of famous Orthodox Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher.45 His sisters include the famous educator Catharine E. Beecher and the renowned author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe.46 His mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, who died when he was three years old, was an educated and affectionate woman.47 Lyman Beecher remarried a year after her death, and his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher, seems to have been her opposite.48 Although she died when her son was still very young, Roxana remained an important presence in his life.49 When Beecher was 12 years old, his family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he enrolled in the Latin Boston School, which Phillips also attended. At the age of 14, he was sent to the Mount Pleasant Classical Institution in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he studied public speaking, which infuenced his subsequent love of oratory and determined in part his future career.50 During his years at Amherst, he met his future wife, Eunice Bullard, whom he married in 1837. They were engaged for seven years but the wedding was sudden as he showed up one morning on her family’s doorstep and asked to get married on the spot.51 Lyman Beecher’s infuence on reform was ambivalent, as he advocated both “change” and “moderation.”52 In 1829, he and his family moved again, this time to Cincinnati, where he became the president of the newly founded Lane Theological Seminary, which abolitionist Arthur Tappan helped set up.53 In 1834, the school was the site of a series of debates on slavery organized by Theodore D. Weld, Angelina E. Grimke’s future husband, leading to the adoption of immediatist ideas by a large part of the student body.54 With Lyman Beecher’s support, all antislavery activities were banned by the school’s trustees and most of the students, including Weld, left. In 1837, after graduating from Lane Seminary and getting married, Henry started his career as a minister, taking a job in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.55 In 1844, he published Seven Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects, a compilation of his sermons that warned against several temptations, including idleness and gambling.56 It was an instant success and gave Beecher some measure of fame. In 1847, he was hired to be the minister of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, founded by New York-based businessmen. It was there that he started preaching what came to be known as the “Gospel of Love,” which opposed some of the strict doctrines that his father had promoted.57 Beecher’s ideas about slavery gradually changed in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Three of his brothers became abolitionists in the 1830s, but he remained on the fence despite what he claimed in later reminiscences.58 By

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1839, however, he had rejected colonization and condemned slavery, giving his frst abolitionist speech in 1843, under the infuence of the church with which he was affliated.59 However, he never was a radical abolitionist, his main concern being the future of the Union if slavery was to be abolished.60 When the Compromise of 1850 was passed, he published an article in the Independent, arguing against the Fugitive Slave Act and the extension of slavery, thus following the evolution of public opinion in the North.61 After his appointment at Plymouth Church, Beecher very quickly became very popular due in great part to his oratory. He was not used to writing his speeches in advance but preferred to speak extemporaneously.62 Despite his success and antislavery convictions, however, not all abolitionists appreciated his lectures. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. mentioned attending and reading some of them in 1859 but seldom enjoying them. In October, he described one of the minister’s addresses as “a superfcial production, wanting almost entirely in moral feeling.”63 In November, he even called the greater part of his sermon on John Brown “despicable.”64 These strong feelings might be explained by Beecher’s emotional oratorical style as well as his belated and probably opportunistic public advocacy of the immediate emancipation of the enslaved, which came only after the beginning of the Civil War, in 1862.65 Although he was not present at women’s rights conventions in the late 1840s and in the 1850s, Beecher was a self-proclaimed supporter of women’s rights. In February 1860, he explained that “society was robbed by the exclusion of woman,” relying on the common rhetoric of the complementarity between the two sexes—“Man was a brute without a woman . . . man alone was like a leafess tree in winter, casting no shade,” he declared.66 All through his childhood, Beecher was exposed to the infuence of strong women, including his mother and sisters.67 Despite the fact that Catharine and Harriet opposed woman suffrage, they also provided him with models of independent womanhood.68 It was, however, after the Civil War and during the debates on the terms of Reconstruction that he started attending women’s rights meetings.

“Woman’s rights” v. “man’s rights” The American Equal Rights Association was founded at the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City in May 1866. Although it advocated universal suffrage, it was also viewed as an offshoot of the women’s rights movement, formed in order to infuence the public debate, at a time when the rights of women, freedmen, and freedwomen were being discussed.69 The American Anti-Slavery Society had refused to integrate the question of women’s enfranchisement into its platform and to become, in the words of its new president Phillips, “a universal reform society.” The American Equal Rights Association logically became the place where woman suffrage was advocated after the Civil War.70

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At frst, discourses that presented “woman’s rights” as “man’s rights” continued to dominate the debates within the new organization. The equivalence had been used during the antebellum period, explicitly as well as implicitly—when activists argued that depriving women of their rights meant depriving society of its half. In 1860, Beecher went as far as claiming that men “needed” women’s rights more than women and calling himself “the defender of man’s rights.”71 At the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention of May 1866, the frst to take place after the Civil War, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Theodore Tilton used the same argument—“I demand the ballot for woman, not for woman’s sake, but for man’s. She may demand it for her own sake; but to-day I demand it for my sake,” he told his audience.72 Not all men active in the women’s rights movement agreed with Beecher’s claims, and Blackwell’s before him, that by fghting for women’s rights men were also fghting for themselves. Some of them used the phrase “man’s rights” as a joke. At the “Mob Convention” held in New York in September 1853, William Henry Channing had told the story of a friend who planned to set up “a Man’s Rights Society” because he felt that “all the efforts of society [were] for the elevation of women, and man ha[d] to perform the drudgery.”73 At another meeting in May 1853, it was Theodore Parker who jokingly argued that “[h]e thought the ladies encroached a little on the men’s rights,” which had provoked laughter and applause from the audience.74 Even if not all male activists went as far as proclaiming that “woman’s rights” was “man’s rights” after the Civil War, woman suffrage was still considered as essential to a balanced and effective government in the name of men’s and women’s complementarity. Beecher was the most forceful advocate of this essentialist vision. “Woman brings to public affairs peculiar qualities, aspirations, and affections which society needs,” he argued at the Eleventh Woman’s Rights Convention.75 Drawing on his sister Catharine’s work, he described woman as “the educator of the world” and “a nursing mother to human society,” an argument reminiscent of his idealized view of his mother.76 These arguments overlapped with debates over the precedence of black suffrage over woman suffrage. The discussions that took place at the conventions of the American Equal Rights Association from 1866 to 1869 gradually evolved from a consensus on the need to ask for universal suffrage to bitter discussions over the respective merits of (white) women’s and black men’s enfranchisement. The list of offcers of the newly formed organization included reform veterans as well as members of the younger generation such as Theodore Tilton and Wendell Phillips Garrison, Garrison’s son and Phillips’s namesake.77 At the origins of its formation was the desire expressed by Anthony “to broaden our Woman’s Rights platform,” and to join the two movements for “the two disfranchised classes the negro and woman.”78 According to the preamble of the association’s constitution, which was written by Stanton, the organization’s avowed goal was to “bury

116 Men v. women’s rights the woman in the citizen,” an ambivalent wish which proved impossible to implement.79 To many activists, however, it seemed that Anthony and Stanton had decided—in the words of Lucretia Mott—“that the negro’s hour was decidedly the ftting time for woman to slip in.”80 The creation of the American Equal Rights Association was at frst welcomed by the members of abolitionist associations.81 The Eleventh Woman’s Rights Convention, where it was founded had gathered a broad coalition of activists such as the Motts, Pillsbury, Stanton, Anthony, Stephen S. Foster, Phillips, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper as well as Beecher.82 At the 1866 New England Anti-Slavery Society meeting, which took place a few weeks later, Foster praised the creation of “a Society whose purpose is to advocate suffrage as a human right, not to be limited by race or sex.”83 In December 1866, the 26th annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society was dominated by equal rights rhetoric under the infuence of Purvis—then the vice president of the organization—and Anthony, although in different ways. The former made a passionate plea for “the oneness and indivisibility of the human family,” the position he continued to advocate throughout the early years of Reconstruction.84 Anthony also asked for universal suffrage but she used a divisive argument that foreshadowed her rhetoric in the years to come. She described freedwomen’s situation if only black men were to be enfranchised and put forward the outrageous argument that black women in the South “ha[d] lived so far in freedom” because they “ha[d] known nothing of the servitude of the marriage laws of the Northern States,” a reference to the fact that the enslaved had not been allowed to marry legally.85 But she did not stop there. She went as far as claiming that enslaved black women had been freer than white women in the North, who had experienced “servitude and dependence” because of marriage laws. Using a racist image that later became popular among some women’s rights activists, she called the freedmen “the greatest tyrants the world has yet seen.”86 Purvis did not contradict these arguments, at least publicly; instead, he showed his commitment to woman suffrage by affrming deeply as he felt the degraded position occupied by the colored man, he would not to-day exchange it for the position of the whitest women to give their efforts and infuence in behalf of his race, and at the same time meanly and selfshly withhold countenance of a movement tending to her enfranchisement.87 Despite the apparent consensus in favor of universal suffrage, questions of precedence dominated the debates of reform conventions very rapidly, under the infuence of Republicans, who believed it would be dangerous politically to link the two questions.88 As the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and women’s rights pioneer, Phillips was in the eye of the storm. In January 1866, Anthony had asked him if he was willing to give a lecture

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on “Equal Suffrage” because she considered him as a strong supporter of equal rights.89 A few months later, at the Equal Rights convention that took place in Boston in May 1866, he advocated for “the negro’s position” to be given precedence.90 It was probably on that occasion that he used the phrase “the negro’s hour,” which meant that, given the present context, he considered black (male) suffrage more urgent than women’s enfranchisement.91 It is possible that Phillips’s decision to focus exclusively on black suffrage was infuenced by his analysis of the power struggle and priorities at the end of the war but it also shows that when given a choice, many reformers gave up on their antebellum claim for universal suffrage.92 Not only did Phillips choose to advocate black suffrage but he also actively worked against woman suffrage by withholding funds from the movement.93 In May 1868, in order to justify his new position on women’s enfranchisement, he reverted to the traditional idea of female infuence, claiming that woman did not need the vote as much as the black man because she “governs now almost as much as if she had her rights.”94 In an article written in response to attacks from women’s rights activist Mathilda Joslyn Gage, he recalled his early position in favor of women’s equal participation in abolitionist societies and his unfinching advocacy of gender equality since the late 1840s. But he also contended that, before the Civil War, the women’s rights movement “was, practically, in the hands of Abolitionists,” which shows that he believed it had always been dependent on the antislavery fght. He however conceded that for him the two questions of racial and gender equality “were not equally ripe.” In this article, he reiterated the position he had taken during previous meetings of the American AntiSlavery Society, i.e. that “the two movements stand separate, each on its own foundation,” while still equating abolitionism with true reform.95 By 1867, abolitionist associations’ meetings were marred by the question of whether woman suffrage should be included in their platform. At the New England Anti-Slavery Convention of May 1867, Foster was again at the vanguard of the fght, claiming that, “[a]s a son and a husband, knowing the worth of woman, God forbid that he should ever be separated from her on that platform, in the church, or at the ballot-box!” Surprisingly, it was his wife who frst opposed his proposal, making the distinction between the mission of antislavery societies and that of the American Equal Rights Association, thus suggesting that an abolitionist meeting was not the place to raise the woman suffrage question.96 The American Equal Rights Association’s meetings became increasingly acrimonious, showing the extent of the rift among previous allies. The 1867 convention was opened by Purvis, who stood temporarily for Lucretia Mott and reminded his audience of the goal of the organization, i.e. “equality of rights for all, without regard to color, sex, or race; and, inseparable from the citizen, the possession of that power, that protection, that primal element of republican freedom the ballot.”97 The call for unity was however disrupted when black reformer George T. Downing asked Stanton if

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she were opposed to black men’s enfranchisement without women’s.98 A tense discussion ensued, which foreshadowed many debates to come that pitted white women’s claims against black men’s.99 Stanton’s answer was at best ambiguous and followed Anthony’s previous line of argument. She was not ready to see the black man get the right to vote before women on the ground that “degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are.”100 She also relied on the theory of women’s vital contribution to government, but by doing so she denied that racial diversity was also crucial for a sound government. “With the black man you have no new force in government, it is manhood still; but with the enfranchisement of woman, you have a new and essential element of life and power,” she pointed.101 Stanton’s remarks were received differently by the audience. Charles Lenox Remond sided with her on the goal of universal suffrage, if not the arguments she used—“All I ask for myself I claim for my wife and sister,” he argued, in line with Purvis’s claims.102 Purvis’s wife and daughters were activists in their own right, and Remond’s sister, Sarah Parker Remond, had been a renowned antislavery lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, touring Great Britain right before the Civil War.103 Both men’s allusions to their female relatives when defending woman suffrage were not mere rhetorical devices but were meant to give black women a tangible place in the debates over women’s enfranchisement. At the 1867 AERA meeting, Stanton was criticized by Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, who both concurred that no competition existed between the two groups and the franchise “of each should be accorded at the earliest possible moment, neither being denied for any supposed beneft to the other.”104 Beecher, ever the compromiser, refused to take sides but he misread the context that favored black male suffrage over women’s enfranchisement by instead suggesting the following strategy in terms that simply denied black women’s claims: “Bait your trap with the white woman, and I think you will catch the black man.”105 He claimed to “advocate no sectional rights, no class rights, no sex rights, but the most universal form of rights for all that live and breathe on the continent,” a position that should be interpreted more as his refusal to take sides than as a frm commitment to equal rights.106 But this was not the direction the Republican Party was taking. Even though he was reluctantly accepting the priority of black male suffrage, Foster was still fghting for women’s right to vote to be included in the American Anti-Slavery Society’s platform. In May 1867, he proposed a resolution in that sense, which met with Phillips’s opposition again but also his wife’s.107 The couple argued over the split of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the late 1830s, in which Abby had been an active participant. Stephen used the events to show that, in previous times, the organization had included the question of women’s rights in its platform, an interpretation his wife contradicted.108

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The last two meetings of the American Equal Rights Association in 1868 and 1869 confrmed the divide among reformers. In November 1867, the two referenda in Kansas were defeated, after a campaign led frst by Stone and Blackwell, followed by Anthony and Stanton, who campaigned with George Francis Train, an openly racist Democrat.109 In January 1868, the frst issue of the Revolution was published and the two women used it to further their claim for woman suffrage. This association with Train infuriated their former allies.110 According to Samuel J. May, a supporter of universal suffrage, Stanton and Anthony were “deluded, infatuated,” and Train was “a fool or a monomaniac.”111 The confict, which culminated at the American Equal Rights Association convention of May 1869, started with Foster’s accusations that some participants had “prevented harmony” in the organization, pointing to the Revolution’s defense of “Educated Suffrage” and opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment.112 He was supported by Douglass, who argued that black suffrage was more urgent and pointedly noted that the convention “had been pre-eminently a Woman’s Rights meeting,” contrary to its mission, which was to defend universal suffrage.113 In 1855, Douglass had called the 1840 schism of the American Anti-Slavery Society “a sad mistake” caused by the “minor” woman question. In the same speech, he made a case for two independent movements, one for “Woman’s Rights,” the other for “the slave’s cause,” an indication that his position after the Civil War was not completely inconsistent with his antebellum rhetoric.114 Despite Blackwell’s attempts to defuse the situation at the 1869 meeting, the argument escalated.115 Anthony and Stanton made a case for “Educated Suffrage,” the latter making the racist claim that she refused to let “ignorant negroes and foreigners” devise “laws for her to obey.”116 She was not, however, the only participant to put forward racist arguments; Blackwell was hissed when he claimed that “the test oath required of white men who had been rebels must be abolished before the vote be given to the negro.”117 The singular position of black women was visible during the American Equal Rights Association’s conventions as they struggled to put forward “their unique perspective.”118 At the organization’s 1867 meeting, the executive committee offered a resolution according to which the present claim for “manhood suffrage,” masked with the words “equal,” “impartial,” “universal,” is a cruel abandonment of the slave women of the South, a fraud on the tax-paying women of the North, and an insult to the civilization of the nineteenth century.119 In 1868, reformer Anna Dickinson argued before the members of the American Anti-Slavery Society in favor of the inclusion of the rights of all women, including “the suffering, agonizing, toiling, down-trodden freed woman, one slave-mother and wife, of the South.”120 Even the white activists who eventually rallied to the Fifteenth Amendment saw woman suffrage as

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essential to the emancipation of black women. In May 1869, Stone claimed that “prejudice” against blacks would not disappear until the Sixteenth Amendment of the Constitution is passed, and the black woman stands by the side of the black man with the ballot in her hand, the one sign of equality, and man and woman together, the black woman and the white, shall stand recognized as equals.121 Even if black women often disagreed on the terms of the debate, most of them defended the priority of race over gender at that point in time.122 In 1869, black abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper joined with those who argued for the precedence of black suffrage over woman suffrage. “When it was a question of race, she let the lesser question of sex go. But the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position,” she said.123 The American Equal Rights Association’s 1869 meeting confrmed Stanton’s and Anthony’s attempts at constructing a narrative that would present male abolitionists, and especially black men, as the enemies of woman suffrage and white women’s adversaries in the present debate. Anthony criticized what she called the “old anti-slavery school” and challenged Douglass, noting that “it was the men that clapped and not the women” when he had advocated black men’s precedence over women. Echoing Purvis’s arguments, she claimed that Douglass would never trade places with Stanton.124 This led Stone to conclude on the failure of the antebellum reform coalition, which had been built on the universality of rights, and the inevitability of defending one’s own interests—“Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate the precedence for her sex, and Mr. Douglass will strive for the frst position for his, and both are perhaps right,” the two fgures representing the two groups that were pitted against one another in the debates.125 The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment led Anthony and Stanton’s supporters to claim that the responsibility for the failure of woman suffrage lay almost exclusively with men. In the History of Woman Suffrage, they along with Gage described the defeat of woman suffrage as evidence of “the stolid incapacity of all men to understand that woman feels the invidious distinctions of sex exactly as the black man does those of color, or the white man the more transient distinctions of wealth, family, position, place, and power.”126 Although they conceded that Purvis was one of the few male activists to defend women’s cause, they advocated the idea that women’s rights would be won only thanks to women.127 This vision, however, was a distortion of the actual events that took place right after the Civil War. Among abolitionists and women’s rights activists, the supporters of the Fifteenth Amendment did not oppose women’s enfranchisement but thought that, in the present context, black (male) suffrage was more urgent and/or easier to reach. In early 1869, Foster, who had fnally admitted his defeat over the inclusion of woman suffrage in the American Anti-Slavery

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Society’s platform, still attended women’s rights conventions.128 At a woman suffrage meeting organized in Massachusetts in March 1869, he got into an exchange with a man who was uncomfortable with the idea that his wife might vote against him. Foster replied that he would not mind. To the man who had jokingly commented that Foster loved arguments so much that he was willing to fght with “his own family,” he replied that he preferred it if his wife voted like him, but he “would ten times rather she would vote the other way, than not vote at all.”129 The acrimonious 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association led to the formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association by Stanton and Anthony, who met with their supporters in New York right after. As a result of the narrative that made men responsible for the demise of an amendment that would have given blacks and women the right to vote, Stanton immediately suggested that only women could be members but the proposal was voted down after animated discussions.130 The History of Woman Suffrage notes that “they had to concede the right of membership to men, in order to carry the main point, as several ladies would not join unless men also could be admitted.”131 This meant that the movement was still in a transition period regarding men’s place and role as allies, between those who believed they should remain active within the same associations as women and others, who advocated for their marginal role. The formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association led to the creation of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland in November 1869. The letter of invitation for the founding convention was signed by two men and three women, thus showing the society’s commitment to women and men’s joint fght for women’s rights.132 In Cleveland, Higginson took the opportunity to discuss men’s position in the women’s rights movement, which he viewed as that of facilitators and allies “next to” women. “Women may doubt and hesitate, uncertain whether they want to vote or not, but men have only one position to take—to withdraw their opposition, and leave it to the women to decide for themselves.”133 Despite this declaration of intention, the organization’s constitution stated that, No distinction on account of sex shall ever be made in the membership or in the selection of offcers of this society; but the general principle shall be that one-half of the offcers shall, as nearly as convenient, be men, and one-half women. The principle of an equal distribution of offces between the two genders was debated and adopted by a narrow vote.134 The discussions and votes over the terms of men’s participation in both the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Association show that men’s place had become a contested issue. The debates over universal suffrage had clearly taken their toll and women were believed to be the main moving force in the fght for female suffrage.

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Beecher was elected president of the American Woman Suffrage Association unanimously, an unlikely choice but one that might be explained by his fame and his relative neutrality in the fght between the two sides of the movement.135 In 1867, he had assured to Stanton that his loose connection with women’s rights was not due to his fear to be associated with an unpopular movement, which shows that his reluctance had been interpreted in this way by many activists. He instead claimed that he was not inclined to work in organizations, including abolitionist associations. He also repeated the common idea that the fate of the movement lay in women’s education to the suffrage question.136 His presidency, however, was short-lived, and, during his tenure, he was at the center of a scandal that caused embarrassment to the American Woman Suffrage Association.137 A few weeks after his election, he was called to the deathbed of Albert Richardson, a journalist, who had been shot by Daniel McFarland, the former husband of actress Abigail McFarland. She had left her abusive husband, and moved to Indiana in order to get a divorce and marry Richardson.138 Beecher performed the wedding ceremony and attended Richardson’s funeral, during which he defended the deceased’s “perfect purity of motives and integrity of character.”139 He was immediately attacked by the press for what was viewed as a vindication of adultery and divorce.140 The events cast a temporary shadow on Beecher’s character although they were not of the magnitude of the Beecher-Tilton scandal that took place a few years later. Very rapidly, activists worried that the existence of two woman suffrage associations would be detrimental to the cause. The split had been both political and personal. Former connections were severed and resentment was strong but many pushed for a reunion, including Douglass and Lucretia Mott.141 In August 1870, Martha C. Wright, Mott’s sister and a supporter of Stanton and Anthony’s, thus summed up the position of many activists in a letter to Stone: “Let us now work in unison for the passage of the 16th Amendment, & in our fnal triumph, forget all past differences,” she argued.142 Tilton, a newspaper editor close to Beecher at the time, started working for a rapprochement. Despite opposition coming from both sides, representatives of the two organizations met in April 1870, but the meeting was rapidly adjourned.143 Tilton and the representatives of the National Woman Suffrage Association then formed the Union Woman Suffrage Association, a short-lived attempt at uniting the women’s rights movement, and Tilton was named president.144 His appointment, however, was not welcomed by everyone. In March 1870, Gage declared that she was “utterly and entirely opposed to any man as Pres[ident] of a National organization,” which confrms the change in some activists as to who should achieve prominent positions within the movement.145 Despite this evolution, men retained an important place in the movement, but not necessarily for the better. Blackwell’s role was decisive during and after the split. In May 1868, after the anniversary meeting of the American

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Equal Rights Association, Anthony wrote that Stone’s speech “melted all hearts” but she criticized Blackwell’s intervention.146 In the years to come, Stone’s husband remained an important actor of the movement, but his role was compromised by what some saw as his duplicity as well as some of his more personal choices. At the time of the split of the late 1860s, Stone discovered his affair with reformer Abby Hutchinson Patton, which may have added to the diffcult situation she found herself when her connections with friends were severed.147 Despite his reputation, Blackwell continued to interfere, writing letters to Stanton and Anthony as well as their female allies to give them unsolicited advice. In January 1870, Martha C. Wright replied rather sharply to his remarks about the “sensational & unreliable character” of the National Woman Suffrage Association.148 In June 1872, he wrote Stanton a condescending letter, in which he explained to her the Republican Party’s politics and gave his sexist viewpoint on the strategy the National Woman Suffrage Association’s female members should adopt. He urged them “to enlist the sympathy and gallantry of men” and not to antagonize them, a clear allusion to the doctrine of female infuence.149 In September of the same year, he reiterated the same advice to Anthony. He encouraged her female supporters to acknowledge the Republican Party’s accomplishments in abolishing slavery and enfranchising black men. He appealed again to women’s infuence—“Women can persuade men,—can reason with them,— can appeal to their sense of justice and chivalry;—they cannot scold them into compliance.” Finally, he recommended they avoid women-only meetings and “combine men & women,” in an effort not “to antagonize the sexes.”150 It is easy to see how Blackwell’s patronizing letters could have angered Anthony and Stanton. They also show the extent to which the National Woman Suffrage Association was associated with an “anti-men” sentiment, an impression that deepened with the Beecher-Tilton scandal.

The Beecher-Tilton scandal: Women’s victimization in the hands of men The Beecher-Tilton scandal affected the suffrage movement deeply.151 Taking place in the early 1870s, it generated a great multitude of narratives at the time.152 In October 1872, just a few weeks before the presidential election for which she was running, Victoria Woodhull—a Wall Street broker and magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Spiritualist mentee—published the story of Beecher’s supposed infdelity with Tilton’s wife, which she had heard from Stanton in May 1871.153 A few days later, she published a short article in the New York World about “a public teacher of eminence who lived in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence,” a veiled reference to both Beecher and Tilton, who recognized themselves and tried to stop her from revealing their names.154 At the time, Woodhull had been involved in the woman suffrage movement with the support of Stanton and Beecher’s half-sister Isabella Beecher

124 Men v. women’s rights Hooker, a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.155 Beecher’s other sisters, Harriet and Catharine, had attacked her for being a free lover. Her reputation and sources of revenue were endangered, and Woodhull threatened Beecher and asked him to share the stage with her at one of her lectures.156 After he refused, Tilton agreed to introduce her that night but his reputation was damaged because of his association with the free love principles Woodhull advocated on that occasion.157 After a year of veiled threats, Woodhull fnally published the story in November 1872.158 Anthony Comstock had her immediately arrested for the circulation of “obscenity.”159 The scandal did not subside with time and in July 1874, under the pressure of public opinion, a Church Investigating Committee, appointed by Beecher himself, convened, only to exonerate the minister. Tilton then fled adultery charges against Beecher, leading to a trial in 1875, which attracted considerable attention from the press and the public.160 Beecher was acquitted by 9-3 votes and received a raise from Plymouth Church, which helped him pay for his legal fees. The scandal was thus deeply rooted in the history of the woman suffrage movement and men’s place in it. Despite its consequences on Elizabeth Tilton’s life and the sympathies of women’s rights activists for her plight, it remained a “man question.” Tilton and Beecher had met in the 1850s and quickly became close friends: Beecher performed Tilton’s wedding in October 1855; in 1857, Tilton was hired as the minister’s “ghostwriter;” in 1864, Beecher recommended his friend as editor of the religious magazine the Independent. In 1866, Beecher jokingly referred to their relationship at the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention—“Theodore was a most excellent young man when he used to go to my church; but he has escaped from my care lately, and now I don’t know what he does,” he told the audience.161 Tilton, who was 22 years Beecher’s junior, belonged to a group of young male parishioners who considered the minister as a father substitute.162 Beecher was thus able to sustain his fock’s support against all odds. “My people are thus far heroic & would give their lives for me. Their love & confdence would make me willing to bear far more than I have,” he wrote his half-sister Isabella a few days after his infdelity was made public.163 Beecher’s marriage was notoriously unhappy and he was unfaithful to his wife. Personal letters have been lost or destroyed, but it is probable that marriage did not fulfll both spouses’ expectations. As early as during his tenure in Indiana, there were rumors concerning his infdelities and they followed him at Plymouth Church. In 1855, he had an affair with his patron’s wife, Lucy Maria Bowen.164 In 1868, it was Elizabeth Tilton’s turn—or so she confessed to her husband. The Tilton marriage also had its ups and downs, due to both spouses’ chronic dissatisfaction. Theodore regularly withdrew from his family to pursue reform and a public life that he found more attractive. He was unfaithful to his wife. In 1859, Eunice wrote an autobiographical novel, From Dawn to Daylight, or the Simple Story of a Western Home, a mixed description of

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her life as a minister’s wife. In it, she spoke of the “unintentional selfshness” of “literary and public men,” which she also excused.165 She clearly admired her husband and was a proponent of the separation of spheres and gender roles, describing women’s mission as “the privilege of shining with a softer light, sheltered and guarded by manly love, in a home made heavenlike by her graceful care and gentle infuences.”166 In 1891, 14 years after his death, she published a tribute to Beecher, describing him as the ideal husband and their married life as idyllic despite the scandal and his infdelities. She painted the portrait of a perfect father and husband who enjoyed the experience of domesticity greatly. She also signed the text with “Mrs. Henry W. Beecher,” the sign that she had not embraced the common practice among female women’s rights activists at the time to keep their birth names.167 Free love had been considered as a danger to the women’s rights movement by its supporters since the 1840s. During the 1869 American Equal Rights Association convention, women’s rights advocate Mary Livermore asked that a resolution, supported by Blackwell, be voted in order to fght against rumors that linked woman suffrage with free love. It stated that the movement did not seek “to undermine or destroy the sanctity of the marriage relation, but to ennoble marriage, making the obligations and responsibilities of the contract mutual and equal for husband and wife,” which is evidence of the importance women’s rights activists assigned to their reputation.168 In November 1869, Beecher had told his half-sister Isabella that Stanton was a believer “in free love,” which, according to him, was the reason behind the division of the women’s rights movement. Isabella was so shocked by the allegation that she wrote Stanton and asked her to give her opinion “on the true practical relation that ought to subsist between the sexes—in marriage & out of marriage,” so that she could show it to her brother.169 The scandal was presented by female activists as further evidence of women’s oppression by men. In June 1871, Stanton had called Woodhull “the last victim sacrifced on the altar of Woman Suffrage.”170 In August 1874, Stone published an editorial about the scandal in the Woman’s Journal, in which she came to Elizabeth Tilton’s defense, writing that she had been “unspeakably sinned against.”171 Like Stone, Anthony was sorrier about Elizabeth Tilton than about the two men involved. She was also convinced of Beecher’s guilt.172 For Stanton, the scandal and Elizabeth Tilton’s martyrdom were evidence that “in the clashing of interests, ambitions, revenges among men how remorselessly mothers wives & daughters are sacrifced.”173 The scandal had great consequences on the woman suffrage movement. It signaled the divergent interests between black activists and their white counterparts, who were almost exclusively involved in the scandal. It also deepened the divide between the two associations at a time when reunion had been contemplated. In September 1872, Blackwell had promised Stanton they would report the National Woman Suffrage Association’s meeting in

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the Woman’s Journal, congratulating her on the convention she had organized earlier.174 Stone and her supporters however believed that Stanton and Anthony’s association with Woodhull had endangered the cause of woman suffrage permanently. In 1874, Michigan organized a referendum on woman suffrage, which was defeated, a result activists attributed to the Beecher-Tilton scandal.175

Divergent woman’s rights masculinities “At any time in history,” Gail Bederman argues, “many contradictory ideas about manhood are available to explain what men are, how they ought to behave, and what sorts of powers and authorities they may claim, as men.”176 Beecher and Purvis exemplify the coexistence of different norms regarding male behaviors within the women’s rights movement, from Purvis’s controlled and moral masculinity to Beecher’s emotional and selfcentered performances. Purvis was commonly described as “a gentleman of the old school” by his contemporaries.177 In his defense of both blacks’ rights and women’s rights at a time when questions of precedence were being raised, Purvis remained constant in his position as a selfess ally. At the 1888 International Council of Women, Anthony introduced him as one of the only men who had stood by women in 1869, “when the cry, was, ‘This is the negro’s hour.’” She recalled that in 1869, he had said, “If need be, I would prefer to bide my time for twenty years before I shall deposit a ballot, if at that time I may be allowed to take my wife and daughter with me to the ballot-box,” an oft-repeated story.178 Purvis’s altruism was also personal as he linked his defense of women’s rights with the defense of the rights of the women in his life. This sometimes put him at odds with the men of his family. At a woman suffrage convention in January 1869, he opposed his own son, Charles Burleigh, who had just argued in favor of the Fifteenth Amendment, showing that the younger generations were not necessarily more enlightened allies and that he was ready to defend women’s rights at all costs.179 Purvis’s feminism was also rooted in his experience of oppression as a black man. He had been deeply affected by blacks’ disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania in 1838 and must have identifed with women’s lack of political rights. In 1860, a public controversy opposed him to the poet Bayard Taylor, who had declared the black race inferior. “I am so organized that a man who insults the race with which I am identifed insults me,” Purvis claimed in one of the letters, the term “identifed” a probable reference to the fact that he could pass as white.180 In his reply to Taylor, he used the analogy with women and women’s rights. “This is as if,” he countered, “some man were to get up at a Woman’s Rights Convention and say, ‘I believe after much travel and research, that woman is the natural inferior of man, but this has nothing to do with the question before the Convention!’”181 As a member of an oppressed group, which he also presented as the result of a

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choice on his part, Purvis had experienced discrimination directly. “I have often heard that it takes a woman to understand a woman’s wrongs; so I say it takes a man of African blood to understand the contempt which is cherished by a certain class against people of African blood,” he wrote.182 Purvis strongly identifed with blacks, but he also had a specifc sense of the black masculine ideals that he embodied and that were infuenced by his class. In 1853, he was attacked by Douglass, who called him “practically an enemy of the colored people” and accused him of benefting from “bloodstained riches,” a probable allusion to Purvis’s father’s occupation as a Southern merchant. In a letter published in the Liberator, Purvis defended the morality of his father’s wealth. He also described himself as a man ready “to the best of [his] ability, to do and suffer with [his] oppressed brethren.” The fact that Purvis felt the need to publish a reply to Douglass’s attacks shows how strongly he felt about his father as well as his own service to blacks’ cause. He also seized the opportunity to distinguish himself from Douglass, whom he called a “shameless ingrate and base slanderer” and a “meanly ambitious man,” as opposed to himself, whose “reputation” he claimed was “unspotted before the world,” showing that his vision of manhood was also linked to the notion of respectability that was so important in his profession and among the middle class at the time.183 A week later, an article reprinted from the Pennsylvania Freeman in the Liberator accused Douglass of slandering several male abolitionists, including Phillips, Purvis, Foster, and Charles Lenox Remond.184 Beecher performed masculinity in a very different way. He advocated the juxtaposition of “both feminine sensitivity and vigorous masculinity” in men.185 He did not shy away from alluding to similar fuid gender norms that were present in abolitionists’ speeches in the 1830s. At the frst women’s rights convention that took place after the Civil War, he claimed that “multitudes of the offces that [we]re held by men [we]re mere excuses for leading an effeminate life,” and developed the idea that women as mothers were worthy of public offce.186 For him, “effeminate” and “feminine” were two very different notions. While the former related to the perversion of masculine ideals, the latter was an essential part of what made men true men. In his eulogy of Garrison, he thus described the abolitionist leader as a man with a heart “as tender as a woman’s and pure as a child’s,” which, according to him, in no way undermined his manhood.187 While these views might be interpreted as an attempt on Beecher’s part to reconcile his father’s and mother’s models, Lyman Beecher seems to have at least sometimes been an affectionate father. In an 1883 sermon, Henry thus reminisced that he had comforted him when he suffered from a toothache by placing his hand on his head—a gesture strikingly similar to Garrison when he asked his daughter to put her hands on his head to warm them.188 Beecher’s emotional oratory and his demeanor made him the target of other rumors relayed by Stanton. In August 1870, an article originally published in the Revolution, and entitled “Beecher in Petticoats,” told the story

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of Beecher visiting his sister Harriet and “urg[ing] his nieces to curl and friz his hair.” The article then proceeded to give a description of Beecher in drag—wearing “a becoming bonnet, skirt and mantilla, and a fan,” and “talking with true feminine affection.”189 The story, which Stanton claimed was passed on to her by Isabella Beecher Hooker, was potentially dangerous for Beecher as cities and states had been passing laws criminalizing crossdressing in the 19th century.190 It was also meant to disparage a man who was known for his display of feelings and did not hesitate to cry in public, and by association all the men who had been members of the American Woman Suffrage Association.191 Purvis and Beecher were central in the process of the redefnition of men’s place in the women’s rights movement after the Civil War, in keeping with evolving notions of masculinity. The transformations of feminism were infuenced by the political context as well as ambiguities rooted in the antebellum period. The conficts were both political and personal. “One of the greatest trials in the pathway of reformers is the necessity of estranging so many who would otherwise be friends, or else of being untrue to our own convictions of duty,” Lydia Maria Child thus wrote Phillips in 1868. Relationships were severed and rebuilt as a result of the political choices made by activists. The consequences of the Reconstruction debates were important. They made the commitment to one’s own rights as important as the fght for the “rights of others.” They also tended to narrow down the women’s rights movement to the question of the vote, while highlighting its status as “a collective tool” and/or as “an individual right.”192 Not all women’s rights activists agreed with such an evolution. In 1870, Martha C. Wright wrote Stanton that she “ha[d] never ceased to regret that [they had] g[iven] up the good old name of Womans Rights” and abandoned “the freedom of [their] platform to all subjects on Womans Rights.”193 In the same way that, before the Civil War, Phillips had declined to discuss the question of marriage and divorce at a women’s rights convention, the members of the American Woman Suffrage Association refused, to use Blackwell’s words, to “complicat[e] the question of Woman’s Equality with discussions of the relations of the sexes and with special theories on this and other subjects.”194

Notes 1 Women reformers founded the Women’s Loyal National League in May 1863 but the organization did not directly advocate women’s rights. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 109–110. On the association’s interracial work, see Dudden, Fighting Chance, 54. In April 1861, a few days after the battle of Fort Sumter, Stanton claimed that “it [wa]s impossible for her to think or speak on anything but the War.” SBA to WP, April 29, 1861, WPP. When Anthony however suggested they organize a women’s rights convention, Martha C. Wright called the move “very unwise.” Martha C. Wright to SBA, March 31, 1862, GFP/SCSC. Stanton later expressed regrets about this strategy. Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 254. To Garrison’s dismay, his son George

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4 5

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Thompson enrolled in the 55th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Massachusetts’ second black regiment, in June 1863. On George Thompson’s experience as a soldier and his family’s reaction, see Alonso, Growing Up Abolitionist, 162–169. SBA to WP, April 29, 1861, WPP. During the presidential elections of 1864, Garrisonians disagreed over Republican incumbent Abraham Lincoln, who, according to some, including Phillips and Foster, was too “conservative.” McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 232. On the division of abolitionists during the Civil War, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 586–587; McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 232–258. “The Anti-Slavery Society,” New York Times, May 11, 1865, 2. The House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865. It was ratifed in December of the same year. In December 1865, Garrison published the last issue of the Liberator. The activities of the American Anti-Slavery Society continued until 1870. On the reasons for Garrison’s resignation, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 587–588; McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy, 263–264. “Wendell Phillips at the 34th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 25, 1867, 2; “New England Anti-Slavery Convention (afternoon session), 37th meeting, Boston, May 29,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 3. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 19. Activists did not form women’s rights associations in the 1850s. It was however considered by Lucretia Mott before the Civil War. LM to LS, August 16, 1852, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffn, 219. LS to SBA, July 4, 1853, LS Papers, BFP/LOC. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 77. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 19. The best examples of these two narratives, who are not necessarily contradictory, are: DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage and Dudden, Fighting Chance. Also see Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 131. On Stanton’s racism, see Michele Mitchell, “‘Lower Orders,’ Racial Hierarchies, and Rights Rhetoric: Evolutionary Echoes in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Thought during the Late 1860s,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, eds. Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Càndida Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 128–151; Stansell, “Missed Connections,” 32–49. In 1998, DuBois wrote that she had minimized the racism of such activists as Anthony and Stanton in her earlier work. Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Last Suffragist: An Intellectual and Political Autobiography,” Woman Suffrage, Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 10. Aileen Kraditor identifes two tendencies within the woman suffrage of the turn of the 20th century that were already present after the Civil War, i.e. “strong reformist motives” coupled with “undemocratic attitudes.” Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981 (1965)), 255. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 52. “The Woman’s Rights Meeting,” New York Times, February 3, 1860, 8. Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 254. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 127. Ginzberg, “Re-Viewing the First Wave,” 425. Bacon, But One Race, 7–10. Margaret Hope Bacon suggests that Harriet was enslaved and that William Purvis never in fact freed her. Harriet’s father came from a Jewish family and her mother was an enslaved woman born in Africa. Purvis’s father was born in England and moved to South Carolina in 1780. Ibid., 10.

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17 Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 120. 18 “Letter from Robert Purvis, Esq.,” Liberator, September 16, 1853, 147. 19 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 36. According to Margaret Hope Bacon, William Purvis decided to leave South Carolina for England or Scotland because of his brother’s death and “his growing uneasiness about dealing in slaves.” Bacon, But One Race, 15. 20 Ibid., 21–23. 21 Ibid., 26. 22 “Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 1, 1866, 1. 23 “Twenty-Seventh Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society; Speech of Robert Purvis,” Liberator, May 18, 1860, 78. 24 On the “Appeal” see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 19–20, 86. By 1840, the great majority of free blacks living in the North were disenfranchised. Young, Antebellum Black Activists, 36; Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 26. In 1834, Purvis had some diffculty in acquiring a passport because he was black and managed to get one issued after the intervention of white Quaker Robert Vaux, who vouched for him. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 261. 25 Purvis’s home and family were targeted by the riots. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 352. Also see Bacon, But One Race, 65; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 124. 26 The relationship between the two men was so strong that it can be best described as that of “father and son.” Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 118. 27 Forten and Purvis both had large fortunes of $100,000 each. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 67. In 1838, Robert’s brother married Harriet’s sister. Bacon, But One Race, 49. 28 Sumler-Lewis, “The Forten-Purvis Women,” 282. 29 Purvis participated in black conventions in the early 1830s. Bacon, But One Race, 35. 30 Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 256. 31 Bogin and Yellin, Introduction, 7. 32 Sumler-Lewis, “The Forten-Purvis Women,” 285. 33 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 77. 34 Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke,” 72. On black couples as “abolitionist teams,” see ibid., 68. 35 Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 353. 36 Ibid., 263. 37 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 109. Members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society also formed a Female Vigilance Committee. SumlerLewis, “The Forten-Purvis Women,” 284. Purvis declared himself a proponent of “self-defense” when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 95. He led the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in Pennsylvania. Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 197. On women’s role in vigilance committees, see Jesse Olsavsky, “Women, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Militant Abolitionism, 1835–1859,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 39.2 (2018): 357–382. 38 Jean R. Doderlund, “Priorities and Power: The Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood, 69. Purvis was also especially close to the Motts. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 60. 39 Bacon, But One Race, 52. The American Moral Reform Society was an offshoot of the black convention movement. It welcomed white members. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 47. Also see Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 309. 40 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 47.

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41 Purvis mentioned then that, unlike Douglass, he had not been present at Seneca Falls. Report of the International Council of Women, 342–343. Purvis’s wife was present at the 1840 American Anti-Slavery Society meeting. Bacon, But One Race, 97. He voted for the admission of women as members at the May 1839 Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Ibid., 73. 42 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 77. 43 The History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 376; Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 16–17. 44 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 265. Purvis and his wife had eight children. Three of them died during their parents’ lifetime. 45 Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 38. 46 Lyman Beecher had seven children with Roxana Foote Beecher and three with his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher. 47 Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2006), 26, 28. 48 Marie Caskey notes that Beecher “perhaps felt a more inveterate antipathy for his stepmother, Harriet Porter, than did the rest of Roxana’s children.” Marie Caskey, Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 209. 49 At the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1866, Beecher mentioned that “[his] mother’s house was ‘wide’ as Christ’s house, and she taught [him] to understand the words of Him that said, ‘The feld is the world; and whoever needs is your brother.’” History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 163. Also see T.J. Ellinwood, ed., Autobiographical Reminiscences of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1898), 70–71. 50 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 65. About Beecher’s “training in elocution,” see Ellinwood, Autobiographical Reminiscences, 53; Jane Shaffer Elsmere, Henry Ward Beecher: The Indiana Years (1837–1847) (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1973), 13–14. Beecher’s college years were also decisive in his intellectual development. At the time, Amherst College was implementing an education infuenced by ideas that originated in Germany and promoted intellectual autonomy. Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 78. 51 Mrs. Henry W. Beecher, “Mr. Beecher as I Knew Him,” The Ladies' Home Journal, November 1891, volume 8, 9. Eunice’s parents were worried about the length of the engagement. Elsmere, Henry Ward Beecher, 22. 52 Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 38, 129. According to T. Gregory Garvey, Garrison learned lessons that were “tactical rather than philosophical” from Lyman Beecher. Garvey, Creating the Culture, 70. 53 Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina, 116. 54 Ibid., 117. 55 In 1839, he took another job in Indianapolis, Indiana. 56 HWB, Seven Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects, Delivered Before the Young Men of Indianapolis, Indiana, During the Winter of 1843–4 (Indianapolis: Thomas B. Cutler, 1844). 57 In his novel Norwood; or, Village Life in New England, published in 1867, Beecher thus defned love as “a point at which every power and faculty of one’s nature comes to a unity, and the whole being becomes symmetrical and harmonious.” HWB, Norwood; or, Village Life in New England, 2 volumes (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1867), 2: 51–52. Kathryn Kish Sklar Beecher argues that, unlike Beecher, his sister Catharine “was excluded from the institutional forms of the church where she might have successfully nurtured and implemented her theory.” Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976), 129. On Catharine’s infuence, see Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 190.

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58 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 186, 129. See Ellinwood, Autobiographical Reminiscences, 56–57, 62–63. 59 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 187.56–57. 60 Ibid., 224. 61 Ibid., 243. On his actions following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, see Ellinwood, Autobiographical Reminiscences, 130. 62 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 214. 63 William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., diary, October 12, 1859, GFP/SCSC. 64 Ibid., November 4, 1859, GFP/SCSC. On the sermon and its reception, see Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 310–312. For the abolitionist leader’s eldest son, Beecher was no match for Wendell Phillips. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., diary, October 12, 1859, GFP/SCSC. Higginson described Beecher as “the only man [he had] spoken with in public of whom [he] felt ashamed.” Mary Thatcher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffin Company, 1914), 310. 65 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 338. 66 “The Woman’s Rights Meeting,” The New York Times, February 3, 1860, 8. 67 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 34, 42. 68 The appeal was written by Catharine E. Beecher and published in a book she co-wrote with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Catharine E. Beecher, “An Appeal to American Women by the Senior Author of This Volume,” in Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 1869), 340–343. In 1837, Catharine E. Beecher had published an essay in which she criticized women’s involvement in the abolitionist movement. Catharine E. Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, With Reference to the Duty of American Females (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837). Angelina E. Grimke answered her with a series of public letters. Angelina E. Grimke, Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, In Reply to An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A.E. Grimké. Revised by the Author (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838). 69 Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 20. 70 “New England Anti-Slavery Society (afternoon session),” National AntiSlavery Standard, June 15, 1867, 1. 71 “The Woman’s Rights Meeting,” New York Times, February 3, 1860, 8. The speech was published as a “woman suffrage leafet” by the American Woman Suffrage Association 30 years later. HWB, “Woman Suffrage Man’s Rights,” Woman Suffrage Leafet (Boston: American Woman Suffrage Association, 1890), Mary Hilliard Loines Papers, SL. 72 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 155 (emphasis in the original). 73 Ibid., 550. 74 Ibid., 671. 75 Ibid., 164. 76 Ibid., 161, 160. In 1868, American writer Mary Abigail Dodge summed up this idea when she claimed: “Female suffrage is not an affair of antagonism between man and woman. It is not a struggle of antagonism between man and woman. It is not a struggle in which women are to be the gainers and men the losers. It is one in which both are to gain or both to lose alike.” Gail Hamilton, Woman’s Wrongs (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 75. Gail Hamilton was Dodge’s penname. 77 Harriet Purvis was appointed a member of the Finance Committee at the 1867 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association. Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 9 and 10, 1867 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1867), 17.

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78 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 172. At the end of the Convention, Lucretia Mott, who was appointed president of the new organization, “rejoiced in the inauguration of a movement broad enough to cover class, color, and sex,” remarks that her husband echoed. Ibid., 174–175. Despite her declared enthusiasm, she was however hesitant to get involved in the American Equal Rights Association because of the divisions of the reform movement as well as her old age. Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 187. 79 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 173. On this ambivalent goal and its outcome, see Laura E. Free, “‘To Bury the Black Man and the Woman in the Citizen’: The American Equal Rights Association and the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1867,” in Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, eds. Christine L. Ridarsky and Mary M. Huth (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 59–85. 80 LM to WP, April 17, 1866, WPP. 81 The discussions were probably infuenced at frst by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which for the frst time introduced the word “male” in the U.S. Constitution. In October 1866, Phillips criticized the amendment because it was meant “to engraft into that Constitution the word ‘male,’ confning us in the onward march of the suffrage question to one sex.” “‘Reject the Amendment—Depose the President.’ Address by Wendell Phillips, at the Cooper Institute, New York, Oct. 25, 1866,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, November 3, 1866, 1. The American Equal Rights Association was not the only organization devoted to suffrage rights created during that period. The Philadelphia Suffrage Association was founded in 1866. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 24. 82 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 152–178. In November 1866, Douglass, Pillsbury, Stone, Blackwell, Remond, and Anthony spoke at the New York Equal Rights Convention. “Equal Rights Convention for the State of New York,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, November 10, 1866, 3. On the strategy of some members of the American Equal Rights Association at the convention, see Free, “To Bury the Black Man.” 83 “New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 9, 1866, 1. 84 “Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 1, 1866, 1. At the meeting, Stanton’s husband jokingly said that he supported “universal suffrage”—“indeed, I do not know that I should be permitted to live in my own house if I were not,” he explained, an allusion to his wife’s strong personality and position on the topic. “Meeting of the Pennsylvania Annual Meeting,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 8, 1866, 1. 85 The absence of legal marriage did not prevent the enslaved from forming “marital bonds.” See Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 29–30. 86 “Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society,” 3. A similar argument was used at the same meeting by Frances D. Gage. “Meeting of the Pennsylvania Annual Meeting,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 8, 1866, 1. On Anthony and Stanton’s efforts to make of the American AntiSlavery Association “a universal suffrage organization,” see Dudden, Fighting Chance, 74. On “the ambiguity of marriage as a bond intrinsic to freedom but evocative of slavery” in abolitionists’ discourse, see Stanley, “Instead of Waiting for the Thirteenth Amendment,” 759–760. 87 “Meeting of the Pennsylvania Annual Meeting,” 1. 88 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 118; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 59. 89 SBA to WP, January 9, 1866, WPP (emphasis in original).

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90 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 178. He added that he was advocating “the woman’s cause” essentially because of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment and its introduction of the word “male.” 91 In July 1865, Phillips wrote that he was concerned that blacks’ enfranchisement was going to be “put off for many a year.” WP to unidentifed correspondent, July 6, 1865, WPP. In August 1869, when the split among reformers had become permanent, he denied ever uttering the phrase “negro’s hour.” WP, “Woman’s Rights. To the Editor of the Woman’s Advocate,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 21, 1869. 92 Phillips’s choice after the Civil War and retreat from the women’s rights movement did not however mean that he was not supportive of women’s endeavors. African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis thus made a marble medallion of his face in 1871. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed on March 11, 2020. http://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2012.89. 93 As shown by Faye E. Dudden, Phillips controlled different funds that had been set up in the wills of activists Francis Jackson Garrison and Charles F. Hovey but he diverted the money dedicated to women’s rights, a decision which had durable consequences on the campaign for woman suffrage after the Civil War. See Dudden, Fighting Chance, 22–23, 52–53, 86. 94 “35th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National AntiSlavery Standard, May 23, 1868, 2. He repeated the same argument in 1869. “35th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National AntiSlavery Standard, June 6, 1869, 1. At the same meeting, Anna Dickinson told him that although his commitment to women’s rights was not to be questioned, his remarks could be “misapprehended.” “35th Annual Meeting of the AntiSlavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 30, 1868, 3. 95 Phillips, “Woman’s Rights.” Two years earlier, he had declared that “woman’s position in political affairs” was “the great, unique, characteristic question of the nineteenth century, the last protest against the injustice of one-half of the human race.” “Wendell Phillips at the 34th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 25, 1867, 1. 96 “New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 15, 6. On the same occasion, William Wells Brown agreed with Abby Kelley Foster’s position, noting that “he saw a disposition in New York . . . to claim the right of woman to vote, and in so doing to disparage the negro.” Parker Pillsbury denied the accusation. Ibid., 3. 97 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 183. 98 Ibid., 214. 99 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn notes that one of the subheads in the History of Woman Suffrage is “Black men opposed to woman suffrage.” Terborg-Penn, African American Woman, 28. She also discusses the way white women targeted black men’s position but failed to note that some black women also often agreed with them. Ibid, 35. 100 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 214. 101 Ibid., 216. 102 Ibid., 215, 220. 103 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 119, 135. Charles Lenox and Sarah Parker Remond gave woman suffrage lectures in New York in 1866–1867. TerborgPenn, African American Women, 25. 104 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 214. 105 Ibid., 218. 106 Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 9 and 10, 1867 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1867), 57–58.

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107 “34th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National AntiSlavery Standard, May 25, 1867, 2. 108 Ibid., 2. Foster was supported by Samuel J. May but the resolution was voted down. 109 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 123. Not all reformers criticized Anthony and Stanton for their association with Train. See Martha C. Wright to ECS, February 20, 1868, GFP/SCSC. Anthony’s biographer claims that it was Blackwell who had planned to bring Train in the Kansas campaign. Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 180–181. On the circumstances of the campaign and Stanton and Anthony’s association with Train, see Dudden, Fighting Chance, 127–132. 110 Higginson, Douglass, Tilton, and Phillips had refused to campaign in Kansas. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 82. The Revolution’s motto was “Men Their Rights and Nothing More—Women Their Rights and Nothing Less.” It was co-edited by Parker Pillsbury. In January 1870, Stone and Blackwell started their own newspaper, the Woman’s Journal. 111 Samuel J. May to LS, March 10, 1868, National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, LOC. 112 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 381–382. “Educated suffrage” was also supported by Blackwell in the 1880s. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 68. 113 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 391. Douglass also rejected “the story that the slaves who are enfranchised become the worst of tyrants.” Ibid. 114 The Anti-Slavery Movement: A Lecture by Frederick Douglass, before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann, 1855), 29. 115 Blackwell noted that the man responsible for racist tirades in the newspaper had resigned. Ibid., 382. History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 382. 116 Ibid., 391. 117 Ibid., 397. Blackwell generally resorted to racist arguments in order to advocate for woman suffrage in the South. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 92–93. 118 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 141. About Sojourner Truth’s position, see Painter, Sojourner Truth, 229; Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, 20. 119 Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, 17. 120 “35th Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” 3. “I don’t want a Southern reconstruction which shall put 2,000,000 black women into the supreme power of 2,000,000 black men,” Foster pleaded at another meeting, using Stanton and Anthony’s favorite racist argument. “38th Annual Meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 13, 1868, 1. 121 “36th Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National AntiSlavery Standard, May 22, 1869. 122 Jones, All Bound Up Together, 141. As mentioned by Leigh Fought, “Black women’s critique of their own community was quite different from the blanket condemnation of all black men that fowed from the pages of The Revolution as it resorted to the worst stereotypes.” Fought, Women, 198. 123 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 391. On Harper’s position, see Painter, Sojourner Truth, 224–225, 231; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 86. On her conception of citizenship, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 228–229. More black women, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charlotte Forten Harper, and Sojourner Truth, joined the American Woman Suffrage Association, but Harriet and Hattie Purvis became members of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 42. There lies one of

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Men v. women’s rights the main differences between white women’s and black women’s demand for suffrage. While the former wanted the vote “only for themselves,” black women called for universal suffrage. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 166. History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 383. Ibid., 383. Ibid., 265. Ibid., 265, 267. They added “that woman must lead the way to her own enfranchisement, and work out her own salvation with a hopeful courage and determination that knows no fear nor trembling. She must not put her trust in man in this transition period, since, while regarded as his subject, his inferior, his slave, their interests must be antagonistic.” Ibid., 268. Foster claimed that he “had been in favor of uniting the two questions, woman suffrage and negro suffrage, but since the Society thought otherwise, he thought we should go on and fght out the negro question to the end.” “Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 6, 1869, 1. “Woman Suffrage Convention at Springfeld, Mass.,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 20, 1869, 3. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 191. History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 400. The invitation letter was signed by Stone, Caroline M. Severance, Julia Ward Howe, Higginson, and George H. Vibbert. August 5, 1869, National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, LOC. “First Convention of American Woman Suffrage Association, Cleveland, November 26, 1869,” National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, LOC. Ibid. Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 387. On Beecher’s refusal to take sides in a confict, see Elsmere, Henry Ward Beecher, 262. HWB to ECS, January 22, 1867. Beecher-Stowe family papers, SL. In November 1870, Blackwell wrote that Beecher was not “willing to serve another term tho very kind & cordial.” HBB to Reverend James Freeman Clarke, November 17, 1870, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 238. Cott, Public Vows, 107–108. McFarland was acquitted at his trial. At the time, Indiana was known as the country’s “divorce mill” due to its liberal divorce laws. “The Late Albert D. Richardson Funeral Services—Mr. Beecher Defends Mr. Richardson's Character,” Richmond Whig, December 7, 1869, 1. Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 388. See for instance “A Public Outrage on Religion and Decency,” Richmond Whig, December 7, 1869, 4. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 35. Martha C. Wright to LS, August 22, 1869, GFP/SCSC (emphasis in the original). Although they had accepted to be present, the representatives of the American Woman Suffrage Association rapidly withdrew from the meeting. In November 1870, Blackwell still believed that Tilton, Stanton, and Anthony wanted “to force [the American Woman Suffrage Association] into combination with them.” HBB to Reverend James Freeman Clarke, November 17, 1870, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 237. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 36. Gage did not trust Tilton because of this relationship with Beecher. Matilda Joslyn Gage to Martha C. Wright, March 29, 1870, GFP/SCSC.

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146 SBA to TWH, May 20, 1868, National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, LOC. Speaking about Stone and Blackwell, she ended the letter saying, “They may try to hinder my success but I never theirs” (emphasis in the original). 147 Kerr, Lucy Stone, 144; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 140–141. Chris Dixon however argues that this affair “must be assessed carefully.” Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 231. 148 Martha C. Wright to HBB, January 1, 1870, GFP/SCSC. 149 HBB to ECS, June 8, 1872, National Woman Suffrage Association Collection, LOC. 150 HBB to SBA, September 7, 1872, in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader, 518–519. 151 Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 248–249. 152 Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the BeecherTilton Scandal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7. 153 Tilton and his wife had confded in both Stanton and Anthony. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 145; Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), 259. Woodhull published the story in the newspaper she and her sister had founded in 1870, Woodhull & Clafin’s Weekly. In May 1872, she announced that she was running for the presidential election. She chose Douglass as her running mate but he declined. 154 Cited in Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 414. 155 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 412. Woodhull had divorced her frst husband and remarried with Colonel James Harvey Blood in 1866. Anthony was much more cautious in her support of Woodhull, warning Stanton about her involvement with the controversial fgure. DuBois, The Elizabeth Cady StantonSusan B. Anthony Reader, 105. Woodhull had also helped formulate the New Departure strategy of the movement in the early 1870s, as some female activists started showing up at the polls claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment gave them the right to vote. The strategy culminated in the 1873 Minor v. Happersett Supreme Court decision, which rejected this interpretation. See Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 56–61. 156 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 416. 157 Ibid., 417. In her lecture, Woodhull claimed that it was impossible to reconcile law and love. Victoria C. Woodhull, “And the Truth Shall Make You Free.” A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom (New York: Woodhull, Clafin, & Co., 1871). In August 1873, she delivered a lecture on “marriage-slavery.” Victoria C. Woodhull, The Scarecrows of Sexual Slavery, an oration delivered before ffteen thousand people, at Silver Lake, Mass., Camp Meeting, on Sunday, Aug. 17, 1873, by Victoria Woodhull (New York: Woodhull & Clafin, 1874), 22, 9. In 1871, Tilton published a hagiographic biography of Woodhull, whom he described as a “heroine.” Theodore Tilton, Victoria Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch, Tract n.3, (New York: The Golden Age, 1871), 3, Olympia Brown Papers, SL. Woodhull’s radical denunciation of the marriage institution was not representative of Spiritualists’ more moderate views. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in 19th-Century America (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001 (1989)), 136. 158 The article was in the form of an interview of Woodhull herself. She gave the names of Stanton, Hooker, and women’s rights activist Paulina Wright Davis as her informants. Goldsmith, Other Powers, 336–337. 159 Cott, Public Vows, 125.

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160 Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 89–91. In the last six months of 1874, the New York Times published 105 stories and 37 editorials dealing with the scandal. Laura Hanft Korobkin, Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 57. 161 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 161. 162 Altina L. Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 7. Young men were especially drawn to Beecher’s theology. Ibid., 30–31, 44. In the late 1860s, Tilton struggled with his faith, which estranged him from both his wife and Beecher. Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 225. 163 Isabella Beecher Hooker to John Hooker, November 3, 1872, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, University of Rochester. 164 Waller, Reverend Beecher, 75. 165 Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, From Dawn to Daylight; or, The Simple Story of a Western Home. By a Minister’s Wife (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859), 40. In 1852, Higginson described Beecher’s behavior at home as that of “a sort of great happy child,” adding that it was the way his wife treated him. Higginson, Letters and Journals, 47. 166 Beecher, From Dawn to Daylight, 294. She however wrote about the physical toll of the life led in the West. Ibid., 292. 167 Beecher, “Mr. Beecher as I knew him,” 9. 168 History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 388–389. The resolution was criticized for being untimely by Stone and other activists, who refused to vote on it. 169 Isabella Beecher Hooker to ECS, November 21 [1869], Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers. Stanton had apparently confded to Elizabeth Tilton that “it was her opinion, that when a woman had ceased to bear children she has a perfect right to have intercourse with whomsoever she pleased, for her own personal gratifcation.” Despite her enthusiasm for Woodhull, Hooker was intent on dissociating the woman suffrage movement from free love ideas. Her husband wrote a letter to the editor of a Connecticut newspaper to set the record straight, claiming that Stanton was the only activist in favor of “easy divorce.” John Hooker, “Woman Suffrage and the Marriage Relation,” letter to the editor of the Courant, ca. 1870 (Hartford, Connecticut), Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers. 170 ECS to Victoria Woodhull, June 21, 1871, National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, LOC. 171 Cited in Blackwell, Lucy Stone, 250–251. Elizabeth Tilton was the center of attention at the trial, which took place in the frst months of 1875. Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 97. 172 SBA to Isabella Beecher Hooker, November 16, 1872 (copy), Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers (emphasis in the original). 173 ECS to John Hooker, September 23, 1874, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers. In January 1875, Stanton wrote John Hooker that, “If Mr. Beecher’s innocence demands the sacrifce of the veracity & honor of the noblest women in the country, it is purchased at too great a cost & I for one shall not be silent.” ECS to John Hooker, January 8, 1875, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers. 174 “So far as appears from the papers your meeting met my ideas exactly—it was better than ours in its being more exclusively and effectively political, in its character.” HBB to ECS, September 27, 1872, National Woman Suffrage Association Collection, LOC (emphasis in original).

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175 In September 1874, Blackwell wrote his wife that “[t]his Beecher-Tilton affair [wa]s playing the deuce with woman suffrage in Michigan.” HBB to LS, September 3, 1874, in Wheeler, Loving Warriors, 251. A few years later, in 1877, however, Anthony, Blackwell, and Stone worked together in Colorado, where a referendum on woman suffrage was held. Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 56–59. 176 Gail Bederman defnes “manhood”—the term used in the 19th century to describe the quality of being a man—as “an ideological construct which is constantly being remade.” Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 7. 177 Purvis’s wealth made him one of Garrison’s benefactors. For instance, he contributed one hundred dollars to a fund established for Garrison in 1844. “William Lloyd Garrison, Indenture and Declaration of Trust,” January 1844, GFP/SCSC. 178 Report of the International Council of Women, 342. 179 “Editorial Correspondence by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Revolution, January 28, 1869, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon, 6 volumes (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 2: 205. 180 Robert Purvis, “To the Editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard,” in Robert Purvis, Speeches and Letters (Philadelphia, 1898), 2. Also see Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 261. 181 Robert Purvis, “To the Editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard,” in Purvis, Speeches and Letters, 4. 182 Ibid., 5. 183 “Letter from Robert Purvis, Esq.,” Liberator, September 16, 1853, 147. According to Margaret Hope Bacon, Douglass’s criticisms can be explained by the attacks he had been the target of because of his relation with Julia Griffths. Bacon, But One Race, 126. About the notion of middle-class respectability, see Frank, Life with Father, 153; Summers, Manliness, 8. 184 “Frederick Douglas Vs. Robert Purvis, Wendell Phillips, and Charles L. Remond,” From the Pennsylvania Freeman, Liberator, September 23, 1853, 149. Douglass and Purvis reconciled after the Civil War. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 355. 185 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 212. See the description of Henry Ward Beecher in his wife’s novel, where she writes about his “great earnestness and manliness, with almost womanly delicacy and gentleness.” Beecher, From Dawn to Daylight, 95. 186 The History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 166. 187 “Sermon Preached by Henry Ward Beecher on William Lloyd Garrison, at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, on Sunday, June 1, 1879,” Daily Evening Traveller, June 7, 1879, GFP/SCSC. 188 Caskey, Chariot of Fire, 209; Villard, William Lloyd Garrison, 6–7. For Beecher’s description of his father, see Ellinwood, Autobiographical Reminiscences, 33–34. 189 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Beecher in Petticoats [From the Revolution],” Indianapolis News, August 1, 1870, 1. I want to thank Andrew W. Cohen for pointing me to this article. 190 Clare Sears, “Electric Brilliancy: Cross-Dressing Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.3/4 (Fall-Winter 2008): 170.

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191 Applegate, The Most Famous Man, 212. 192 Ginzberg, “Re-Viewing the First Wave,” 422. The refusal to integrate gender into the Fifteenth Amendment seemed to confrm that political right was what Carole Pateman has called “patriarchal right or sex-right.” Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 1. 193 Martha C. Wright to ECS, December 14, 1870, GFP/SCSC. 194 “Remarks by Susan B. Anthony to the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland, November 23, 1870,” DuBois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Papers, 378.

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Frederick Douglass and Thomas Wentworth Higginson The “back benches” of the women’s rights movement

The 1880s were times of both retrospection and introspection for pioneer reform activists. “The times have changed,” Higginson claimed in 1887, pointing to the “great variety of points of view” present in the women’s rights movement, a probable reference to the split of 1869 and the integration of new generations of activists.1 During that period, “abolitionist reminiscences” were published by abolitionists and their children.2 Between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century, reform activists’ actions were commemorated in eulogies when they died—James Mott in 1868, Charles Lenox Remond in 1873, William Cooper Nell in 1874, Harriet Forten Purvis in 1875, William Lloyd Garrison in 1879, Lucretia Mott in 1880, Stephen S. Foster in 1881, Sojourner Truth in 1883, Wendell Phillips in 1884, Ann Greene Phillips in 1886, and Abby Kelley Foster in 1887. “Death has been very busy during the last few years, in thinning out the ranks of such men,” Douglass noted after Phillips’s death.3 Under the aegis of Stanton and Anthony, women’s rights activists were also intent on writing the history as well as preserving and controlling the memory of the movement. In the 1880s, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage published the frst three volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage, both an archive and a narrative of the American women’s rights movement.4 From March 25 to April 1, 1888, the National Woman Suffrage Association organized the frst meeting of the International Council of Women. The convention was meant to develop an international women’s rights movement in the wake of Stanton and Anthony’s trip to Europe in 1882–1883.5 During the day that was devoted to the “conference of the pioneers,” veterans of the movement addressed the audience, reminiscing about antebellum women’s rights agitation and pondering over the role they had played in it. Now reconciled with Stanton and Anthony, Douglass was present that day.6 After the Civil War, he had received political appointments from the U.S. government, a tribute to his stature and infuence. His wife Anna had died in August 1882 and in January 1884 he had married Helen Pitts, his clerk in the offce of the Recorder of Deeds in Washington, D.C. Pitts was white and the interracial marriage caused yet another controversy. At the

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“conference of the pioneers,” Douglass claimed that men “should take back benches and wrap themselves in silence,” in keeping with many speeches he gave in the 1880s on the topic of women’s rights and men’s place in the fght.7 He was then merely stating the obvious, as the call for the International Council of Women had been signed by women only, and the preamble of its constitution tellingly started with “We, women of the United States.”8 Also a veteran of the abolitionist and women’s rights movements, Higginson (1823–1911) declined the invitation to the convention, but he wrote a letter that was read to the audience. Its tone was optimistic; he recalled the progress made by women in the last decades.9 Although he did not elaborate on men’s role in the movement then, he clearly concurred with Douglass. In Woman and Her Wishes, published in 1853, he had underlined women’s central role in the movement.10 At the time of the International Council of Women, he was a well-known writer, a regular contributor for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of several books. He had been especially prolifc in the feld of women’s rights.11 Like Douglass, he had remarried after his frst wife’s death. He had also become a father for the frst time in 1883, at the age of almost 60. Forty-eight years after the London convention, men’s speeches at the International Council of Women signaled that they had become more marginal voices in the fght for women’s rights. Blackwell might have argued then that the women’s rights movement was “not exclusively a woman’s movement” but he went against the fow of many male and female activists, who believed that gender identities were now central to the organization of the movement.12 Even if they continued to advocate woman’s cause, Higginson and Douglass concurred with this evolution.

Woman’s rights man Higginson Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 22, 1823, Higginson came from prominent families on both his parents’ sides. He was the last child of his father Stephen’s second marriage to Louisa Storrow.13 His father died when he was ten years old and it was his mother who probably had the most decisive infuence on him. In a letter to his fancee, Higginson thus wrote that she was “one of the most fascinating persons” he had ever met—“There are no bounds to my enthusiasm about her,” he claimed with great lucidity.14 As described by one of his contemporaries, Higginson was “emphatically a Cambridge man.”15 His father had worked as a bursar at Harvard, where his sons studied, and participated in the creation of its Divinity School.16 In 1837, Thomas entered Harvard College. Like Phillips before him, he took the rhetoric and oratory classes of Edward Tyrrel Channing. After graduating from college in 1841, he became an assistant teacher at a boys’ school, then a tutor in a rich cousin’s family, where he was introduced to the infuence of the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller as well as members of the Massachusetts utopian experiment Brook

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Farm.17 It was in this familial and intellectual context that Higginson became an abolitionist.18 In 1847, he graduated from Harvard Divinity School and married Mary Channing, with whom he had been engaged for four years. He was then hired as a minister in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he preached abolitionism to the dismay of his parishioners, leading to his resignation in 1848.19 He then became a minister at the Free Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, which, by his own admission, was “composed of radicals of all descriptions and as whole was imbued with strong anti-slavery sentiments” and where he stayed from 1852 to 1858.20 Fifty years later, Higginson described his important experience there as “as a means of development.”21 In Worcester, he was involved in a great number of activities, from the School Committee and the Public Library to the Natural History Society and a gymnastic club.22 In 1858, he resigned from the ministry to start a “literary career,” which he pursued until his death.23 After fghting in the Civil War, Higginson returned to writing and reform, including women’s rights and temperance. He had been an advocate of the “woman question” since before the formal beginning of the women’s rights movement, a commitment he attributed to his mother, who had instilled in him “the love of personal liberty, of religious freedom, and of the equality of the sexes.”24 As early as the 1840s, he wrote letters to his fancee, defending women’s rights and woman suffrage.25 Higginson participated in the women’s rights movement in its early stages. He signed the call for the First National Convention held in Worcester in October 1850. During the split of the late 1860s, he sided with the proponents of the Fifteenth Amendment against Anthony and Stanton and was especially critical of the two women’s decision to ally with Train, a criticism to which Stanton replied harshly in January 1868—“We do care what all good men like you say, but just now the men that will do something to help us are more important,” she wrote him in 1868.26 In August 1869, he signed the call for the formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association, which Anthony went on to describe as the work of “the Higginson, Stone, Blackwell trinity,” which shows that he was central to the project.27 He presided over the founding convention of the organization and was co-editor of the Woman’s Journal for 14 years. Writing was probably Higginson’s main contribution to the movement. In 1859, he wrote Phillips about his love for it but deplored it had curtailed his oratorical skills.28 More than two years later, he described his impatience with reform conventions, “being tired of tongues & addicted to the pen.”29 Between 1853 and 1900, he regularly published speeches as well as collections of essays on women’s rights. He believed that writings were crucial to the construction of feminist consciousness and women’s rights education. In 1853, he had recommended articles and tracts be written and circulated in order to lay out all the arguments in favor of women’s rights.30 In 1854, he suggested to Maria Weston Chapman that the tracts be translated

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into French, or at the very least a notice of their publication be published in the French literary magazine Revue des Deux Mondes—“what a step is gained for anything undertaken in this country, if an echo can be heard from across the water,” he argued.31 Higginson also supported women writers. In 1849, he nominated a woman for a literary club in Boston.32 He famously started working with and had friendly relationships with female writers, including Emily Dickinson.33 In 1884, he published a eulogistic biography of American writer Margaret Fuller.34 Twelve years later, convinced that women’s history was an important tool in the fght for women’s rights, he donated close to 1,000 books “bearing on the general subject of the History of Woman” to the Boston Public Library.35

“With unusual diffdence” The list of guests present at the “conference of the pioneers” that took place on March 31, 1888, as part of the International Council of Women was impressive. It included Stanton, Douglass, Stone, Blackwell, Purvis, Anthony, as well as Mary Grew and Emily Winslow Taylor, who had been delegates at the London convention of 1840, but there is no mention of black women being invited to speak on the occasion, the confrmation that they were active in other contexts. The day started with silence in memory of Lucretia Mott, who had died eight years earlier. Stanton was the frst to address the audience. She reminisced about the London and Seneca Falls conventions, which she had both attended, and she assessed the progress made by the movement since then.36 Douglass then took the foor, “with unusual diffdence” he claimed. For him, the progress made by the women’s rights movement could also be measured in the light of men’s place in it. “There was a time when, perhaps, we men could help a little . . . but now it can afford to dispense with me and all of my sex,” he argued.37 When he compared his commitment to abolitionism with his advocacy of women’s rights, he also appealed to the same principle of disinterestedness that Phillips and Purvis had relied on right after the Civil War.38 A few months later, Douglass also insisted that, in some respects, “this woman suffrage movement is but a continuance of the old anti-slavery movement,” a position that several speakers at the 1888 meeting, including Stone and Purvis, also defended.39 Anthony concurred with Douglass’s view that men were not to be the movement’s main actors and should be relegated to the part of women’s assistants. When she introduced Blackwell, she described him as someone who had “devoted his life aiding his wife in her work for the emancipation of woman,” a double-edged compliment as it also suggested his lesser role.40 Blackwell continued to resist the idea that men were to take a backseat. He justifed his role in the fght for women’s rights by calling it a “movement of women and men for the common interest of all,” an important addition.41 Blackwell, however, was a marginal voice in 1888.

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Men’s changing position does not mean that they stopped being active in the movement. Phillips, who had probably resented the tensions of the late 1860s, turned to other fghts, but most male women’s rights activists who had been involved before the Civil War continued to agitate for women’s rights, and sometimes even more than during the antebellum period.42 Higginson had written essays, books, and speeches about women before 1860, but the bulk of his production dates back to the 1880s. During that decade, he published at least fve pamphlets about women’s rights: Common Sense about Women (1881); The Nonsense of It: Short Answers to Common Objections Against Woman Suffrage (ca. 1881–1887); For Self-Respect and SelfProtection (1887); Unsolved Problems in Woman Suffrage (1887); Women and Men (1887). His renewed interest in the question may be explained by his confdence in his skills as a writer as well as his becoming the father of a girl in 1881. In 1887, he declared that he believed in the cause of woman suffrage because he was “the son of a woman and the husband of a woman and the father of a prospective woman.”43 Douglass also lent his voice to the fght for woman suffrage in the 1870s and 1880s. By 1873, fences had been mended with former adversaries. Addressing the New England affliate of the American Woman Suffrage Association, he counted himself among the “colored men in the country who have not forgotten the rights of others in having received their own rights,” a reference to black men’s enfranchisement with the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment but also accusations that had fared against them right after the Civil War.44 In the 1880s, Higginson and Douglass resorted to several arguments that were consistent with antebellum women’s rights discourses. In 1886, Douglass argued that woman suffrage was rooted in the universality of rights. In the same speech, he made the case for a more effective and balanced government “guided and controlled by the combined wisdom of all the men and all the women.”45 He also claimed on several occasions that only woman could represent herself because she was her own person.46 Higginson used similar arguments in his speeches—“woman needs the ballot for herself, for self-respect on the one side and for self-protection on the other,” he said in 1887.47 But he was also prone to claim that the best argument in favor of woman suffrage was the difference existing between the two sexes. “[I]f woman is a mere duplicate of man, man can represent her,” he conceded, “but if she has traits of her own, absolutely distinct from his, then he cannot represent her, and she should have a voice and a vote of her own.”48 Douglass often mentioned his reticence to speak for women in his speeches on suffrage in the 1880s, insisting that he could contribute “nothing to the force and very little to the volume of argument in favor of the claims” made by them.49 He also emphasized the notion of male privilege by suggesting that men were likely to oppose women’s enfranchisement due to the great benefts they derived from female oppression. Using the war metaphor, he identifed in men “a stubborn determination to hold the fort at all hazards” against women’s claim for equality.50

146 The “back benches” Higginson agreed that even if men could beneft from women’s rights, they were mostly allies in what was essentially women’s fght. “The womansuffrage movement in America, in all its stages and subdivisions, has been the work of woman,” he wrote in 1900. Describing men’s contribution to the movement, he conceded that even if they had done “much of the talking” and writing, a probable allusion to his own production, “the energy, the methods, the unwearied purpose, of the movement” had been women’s only.51 Higginson was among the activists who often noted women’s opposition to their own enfranchisement. In a letter written to Stanton in 1866, he had mentioned that there was a difference between men and women on that point, as, unlike men, “the women otherwise most radical seem[ed] usually indifferent to the suffrage,” which for him limited the impact of the demand for women’s right to vote.52 Twenty years or so later, he once again tackled the issue of women’s indifference or opposition to woman suffrage. Directly addressing women who objected to female enfranchisement, he wrote: you ought to be ashamed of yourself if, not having them, you do not “want” them . . . You have no right to shut yourself within the circle of your own interests, and to say that you do not ‘want’ such rights as these. This was a scathing indictment which did not take into account the multitude of reasons why some women might have opposed women’s enfranchisement or simply might not have considered this demand as a priority.53 Both Higginson and Douglass continued to speak and write in favor of women’s rights after the split of the late 1860s, and they often relied on arguments that activists had been using for almost half a century. The difference between the two men, however, lies in the range of topics that they both addressed. In keeping with the narrowing down of women’s rights, they mostly discussed female enfranchisement. Yet, contrary to Douglass, who seldom digressed from the issue of women’s political rights or addressed women’s equality in more general terms, Higginson tackled a wider range of issues, probably because of his predilection for writing.

Marriages and remarriages “Postwar reaction to turbulence in the institution of marriage” took several forms, from the reaffrmation of its sacred character to the government’s attacks on polygamy.54 While after the Civil War there was an increase in the number of widows and an equal shortage of men to marry due to the confict, Douglass and Higginson both remarried after their frst wives had died.55 The two men’s second marriages were very different from their frst, a possible consequence of their participation in women’s

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rights debates. They had met their frst wives before becoming full-fedged militants and their second unions might have been infuenced by both their activism and age. They also both married women who were 20 years or so their junior. Anna Murray Douglass died in 1882 and Douglass’s remarriage to Helen Pitts a year and a half later was a surprise to everyone, including his friends and relatives. Black minister Francis Grimke recalled that when Douglass asked him to perform the wedding ceremony, there had been “rumors afoat in the community that he was interested in one of two prominent women of the race, and that one or the other, if he ever got married, would be his choice,” a sign that his potential remarriage could have had a political signifcance as it was considered as a possible sign of solidarity with blacks.56 The daughter of abolitionist sympathizers, Pitts was 46 years old, more than 20 years younger than Douglass, but more importantly, at least to relatives and public opinion, she was white. During the Civil War, she had worked for the American Missionary Association, teaching freedmen and women, and in the early 1880s, she had moved to Washington, D.C. and been hired as a copyist by Douglass, who was then Recorder of Deeds in the District of Columbia.57 She and Douglass knew that their wedding would be the object of public conversations, as all aspects of his personal and public life had been before then, and the ceremony was private; only two people were present, besides the bride, the groom, the minister and his wife and two houseguests.58 Interracial marriage was a crucial issue during Reconstruction, leading white supremacists to pass state laws banning it in the South.59 As Douglass’s example shows, however, the prejudice surrounding marrying across the color line was not confned to Southerners or to whites. The news of Douglass’s wedding spread rapidly and the reactions were mixed to say the least. His relatives had not been informed of the union, and some of them expressed their disapproval. So did some of Pitts’s relatives.60 According to Grimke, dissatisfaction with Douglass’s choice of partner was also strong among blacks.61 White female women’s rights activists reacted to the wedding, but they disagreed on the issue.62 Despite her estrangement from Douglass in the late 1860s and the racism surrounding her defense of woman suffrage at the time, Stanton was among those who supported him unconditionally. “To think that you a full-fedged citizen of this republic,” she wrote him a few days after the wedding, “one of the male aristocracy, a sovereign in your own right, who can make & unmake Presidents, Senators, & Congressmen, amend Constitutions, capable of occupying the loftiest position in the gift of the American people, to think that you should unite your future destiny to ‘a woman,’” thus suggesting that she was not ready to judge him for his choice of a partner but also that she was aware of the attacks he and his wife had been the targets of.63 Three months later, Douglass expressed his

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gratitude to her and his resolution not to yield to public opinion. He insisted that he and his wife had followed “the convictions of [their] own minds and hearts in a matter wherein [they] alone were concerned and about which no body has any rights to interfere.”64 Faced with public disapproval, Douglass appealed to principles. Instead of the words “love” and “sentiments,” he chose the term “convictions.” Marrying a white woman was a personal choice but he, of all people, knew that it was a decision with political undertones, a position his wife was also well aware of.65 In a letter written in August 1884 to another female friend of his, Amy Post, he noted that the uproar had subsided but he still resented “the curiosity of the world about [his] domestic relations.”66 He asked: What business has the world with the color of my wife? It wants to know how old she is? How her parents and friends like her marriage? How I courted her? Whether with love or with money? Whether we are happy or miserable now that we have been married seven months, he asked. The list of rhetorical questions is an indication of his annoyance and his wish to protect himself against what he considered as an invasion of privacy, which he had fercely defended throughout the years. He only conceded that he and Helen were very happy and did not have any regrets “yet” about their union.67 In another letter, he appealed to his right to marry whomever he wished, one of the fundamental freedoms of which the enslaved had been deprived.68 On the day Stanton congratulated Douglass, Anthony wrote her to express her disapproval of his wedding and its potential consequences on the woman suffrage movement. She was disappointed that Douglass had married “one of the clerks under him,” which gave the impression that his bride had married “for a home!”69 This remark can be interpreted in different ways. Anthony might have been intent on proclaiming that she believed in marriages between equals but she might also have been spreading yet another rumor about Douglass by suggesting his wife had married him out of interest. More importantly, she wrote Stanton that she did not want what she called “the Douglass question, the intermarriage of the races,” to be dragged to the woman suffrage platform. She was clearly enraged. She denied Pitts had ever been a woman suffrage activist as had been reported by journalists. She also underlined the threat posed by Douglass’s wedding because it “shocked the general feeling of propriety” and she feared it would cast a shadow on woman suffrage activists’ reputation. Two days later, she fnished the letter, having probably heard about Stanton’s support and protesting against “this mad passion business”—“your endorsement will be charged upon me & all the Woman Suffrage Women of the entire nation!”70 Her intense reaction to Douglass’s wedding is reminiscent of her complaints when she heard about female activists’ engagements before the Civil War and the fear she felt of being let down. After the scandals that had damaged

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the reputation of woman suffrage activists in the 1870s, she was also afraid that her work to bring respectability back to the movement would be again destroyed even if it meant endorsing the worst prejudices. Despite their disagreements in the 1850s, Douglass found an unlikely ally in Purvis, who had himself married a white woman in 1878, three years after his frst wife had died.71 In her letter to Stanton, Anthony suggested however that Douglass had not been equally supportive of Purvis’s decision at the time, whether in public or in private—“after all he said of Purvis’ outraging the feelings of his family (for him to go & do the same thing to his)!!,” she exclaimed.72 Purvis’s second wife, Tacie Townsend, had been a Quaker neighbor and a friend of the Purvises. She was also a women’s rights supporter and a poet who published her frst book the year she married Purvis.73 Seven years before, Purvis’s son had married a white woman, which means that, unlike the situation in Douglass’s family, interracial marriage had already been accepted or at least experimented by the Purvises— not to mention the fact that Purvis himself was the child of a relationship across the color line.74 Like Douglass, Higginson experienced remarriage later in life, but with less controversy because he was white and simply because he was not Douglass. His frst wife was Mary Channing, who was born in a prominent New England family. Like the Phillipses, the Channings were Boston Brahmins, but they were also involved in the different reforms of their times, including abolitionism and women’s rights.75 In 1840, Mary Channing had helped form liberal Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s Boston Church of the Disciples, an important infuence on Higginson’s decision to become a minister.76 Both her mother and stepmother had died before she was 12 years old, and she was apparently reluctant to have children because of the loss she had experienced early in life.77 They married in 1847, after Higginson graduated from Divinity School and was hired as a minister at Newburyport. Despite her background, the Higginsons were not committed to reform as a couple. Mary was confned to a wheeled chair, but unlike Ann Greene Phillips, she apparently was not extremely supportive of her husband’s activism.78 Both her condition and his propensity to firt fueled rumors of his infdelity. Higginson was an attractive man who formed close relationships with women.79 In 1871, at a time when Victoria Woodhull was being attacked for being a free lover, Anthony wrote Martha C. Wright that she was aware of “gossip of undue familiarity with persons of the opposite sex” about Higginson and other men.80 After the Civil War, Higginson was close to writer Helen Hunt Jackson, who also lived in Newport and with whom it is claimed he had an affair.81 His ambivalent relationship with his wife, to whom he was committed but whose disease cramped his aspirations, is well evidenced in a letter he wrote to a friend when she died in 1877. “You are one of those whose personal experience has taught you what it is to lose an object of care; how little there seems left to be done, how strange and almost unwelcome the freedom,” he confded then.82

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Higginson remarried in February 1879, and his choice of a partner might have been as surprising as Douglass’s to those who knew him. Mary Thatcher had known the Higginsons. She wrote a little, for which he had congratulated her.83 According to Higginson himself, she was “an old-fashioned girl,” which shows that he did not necessarily look for the same qualities in a wife as in the women’s rights activists and female writers that he worked with and praised in his writings.84 His marriage to Thatcher was different from his frst in that it made a father of him, which had always been his dream. His aspiration was fulflled when his frst daughter Louisa, named after his own mother, was born in January 1880. Reveling in his happiness, he wrote in his diary: “How trivial seem all personal aims and ambitions beside the fact that I am at last the father of a child. Should she die to-morrow she will still be my child somewhere. But she will not die.”85 When the baby passed away after seven weeks, he wrote about his intense pain.86 A second daughter, Margaret, was born in 1881. Aware that he was not a young father and “might not live to see her grow up,” he wrote that his goal was to be “a vivid and tender recollection” for her.87 He was a doting father, who rode the bicycle and played with his daughter and organized her birthdays, a privilege that Douglass did not have with his own children.88 Both Douglass’s and Higginson’s choice of partners after their frst wives died was unexpected for their contemporaries. They were public men who were jealous of their privacy, especially Douglass, whose life had so often been dissected in public.89 The surprise also came from the fact that they did not marry women that public opinion thought suited their public personas. “Only me like yourself—men born in advance of their time, men who saw and comprehended the dignity of human nature, whether under one complexion or another, long before these sunny days—can fully comprehend the signifcance of this appointment and confrmation,” Douglass wrote a friend when he was appointed U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia in 1877, an indication of his sense of responsibility to black communities.90 His marrying a white woman might have been viewed as a disappointment by both blacks and whites and as a betrayal for some. At frst sight, Higginson’s second wife did not seem to correspond to the female ideals that he kept extolling in his women’s rights and literary writings at the time. Mary Thatcher Higginson, however, helped him fulfll domestic aspirations he had been deprived of until then. In 1888, he defned marriage as “a mutual surrender,” in which “the two partners are morally equivalent.”91 In another essay, he used the image of the “copartnership,” reminiscent of Blackwell’s view of the institution, to describe the relationship between two spouses and its “division of labor.”92 Higginson was well aware of the possible interactions between convictions about gender roles and the reality of marriages. In 1864, he asked Ellen Wright, who had just married William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., if her husband, the son of an “eminent reformer,” had “st[ood] the test.” He added that he “must have learned from his mother how to appreciate noble womanhood,” a sign that

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he believed that mothers’ infuence was paramount in the making of men.93 Twenty-four years later, probably drawing from his own experience as an older man, he developed the idea that, with age, men became “dependent” while women were “the central and essential fgure of the household,” which might explain his relationship to a younger woman he felt would provide him with the domestic stability and nurturing he thought he had lacked in his frst marriage.94

“Who and what is woman?” “Who and what is woman?,” Douglass asked in an address on woman suffrage delivered in 1886, the frst of a long list of rhetorical questions supporting his view that all the arguments in favor of male suffrage were equally relevant when it came to women’s enfranchisement.95 But the question “Who and what is woman?” was not only a rhetorical question for Douglass. It was certainly not for Higginson, whose writings show an interest in the question of gender difference, what he also called “the distinctions of sex.”96 In keeping with his discretion about his personal life, Douglass rarely tackled the question of women’s rights and woman suffrage in more than abstract terms, pointing to woman’s equality of rights with man, and her being her own person endowed with moral sense and reason, a constant in his women’s rights rhetoric.97 “Woman is woman. She is herself, and nobody else than herself. Her selfhood is as complete, perfect and absolute as is the selfhood of man,” he maintained speeches after speeches.98 In an undated address, he answered the objection that women’s enfranchisement would cause “strife and division in the family.” His answer shows some reluctance to consider differences between men and women as members of separate groups, to focus instead on individuals’ integrity and autonomy. He advocated conficts of opinions within marriage and highlighted the necessity for spouses to be their own persons for a marriage to be successful, a theory that many woman’s rights men supported. “Who on earth can want to spend his or her days as a simple echo?—a body without concessions or light under a bushel, a talent buried in silence, a piece of intellectual emptiness and social nothingness?,” he asked.99 Unlike Douglass, Higginson seemed intent on addressing the question of gender difference, sometimes espousing the paradoxes linked to the demand for equality in the name of difference.100 He revisited the issue in most of his writings on women’s rights, which shows it was central to him even if he found it diffcult to give more than partial answers. In 1900, he conceded that there was “a foundation for the rather vague item of ‘manliness’ and ‘womanliness’” and that “a difference” existed between the two, but it was elusive, “like the differing perfume of two fowers of the same genus and even of the same species.”101 He also believed that gender was among the many factors that accounted for differences: “Nature . . . has

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a hundred systems of grouping, according to sex, age, race, temperament, training, and so on; and we get but a narrow view of life when we limit our theories to one set of distinctions,” a theory reminiscent of more contemporary analyses of an individual’s multifaceted identities.102 Such a principle implied that, for Higginson, there were no qualities assigned exclusively to men and women.103 This idea had been already advocated more than half a century before by one of Higginson’s favorite writers, Margaret Fuller, in an essay entitled “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” published in the transcendentalist magazine the Dial in 1843. “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,” she had concluded.104 Higginson was a great admirer of Fuller. His and her families had been particularly close.105 He noted that her home was dominated by the father, who was “both father and mother,” while the mother was selfeffacing.106 Higginson thus suggested that she was an exceptional woman in part because of that masculine infuence in her life and the absence of the “fear of woman’s unsexing herself” in her.107 In his writings about Fuller as in his other works, however, Higginson showed his belief that the order of things was for women to be married and have children and that their sphere of action was still primarily the home. In an essay published in 1859, he argued against “the abolition of domestic labor for women” and “outdoor labor for men,” in order to show that woman suffrage would not change assigned gender roles.108 Alluding to Fuller’s romantic disappointment early in her life, he still underlined her aspirations in the private realm, i.e. her desire to have a husband.109 The conclusion of his biography confrms his idea that marriage and maternity provided Fuller with the requisite emotional fulfllment.110 Like many woman’s rights men of his generation, Higginson considered marriage as men’s and women’s natural aspiration and domestic labor as women’s job. Despite this belief that married women’s primary sphere was the home, however, Higginson’s long experience of a childless marriage made him aware of the undue burden placed on women who were not mothers. He refused to “treat women as if they could render no service to their country except by giving it children,” a probable reference to his own situation as well as that of his two sisters, who never married.111 At the center of the question of gender roles, we fnd Higginson’s and Douglass’s preoccupation with female education as a personal and political issue. Douglass had made literacy and education one of the main topics of his frst narrative. In 1845, when his eldest daughter was six years old, he and his wife were confronted with a diffcult decision given the limits imposed on black children’s education in the North at the time. They eventually sent Rosetta to a school in Albany, New York, which shows the value he and Anna placed in their daughter’s training despite the emotional cost it entailed.112 Throughout his life, Douglass’s convictions about gender equality were then tested because of racial discrimination and segregation.

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Education was one of Higginson’s primary concerns. Like Garrison, he was never shy about mentioning his “intense love of children.”113 In the diary in which he recorded his life in the army during the Civil War, he wrote about his “philoprogenitiveness,” a term that was used at the time by phrenologists to describe “the instinctive love of offspring and delight in children.”114 In his journal written during his years in Worcester, he compared himself with “a sentimental school-girl,” because of his need to be loved by children.115 He also praised young girls’ qualities. “Girls are so quick-witted, they have so few distractions compared to boys, and their school constitutes so much larger an interest in their lives,” he wrote in 1873, a few years before his daughters were born.116 This explains the strong sentiments he expressed as a daughter’s father, and later grandfather.117 Higginson’s relationships with young women might have prompted rumors about his infdelities, but he seems to have taken a genuine interest in their education and development. His second wife noted that, in Worcester, he “gathered around him also a remarkable bevy of maidens who studied English poetry with him and for whom he planned a course of Shakespeare readings.”118 Higginson’s correspondence with Ellen Wright, Martha C. Wright’s daughter, who later married William Garrison, Jr., is a good example of his ability to exchange with young women on an equal footing.119 Higginson frequently mentioned female education in his writings about women’s rights. In a paper entitled “Higher Education of Woman” given in 1873, he used the remarkable image of “a woman without a head,” otherwise known as the “Good Woman,” in order to describe women’s unequal situation in terms of educational opportunities at the time.120 In the fght for gender equality, Higginson’s main focus remained both the franchise and education, which, he thought, would turn women into “a visible force.”121 In 1888, the same year as the International Council of Women, he advocated for educators to acknowledge girls’ equal need for “strength of will,” a remark which indicates that he supported the development of the same qualities in women as in men and resonated with his being a father.122 Douglass’s answer to the question “Who and what is woman?” was “Like man,” a position that he defended speeches after speeches. Higginson’s views were probably less consistent. In order to defend woman suffrage, he relied on both woman’s identity with man, which led to the claim of the universality of political rights, and her difference, which justifed her enfranchisement to bring balance to the government and ensure that her interests would be represented.

“Who and what is man?” Discussions about women’s rights and place in society logically raised questions about men’s role. Throughout their addresses and writings about women’s rights, Douglass and Higginson showed similar interest in defnitions of

154 The “back benches” masculinity and the way those interacted with the defense of women’s rights. Douglass never shied away from being called a “woman’s rights man.” In Women and the Alphabet, Higginson associated men’s physical and moral strength with the defense of women’s rights, agreeing with the statement according to which opposition to gender equality was a sign of weakness in men who feared “competition.”123 Both he and Douglass believed that the advocacy of women’s rights made them better and stronger men. At the time, different experiences were believed to be constitutive of men’s identity. In a postbellum context, the war was viewed as a defning element of manhood.124 In the last third of the 19th century, there was a marked shift from a masculinity based on morality and self-control to a “bodily ideal of manhood,” originating in the fear of men’s feminization.125 One of the arguments used by the opponents of woman suffrage was that women did not fght and thus could not qualify for full citizenship, an objection Douglass and Higginson rejected in theory.126 They both claimed that women’s inferior physical strength did not make them less suitable for the vote.127 More than strength, both men continued to place value in courage and moral force, attributes that characterized the women they had worked and lived with.128 Despite their dismissal of war as the basis of enfranchisement, it was however an important experience in Douglass’s and Higginson’s lives. As abolitionists, they both had been confronted with the issue of violence and the use of physical force in order to further their goals but, unlike Garrison, they had refused to commit to nonresistance. In April 1851, Higginson became a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, and, three years later, he participated in an attempt to free former enslaved man Anthony Burns, who had been arrested in Boston under the 1850 Slave Fugitive Act.129 He was also a member of the “Secret Six,” who funded John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.130 Although he knew and met Brown on several occasions, Douglass refused to join the venture. Despite having “little taste for violence,” he however sympathized with the use of force against slavery and even described a slave insurrection in his only fctional writing, The Heroic Slave, published in 1853.131 One of the most memorable scenes in his narrative is his physical confrontation with Covey.132 When the war broke out, most abolitionists, including Douglass and Higginson, publicly welcomed it as the event that would destroy slavery.133 In April 1861, Anthony recorded that she had attended “a very manly speech” about the confict by Douglass.134 Although Douglass did not enlist, he worked for black men’s enrollment into the military.135 After the Emancipation Proclamation was implemented in January 1863, he renewed his efforts, calling for black men to be allowed to fght in the war.136 He believed that participation in the war was evidence that they deserved their rights as citizens, an argument he used during the debates over universal suffrage. This does mean that he believed participation in the war was a prerequisite to be enfranchised but that black men had “deserved well of their country” and showed their loyalty, which had to be recognized through political rights.137

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Higginson also welcomed the war and was convinced of the necessity to participate in it. When the confict broke out, he was asked to enlist but turned down the offer, in part because of his wife’s illness.138 After this decision, he continued to be torn.139 His second wife noted that, during that time, “he continued to study military tactics; took fencing lessons; and before going into active service, had belonged to fve ‘drill clubs,’” which shows that he was determined to enroll sooner or later.140 In October 1861, he wrote Phillips that he “felt more & more the importance of anti-slavery men’s taking part in the war, both for the service they may render on the spot & for the infuence they can only thus gain in the fnal adjustment.”141 In the summer of 1862, he joined the army and in November of the same year, he was promoted to the rank of Colonel and asked to lead the frst black regiment, the First South Carolina Volunteers, an experience he narrated in Army Life in a Black Regiment, published in 1870.142 Higginson wrote about the “thrill of joy” he felt when he enlisted.143 According to his recollections of the months he spent in the army, the homosociality that the war entailed was an aspect that he particularly enjoyed.144 He also expressed a great sense of responsibility as the commanding offcer of a black regiment. One of his early biographers noted that “he was chiefy ‘Colonel’ to the end,” describing “the black soldiers bearing the coffn wrapt in the fag” at his funeral.145 “I did not seek the command of colored troops, but it sought me,” he wrote at the beginning of Army Life in a Black Regiment.146 Although his experience in the army had been important for him, Higginson still claimed in the preface of his popular Young Folks’ History of the United States that he had decided to devote “less space than usual . . . to the events of war, and more to the affairs of peace,” because the latter were the most important accomplishments for a nation.147 This is evidence of the ambivalence he felt for the war despite the fact that it had been a defning experience for him. Much has been written about Higginson’s account of his life as an offcer during the Civil War and especially his ambivalent descriptions of black men. One scene in particular has drawn the attention of critics: Higginson’s voyeuristic and homoerotic account of black soldiers’ bathing and the description of their naked bodies. He wrote in his diary To be sure they often look magnifcently to my gymnasium-trained eye and I always like to observe them when bathing,—such splendid muscular development, set off by that smooth coating of adipose tissue which makes them, like the South-Sea Islanders, appear even more muscular than they are. Their skins are also of fner grain than those of whites.148 While Higginson’s fascination with his soldiers’ bodies is evident throughout the memoir, so is his conviction, often expressed in prejudiced and condescending undertones, that he was witnessing enslaved men’s crucial transformation into soldiers, and ultimately citizens.149

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Douglass’s and Higginson’s physicality originated in different contexts. On the one hand, as an enslaved man, Douglass had had to rely on his physical and mental strength to survive slavery. When he gave his frst lectures as an abolitionist, his presence impressed his audience. As Vincent Woodard notes, Douglass’s power as an orator came from his ability to draw attention simultaneously “away from” and to his body.150 A few decades later, Higginson commented on Douglass’s oratory through a description of his “superb stature” and “distinguished bearing.”151 Oratory fell within what society defned as man’s realm in the 19th century.152 For Higginson, while Phillips remained the best specimen of the male orator, because of his “directness and simplicity,” as well as his ability to present his body to his audience, oratory testifed to Douglass’s both humanity and manhood.153 This was an interpretation that Douglass concurred with, as he wrote that his abolitionism was “based broadly upon [his] manhood.”154 Like the war, oratory could also be conducive to the “gendering of the black man.”155 Higginson, on the other hand, had been a weak child.156 As an adult, however, he was dedicated to physical exercise, which he praised in several essays, including the frst one he ever published, “Saints and Their Bodies.”157 He was a nature enthusiast who loved outdoor activities and sports.158 In the 1880s and 1890s, he published texts critical of Walt Whitman, in which he questioned the poet’s “manliness,” the lack thereof he associated with working-class behavior as well as “the erotic content” of his work. Some commentators have noted that Higginson’s criticism might have been evidence of his homosexuality.159 They were also founded on the new masculine ideal that extolled “manly passions” and “competitive impulses” and that he came to represent.160 After the Civil War, both Higginson and Douglass were made aware of the passage of time. The honors that were heaped upon Douglass then might have contributed to this feeling. In 1879, on the occasion of the unveiling of his bust in Rochester, he reminisced about his long life. “Incidents of the character in my life do much amaze me . . . yet here I am alive and active— and with my race enjoying citizenship in the freest, and prospectively the most powerful nation on the globe,” he exclaimed.161 Becoming a grandfather was also an important event for him, which both flled him with joy and reminded him of his old age. He wrote to his daughter in 1872 I am no longer the strong young man—but the father of grand children. It is in the order of nature that I now begin to favour myself—and have children come to me. It is natural for young people to desire to travel. It is equally natural for old ones to wish to stay at home.162 Higginson’s sense of vulnerability started during the war, when he was discharged because of an injury. “I see in your face . . . the same infuence which has touched all the true soldier faces I have seen, and of which we who stay at home are not unconscious. Fire purifes, but it tries,” one of his friends,

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George William Curtis, wrote after visiting him.163 In July 1864, Higginson voiced his concern about his health, writing Phillips to express his desire to return to the battlefeld.164 His unease was also probably due to the fact that he was no longer living in Worcester, where he had been particularly active and had known a lot of like-minded people. His frst wife had relocated to Newport, Massachusetts during the war, apparently because of her poor health.165 Although Higginson ultimately recovered from his injuries, he was made aware of his older age when his fellow classmates and activists died. “As each one disappears, the whole number shrinks; and it is a question of time, and of a very little time, when all will be gone. There is no discharge in that war,” he wrote, alluding to his interrupted war experience.166 Looking back on their lives, both Douglass and Higginson claimed that their women’s rights activism had been an object of self-gratifcation for them. Higginson concurred with Phillips, who had argued that the women’s rights movement was “the grandest reform yet launched upon the century, as involving the freedom of one-half the human race.”167 When Douglass spoke about his role as a women’s rights activist after the Civil War, it was always with pride.168 Both men’s implication in feminist agitation had been constant but they acknowledged its transformation into a movement for and by women in the late 19th century by presenting themselves as women’s helpmeets.169 Men like Douglass and Higginson could still fnd fulfllment in the defense of women’s rights and most remained women’s rights supporters until the end—the last public meeting attended by Douglass before he died was a women’s rights convention in Washington, D.C.170 They however could not take center stage anymore. By the early 20th century, at a time when the term “feminism” was beginning to be used in the United States, the men who were engaged in feminist activities were mostly members of auxiliary and separate associations, making of the existing national organizations essentially women’s groups.171 The Men’s International Alliance held its frst Congress in London in 1912.172 Male socialist intellectuals were also supportive of women’s emancipation in the 1910s.173 However, suffrage activist Miriam Allen deFord recalled that, in the decade before the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted, her husband refused to march for women’s right to vote, not because he disagreed with it, but because “[h]e thought it would be too embarrassing to be one of the few men [t]here.”174 Another suffragist, Laura Ellsworth Seiler, concurred that, at that time, “[i]t took so much more courage for a man to come out for woman’s suffrage than it did for a woman.”175 In 1890, the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association merged, and the new organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was run by women. The same year, Anthony wrote that she had participated in “good meetings,” but regretted that they should have been “made up of women mainly.” She saw men’s absence as a sign of indifference on their part. “How can

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we make the men feel our enfranchisement any business of theirs?,” she asked.176 Anthony’s remarks are evidence of the ambivalence she felt toward men’s role as women’s rights allies. She was well aware of the necessity for women to be the movement’s leaders and was wary of men’s dominating presence. She was however convinced that women’s rights were also men’s concern and required their support. Anthony’s comments invite us to think about men’s role as feminist allies in the 19th century. The title of this book is “cumbersome allies,” not “bad allies.” Male activists played an important part in the emergence of a women’s rights movement in the United States and continued to infuence the production of feminist discourses throughout the 19th century. They also offered organizational and emotional support when needed. But they were also “cumbersome,” for instance when they used their position as self-styled disinterested actors to patronize women and control the movement’s agenda. In the heat of the debates over the Fifteenth Amendment, Phillips called the women’s rights movement “selfsh” because it was composed of women fghting “for their own rights,” a criticism stemming from his resentment about the attacks he had been the target of.177 Phillips’s comments testify in part to the way male and white privilege and feminist allyship were interrelated in the 19th century. They show that his performance of “disinterestedness” after the Civil War served as an argument of authority, which originated in his position as a wealthy white man. Male privilege in relation to women’s rights advocacy took many forms. Its interaction with situations and experiences of exploitation and discrimination also shaped the way “woman’s rights men” like Douglass articulated their feminist activism with other reforms. Men’s allyship was also informed by their personal relationships. Marriages and friendships were sites where feminist ideas emerged and were transformed. Such discourses were the result of conversations and practices that took place in the domestic and public spheres. The study of men’s feminist activism helps us think about the crucial role played by the voices of invisibilized women such as Anna Murray Douglass in the formation of women’s rights ideas. It also provides one explanation for the way U.S. feminism has been historically defned as a white women’s movement to the detriment of black women and women of color in general. The integration of women into abolitionist organizations at the end of the 1830s was a double-edged sword. It allowed women to be on an equal footing with men and gave some of them, mostly white women, opportunities. It also deprived others of voices and means of empowerment, which they had to fnd for themselves elsewhere, ultimately making interracial feminist work a more distant prospect.

Notes 1 Higginson, “For Self-Respect,” 1. In the same speech, he argued that men had “feebler voices” in the movement. 2 The goal of these “abolitionist reminiscences” was “to set the historical record straight but also to draw attention to the new racial reign of terror in the

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post-war South.” Manisha Sinha, “Memory as History, Memory as Activism: The Forgotten Abolitionist Struggle after the Civil War,” Common-Place 2.14 (Winter 2014). Garrison’s children published the frst volume of their father’s biography in 1885. FD, “Wendell Phillips Cast His Lot with the Slave: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on 22 February 1884,” in Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 5: 148. “There is no one left of the old guard who has power to pay the tribute” but a few people, Anthony lamented on hearing about Phillips’s death. SBA to William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., February 2, 1884, GFP/SCSC. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 115. The frst volume (1848–1861) was published in 1881; the second (1861–1876) in 1882; the third (1876–1885) in 1886. The fourth volume (1883–1900) was published by Anthony and Ida Husted Harper in 1902. The ffth and sixth volumes appeared in 1922. On the History of Woman Suffrage, see Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 112–144. May Wright Sewall, comp., Genesis of the International Council of Women and the Story of its Growth, 1888–1893 (1914), 1, International Council of Women Records, SCSC. An International Congress on Women’s Rights had taken place in Paris in 1878. Convened 40 years after the Seneca Falls convention, the International Council of Women “also announced a fully mature origins myth and served as a rehearsal for [the] reunion” of the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association, which was effective in 1890. Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 146. On the constitution of an international feminist movement at the turn of the 20th century, see Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). In 1870, Douglass took control of the newspaper The New Era, renamed The New National Era, which supported woman suffrage. S. Jay Walker, “Frederick Douglass and Woman Suffrage,” The Black Scholar 4.6/7 (1973): 30. Black women such as Mary Ann Shadd contributed to the publication. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 28–29. In 1872, Douglass published the letter of white suffrage activist Mary Olney Brown, who asked black men to support black women’s enfranchisement. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 40–41. Despite mending fences with white suffragists, Douglass addressed prejudices against blacks among white suffrage activists at the convention of the NAWSA in 1878 and Anthony asked him not to attend the NAWSA meeting in Atlanta in 1894. Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 110–111. Report of the International Council of Women, 327. Sewall, Genesis, 8, 16. Douglass had been on the committee of arrangements of the 30th anniversary meeting of the Seneca Falls convention. Quarles, “Frederick Douglass,” 43. Report of the International Council of Women, 367. Higginson, Woman and Her Wishes. On Higginson’s essays, see “What Higginson wrote,” Boston Transcript, May 17, 1911, Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers, AAS. The Atlantic Monthly was a magazine of literature founded in 1857. Report of the International Council of Women, 335. Stephen Higginson was a spendthrift. Storrow was his children’s governess. She married him when she was 19 and had ten children with him. Wineapple, White Heat, 18, 19. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 56. His mother died in 1864. Higginson’s second wife also claimed that another important female fgure of his childhood was his mother’s sister. Ibid., 5–6.

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15 Edwin Mead, “Thomas Wentworth Higginson,” New England Magazine 21 (February 1900), 400. 16 Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric, 45–46. 17 Wineapple, White Heat, 21–22. For a description of his cousin’s circle of acquaintances, see TWH to Mr. Rossiter, February 3, 1911, TWH Papers, AAS. 18 His brother published an antislavery book, Remarks on Slavery and Emancipation in 1834. His mother also told him the story of her encounter with an enslaved man on a trip to Virginia, which made a great impression on him. Wineapple, White Heat, 24, 26. 19 Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric, 70–71. In 1848, he accepted the nomination of the Free Soil Party for Congress. 20 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 115. 21 TWH to Alfred E. Roe, November 12, 1903, TWH Papers, AAS. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. In 1858, he published his frst essay entitled “Saints and Their Bodies” in the Atlantic Monthly. During his tenure on the School Committee, he was instrumental in raising the female teachers’ wages. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 123. 24 Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 7. 25 Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 73. 26 ECS to TWH, January 13, 1868, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 126–127 (emphasis in the original). 27 SBA to Lepha Johnson Canfeld, Rochester, January 2, 1871, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 2: 398. Higginson had defended black women’s right to vote against Phillips at the 1867 annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 95–96. 28 TWH to WP, May 26, 1859, WPP. 29 TWH to Ellen Wright, October 3, 1861, GFP/SCSC. 30 History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 131–133. 31 Higginson suggested to translate Parker’s sermon, his own “Woman and Her Wishes,” or Stanton’s Appeal to the New York Legislature. TWH to Maria Weston Chapman, November 30, 1854, BPL. The Revue des Deux Mondes was founded in 1829. 32 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 92. 33 On his relationship with Emily Dickinson, see Brenda Wineapple, White Heat. 34 TWH, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Houghton, Miffin and Company, 1884). 35 “Catalogue of the Galatea Collection of Books Relating to the History of Woman in the Public Library of the City of Boston” (Boston: Published by the Trustees, 1898), 5. On Higginson’s support of women writers and of their place in American literary history, see Helene Quanquin, “Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Women’s History,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 137 (2013): 38–50. 36 Report of the International Council of Women, 325. 37 Ibid., 327. 38 Ibid., 329. 39 FD, “I Am a Radical Woman Suffrage Man: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 28 May, 1888,” Woman’s Journal, 1888, in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 4: 381. Stone noted that “[w]omen who heard the plea of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips for equal human rights, saw that the argument applied to women no less

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43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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than to the slaves,” Report of the International Council of Women, 331. Purvis also pointed out the similarities that existed between the two movements. Ibid., 343. Gage recalled that she had been “trained in the antislavery ranks,” which had logically led her to advocate women’s rights. Ibid., 347. Report of the International Council of Women, 335 (emphasis added). Ibid. (emphasis added). Phillips got involved in the labor movement after the Civil War. On his labor activism, see Peter Wirzbicki, “Wendell Phillips and Transatlantic Radicalism: Democracy, Capitalism, and the American Labor Movement,” in Wendell Phillips: Social Justice, 155–180. Higginson, “For Self-Respect,” 3. FD, “Nobody Can Be Represented by Anybody Else: An Address delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 15 December 1873,” Woman’s Journal, December 20, 1873, in Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 4: 96. In this remark, he also suggested that some black men had indeed “forgotten” women’s enfranchisement after getting the right to vote. FD, “Woman Suffrage: Address at Tremont Temple, Boston, May 24, 1886,” 8, 11, FD Papers, LOC. FD, “The Greatest Revolution The World Has Yet Seen: An Address Delivered in Providence, RI, on December 3, 1884,” Woman’s Journal, December 13, 1884, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, 5: 169; Frederick Douglass, “I Am a Radical Woman Suffrage Man,” 387. Higginson, “For Self-Respect,” 3. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 62. Frederick Douglass, “Woman Suffrage: Address at Tremont Temple, Boston, May 24, 1886,” 1. Ibid., 6. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 278–279. TWH to ECS, December 22, 1866, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 2: 10–11. TWH, The Nonsense of It: Short Answers to Common Objections against Woman Suffrage (Boston: Woman’s Journal Offce; American Woman Suffrage Association, ca. 1881–1887), 1. Cott, Public Vows, 105. Ibid., 78–79. Francis J. Grimke, “The Second Marriage of Frederick Douglass,” The Journal of Negro History 19.3 (July 1934): 324. Fought, Women, 233–240. The only two people who were invited to the wedding were Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce and his wife. Fought, Women, 229. Bruce was the Senator of Mississippi from 1775 to 1881. Born with slave status, he was his enslaver’s son. Cott, Public Vows, 99. Fought, Women, 245–247. Douglass’s sons contested his will when he died. “Will of Frederick Douglass,” New York Times, March 30, 1895; “Denial by Frederick Douglass’s Sons,” New York Times, March 8, 1895. “The colored people, generally, did not approve of his marriage to a white woman. They said it was showing contempt for the women of his race; and that he had married only a common, poor white woman,” Grimke recalled. Grimke, “The Second Marriage,” 325. Ida B. Wells defended Douglass’s union because of his unwavering commitment to blacks’ rights. Ross, Manning the Race, 127.

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75 76 77 78

79 80

The “back benches” ECS to FD, June 27, 1884, ECS Papers, LOC (emphasis in original). FD to ECS, May 30, 1884, ECS Papers, LOC. Fought, Women, 242. FD to Amy Kirby Post, August 27, 1884, in James O. Horton, “‘What Business Has the World with the Color of My Wife?’ A Letter from Frederick Douglass,” OAH Magazine of History 19.1 (January 2005): 53. Amy Post and her husband Isaac were active abolitionists and women’s rights advocates. On Amy’s life as a radical reformer, see Nancy A. Hewitt, Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018). FD to Amy Kirby Post, August 27, 1884, in Horton, “What Business Has the World,” 53. “I have no apology to make for my marriage. Love and mutual agreement between a free man and a free woman need not ask pardon of any body for marrying. In matters of this kind the world has a good chance to mind its own business,” Douglass claimed. FD to Mrs. W.H. Williams, March 18, 1884, FD Papers, University of Rochester. About Douglass’s marriage with Pitts, see for instance Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, 254. Anthony added: “It has no place on our platform, any more than the question of no marriage at all—or of polygamy, and so far as I can prevent it—it shall not be brought there.” SBA to ECS, January 27, 1884, SBA Papers, University of Rochester (emphasis in the original). She also advised Stanton, a little too late apparently, “not to congratulate him by letter.” SBA to ECS, January 27, 1884, SBA Papers, University of Rochester (emphasis in original). Stanton was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association at the time. Anthony compared Douglass’s union with “the ten thousand other foolish, impulsive marriages!” Bacon, But One Race, 187. Harriet died on June 11, 1875. SBA to ECS, January 27, 1884, SBA Papers, University of Rochester. Bacon, But One Race, 187. As noted by Bacon, she published it under her birth name but signed the preface “T.T. Purvis.” Tacy Townsend, “Preface,” Abi Meredith (Philadelphia: Friends Books Association, 1878). Purvis and Townsend married in a Quaker ceremony. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 356. Charles Purvis married Ann Hathaway, a teacher and an activist. Later on, they sent their daughter to a white school, which caused uproar in the black community in Washington, D.C., where they lived. Bacon, But One Race, 179–180. Charles’s two wives were white. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 360. Despite his family’s overall support, one of Purvis’s sons, Henry, might have reacted badly to his father’s remarriage. He was disinherited by his father. Winch, Ibid., 356, 361. Wineapple, White Heat, 24. She belonged to the family of Higginson and Phillips’s teacher of rhetoric. Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric, 45. Wineapple, White Heat, 25; Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 68. Wineapple, White Heat, 24. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 255. “Why do the insane always come to you!,” she apparently asked him once. Ibid., 93. Like the Phillipses, the Higginsons took a trip to Europe (to the Azores) in 1855 in the hope of helping cure her condition. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 119. After listening to one of his speeches, Phillips reportedly exclaimed “Is it not glorious to be handsome!” Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 96. SBA to Martha Coffn Wright, March 21, 1871, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 2: 425 (emphasis in the original). She also quoted Benjamin Franklin Butler, Matthew Hale Carpenter, and Samuel Clarke Pomeroy.

The “back benches” 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106

107

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Wineapple, White Heat, 186. Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 290 (emphasis in original). Wineapple, White Heat, 225. Cited in Wineapple, White Heat, 224. The newlyweds went to Harpers Ferry, the place of John Brown’s raid, for their honeymoon. Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 294. Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 295. Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 304. Ibid., 372. In 1889, he also wrote about the solitude he felt in her absence, as well as his awareness, as an older man, of the passage of time. Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 321. Douglass’s fame also made it impossible for him to travel discretely. When he embarked for a visit in Europe and Africa with his wife in 1886, he noted that he was being recognized, adding with regret, “Our voyage will thus evidently not be one of solitude.” FD, Frederick Douglass Diary Tour of Europe and Africa. September 15, 1886. Manuscript/Mixed Material. www.loc.gov/ item/mfd.01001/. Also see September 27, 1886, Helen Pitts Douglass Diary. October 5, 1886, 1886. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Accessed on March 11, 2020. www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01002/. FD to Samuel Drummond Porter, March 21, 1877, FD Papers, University of Rochester. TWH, Women and Men (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888), 94. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 143. TWH to Ellen Wright, December 24, 1864, GFP/SCSC. Higginson, Women and Men, 32. Douglass, “Woman Suffrage,” 7. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 80. Douglass, “Woman Suffrage,” 7–8. Frederick Douglass, “Woman Suffrage (Undated Speech),” in Foner, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, 138 (emphasis in the original). Ibid., 143–144. This paradox accounts for the tensions in the feminist movement in the 1910s. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 5. French philosopher Genevieve Fraisse suggests that this paradox is rooted in a misunderstanding of the meaning of the notions of “identity,” “equality,” and “difference.” Genevieve Fraisse, La Différence des sexes (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1996), 120. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 78. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 83. Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” The Dial IV, July 1843. Accessed on August 6, 2016. http://archive. vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/fuller/debate.html . TWH, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Houghton, Miffin and Company, 1884), 1, 4; Gloria Shaw Duclos, “Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Sappho,” The New England Quarterly 57.3 (September 1984): 407. Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 28. Fuller’s father was a prominent lawyer and politician. On the way he educated his daughter, see Mary Kelley, “Introduction,” in The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), xi. TWH, “Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” in James Parton, Horace Greeley, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, J.S.C. Abbott, Prof. James M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E.C. Stanton, etc., Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the

164

108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

126 127

128

129

The “back benches” Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation (Hartford, CN: S.M. Betts and Company, 1868), 195. TWH, “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet,” in Women and the Alphabet, 28. He also claimed that motherhood was “an essential part of [woman’s] duty.” Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 155. Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 233. Ibid., 314. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 166. The decision was especially diffcult for Anna, who would have relied on her daughter for affection and help in domestic tasks. On the circumstances of the decision to send Rosetta to Albany, see Fought, Women, 63–65. Ibid., 120. TWH, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), 32; George Combe, A System of Phrenology (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey and Company, 1851), 115. For Higginson, philoprogenitiveness was “an important organ for an offcer of colored troops.” Higginson, Army Life, 32. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 121. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Higher Education of Woman, a Paper Read by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Before the Social Science Convention, Boston, May 14, 1873 (Boston: Woman’s Journal Offce, 1873), 5–6. In 1850, he wrote a fairy tale for his niece Annie on her birthday. TWH, The Birthday in FairyLand: A Story for Children (Boston: WM. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1850). TWH to Captain John L. Goodell, July 10, 1907, TWH Papers, AAS. Also see Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 394–395. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 95. See for instance TWH to Ellen Wright, December 7, 1856, GFP/SCSC. TWH, Higher Education of Woman, a Paper Read by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, before the Social Science Convention, Boston, May 14, 1873 (Boston: Woman’s Journal Offce, 1873), 3. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 69. Higginson, Women and Men, 58. Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, 47. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 10. E. Anthony Rotundo, “Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American MiddleClass Manhood, 1770–1920,” Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983): 26. Also see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 16–19; Summers, Manliness, 79–80; Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 252. See for instance Higginson, The Nonsense of It, 16. Douglass maintained that “the true basis of Republican government” was, “not sex, nor physical strength, but moral intelligence and the ability of discern right from wrong, good from evil, and the power to choose between them.” Douglass, Life and Times, 480. While Higginson defned his own brand of courage as “boyish,” he saw in Wendell Phillips “highborn chivalrous courage, careless of danger, despising it too utterly to give it a thought.” Cited in Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 201–202. In 1859, he told the story “of an English traveler who, looking out of Mr. Ticknor’s window, pointed out as the only two Americans he had seen who looked like gentlemen, W. Phillips and Edmund Quincy.” Higginson, Letters and Journals, 72 (emphasis in the original). In 1857, he described Phillips as “always graceful and gay, but inwardly sad, under that bright surface.” Ibid., 93. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 112, 147.

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130 The “Secret Six,” who helped fund John Brown’s raid were Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns. 131 FD, The Heroic Slave (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008 [1853]). See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 189. On Douglass’s meeting with Brown in September 1859 and his refusal to be part of the raid, see Blight, Frederick Douglass, 296–309; John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008), 159–161. Despite his refusal, Douglass was threatened with arrest after the Harper’s Ferry events. 132 Douglass, Life and Times, 176–177. 133 Stauffer, Giants, 221. 134 SBA to WP, April 28, 1861, WPP. On the infuence of the Civil War on black manhood, see Jim Cullen, “‘It’s a Man Now’: Gender and African American Men,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 76–91. 135 Douglas R. Egerton, Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 72–77; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 218. He was joined by other black activists such as William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, and Purvis. Douglass’s own sons fought in the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry. On Douglass’s use of “the manly rhetoric of action,” see Jim Cullen, “I’s a Man Now,” 81. About Purvis, see Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 354. 136 FD, “Men of Color, to Arms,!” Broadside, Rochester, March 21, 1863, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 3: 317. 137 FD, “An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (January 1867): 113. 138 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 205. 139 Jonathan Morse, “Emily Dickinson and the Spasmodic School: A Note on Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Esthetics,” The New England Quarterly 50.3 (September 1977): 508. 140 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 205. 141 TWH to WP, October 12, 1861, WPP. The letter was marked “private.” 142 Wineapple, White Heat, 123. It was during the Civil War that he and Emily Dickinson started a correspondence. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 204–205. Higginson’s nephew was a lieutenant in the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Egerton, Thunder, 99. 143 Higginson, Army Life, 4. In his remarks, he compared himself with John Brown. 144 Wineapple, White Heat, 122. On homosociality and the war experience, see Goldstein, War and Gender, 194. The Civil War was also “glorifed” as a key moment in the construction of manhood. E. Anthony Rotundo, “Body and Soul,” 28. Also see Reid Mitchell, “Soldiering, Manhood, and Coming of Age: A Northern Volunteer,” in Divided Houses, 44. Higginson’s position, however, might have been different as he volunteered as an older man. 145 Mead, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 400. 146 Higginson, Army Life, 3. 147 TWH, Young Folks’ History of the United States (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1875), iii–iv. Higginson also opposed the Spanish-American war. Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 43. 148 Higginson, Army Life, 55. Christopher Looby sees Higginson’s narrative as evidence of the way in which “normative white manhood in particular is dependent upon a complex doubleness of attitude toward black manhood,”

166

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150 151 152 153

154 155

156 157 158

159

160 161 162 163 164 165 166

The “back benches” i.e. the feminization of black men as well as their association with “a hyperbolic masculinity.” Christopher Looby, “‘As Thoroughly Black As the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire’: Erotics of Race in Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment,” in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, eds. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 71. Higginson, Army Life, 4. Higginson’s fascination with the male body, however, was not confned to black men. His second wife thus notes that after he left the army because of an injury, he kept “a photograph of the equestrian statue of the Venetian Coleone, and from this picture of the invincible warrior Colonel Higginson felt that he derived strength.” Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 256. Woodard, The Delectable Negro, 100. TWH, American Orators and Oratory (Cleveland: The Western Reserve Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1901), 76. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 58. Higginson, American Orators, 72. Although Garrison was not considered as good an orator as Phillips, Higginson praised his propensity to make “perfectly direct statement[s].” Ibid., 69. Edward Channing, Higginson and Phillips’s teacher at Harvard, “place[d] rhetorical authority within the mind and heart— the character—of the speaker or writer.” Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric, 24. FD to Alphonso Alva Hopkins, November 6, 1883, FD Papers, University of Rochester. Hatt, “Making a Man of Him,” 21. Expressing a similar idea, Jim Cullen notes that “the war realigned gender conventions in the black community; as a result, they more closely resembled those of whites.” Jim Cullen, “I’s a Man Now,” 90. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 10. Gorn, The Manly Art, 130; Wineapple, White Heat, 93. Higginson participated in the construction of “American athleticism.” Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter, 42. Higginson was an entomologist. Frank D. Rashid, “Higginson the Entomologist,” The New England Quarterly 56.4 (December 1983): 577–582. In Worcester, he organized a boat club and was the president of an athletic club. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 138, 139. Robert K. Nelson and Kenneth M. Price, “Debating Manliness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane Kennedy, and the Question of Whitman,” American Literature 73.3 (2001): 497–524. Higginson also criticized Oscar Wilde in the pages of the Woman’s Journal when the author visited the United States in 1882. His attacks might have been prompted by his jealousy and his feelings for his Harvard classmate William Hurlbut. Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter, 71–72. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 222. Also see Summers, Manliness, 9. FD to Samuel Drummond Porter, June 25, 1879, FD Papers, University of Rochester. FD to Rosetta Douglass Sprague, November 4, 1872, FD Papers, University of Rochester. Cited in Higginson, Letters and Journals, 210. Higginson’s vulnerability was no doubt also caused by the experience of death inherent in war. TWH to WP, July 11, 1864, WPP. TWH to Alfred E. Roe, November 12, 1903, TWH Papers, AAS. TWH, The Unforlorn Hope (n.d.), TWH Papers, AAS.

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167 Cited in Mead, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 407. 168 Report of the International Council of Women, 329. 169 This transformation is also linked to what Estelle Freedman identifes as the movement toward “female institution building” in the late 19th century. Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” in Feminism and Community, eds. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 85–104. 170 Walker, “Frederick Douglass and Woman Suffrage,” 24. 171 On the use of the term “feminism” in the United States, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 13–16. 172 Strauss, “Traitors to the Masculine Cause,” 229. The Constitution of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York stated the following aims: “to express approval of the movement of women to attain the full suffrage in this country, and to aid them in their efforts toward that end.” “Constitution of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York,” GFP/SCSC. 173 Anne Ollivier-Mellios, “La Voix de son maître. Les intellectuels radicaux et le mouvement feministe americain dans les annees 1910 : entre avant-gardisme et conservatisme,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 114 (December 2007): 10–24; Cott, The Grounding of American Feminism, 38. 174 Interview with Miriam Allen deFord, “In the Streets,” Sherna Gluck, The Suffragists: From Tea-Parties to Prison, Suffragists Oral History Project (The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1975), 33. 175 Interview with Laura Ellsworth Seiler, “On the Soapbox,” Sherna Gluck, The Suffragists: From Tea-Parties to Prison, Suffragists Oral History Project (The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1975), 34. 176 SBA to Harriet Taylor Upton, March 12, 1890, SBA Papers, University of Rochester (emphasis in the original). Despite the newly found unity of the woman suffrage movement, two years later, she still described Blackwell as “a schemer.” SBA to Mrs. Upton, April 16, 1892, SBA Papers, University of Rochester. 177 Phillips, “The Fifteenth Amendment,” 1.

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170 Bibliography Blackwell, Alice Stone, Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell, Elizabeth Blackwell, Emily Blackwell, Henry Browne Blackwell, Kitty Barry Blackwell, and Lucy Stone. Blackwell Family Papers, 1759−1960. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, 1814–1946 (MSS41210) Frederick Douglass Papers, 1841–1964 (MSS11879) National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA Quincy Family Papers, 1639–1930 (Ms. N-764) William Lloyd Garrison Papers, 1833–1882 (Ms. N-1276) Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA Garrison Family Papers, 1694–2005 International Council of Women Records, 1888–1957, SSC-MS-00352 Women’s Rights Collection Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester Frederick Douglass Papers, A.D74 Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, D.292 Susan Brownell Anthony papers, A.A62 Worcester Historical Museum, Worcester, MA Abby Kelley Foster Papers

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172 Bibliography Garrison, Wendell Phillips. The Benson Family of Newport, Rhode Island. Together with an Appendix Concerning the Benson Families in America of English Descent. New York: Nation Press, 1872. Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Francis Jackson Garrison. William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children. 4 vols. New York: Century Co., 1885–89. Garrison, William Lloyd. Thoughts on African Colonization: Or, an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. Boston, MA: Garrison and Knapp, 1832. –––. Address Delivered in Boston, New-York and Philadelphia, Before the Free People of Color, in April, 1833, by William Lloyd Garrison. New York: Printed for the free people of color, 1833. –––. Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison. Boston, MA: Rev. F. Wallcut, 1852. Fuller, Margaret. “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women.” The Dial IV, July 1843. Gordon, Ann, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Volume II: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866–1873. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Grew, Mary. James Mott: A Biographical Sketch, with Tributes from Wendell Phillips, and Others. New York: William P. Tomlinson, 1868. –––. Diary. Alma Lutz collection, women’s studies manuscript collections from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, series 1, woman’s suffrage. Bethesda, MD: University Press of America, 1990. Grimke, Angelina E. Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimké. Revised by the Author. Boston, MA: Isaac Knapp, 1838. Grimke, Archibald H. A Eulogy of Wendell Phillips, Delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, April 9, 1884. Boston, MA: Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 1884. Grimke, Francis J. “The Second Marriage of Frederick Douglass.” The Journal of Negro History 19.3 (July 1934): 324–329. Hallowell, Anna Davis, ed. James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters. Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin, 1896. Hamilton, Gail. Woman’s Wrongs. Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1868. Helen Eliza Garrison. A Memorial. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1876. Higginson, Mary Thatcher. Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1846–1906. Boston, MA/New York: Houghton Miffin Company, 1921. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. The Birthday in Fairy-Land: A Story for Children. Boston, MA: WM. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1850. –––. Woman and Her Wishes: An Essay. New York: Fowlers and Wells, Publishers, 1853. –––. “Margaret Fuller Ossoli.” In Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation, edited by James Parton, Horace Greeley, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, J.S.C. Abbott, James M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, E.C. Stanton, etc. Hartford, CT: S.M. Betts and Company, 1868. 173–201. –––. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston, MA: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870.

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Index

abolitionism: division of 32, 117, 118; friendships in 18–19; gender-segregated activities in 18; intermingling of the political and the domestic in 23; role of black activists in 16; role of black women in 17, 30; role of women in 17, 18, 21, 22, 158; as site of social mobility 21 abolitionist marriages 23 Alcott, Bronson 142 ally activism 3, 91–92, 158; see also “woman’s rights men” allyship see ally activism American Anti-Slavery Society 16, 19, 22, 23, 28, 30, 112; meetings of 7, 8, 17, 21, 22–23, 29, 109, 50, 110, 111, 118; and woman suffrage 109, 114, 120–121 American Equal Rights Association 109; black women in 119; formation of 114, 116; meetings of 8, 110, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122–123, 125; preamble of 115–116 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society 22–23 American Free Produce Association 28 American Moral Reform Society 112 American Woman Suffrage Association 2, 109–110, 121, 122, 128, 135n123, 157 Anthony, Susan B. 1, 77, 85, 86, 93–94, 109, 110, 115, 121, 122, 143, 149, 154; at AERA meetings 120; ambivalence toward male women’s rights allies 157–158; association with Victoria Woodhull 126; criticism of Frederick Douglass 120, 148–149; criticism of Henry B. Blackwell 122–123;

on “Educated Suffrage” 119; and History of Woman Suffrage 141; at International Council of Women 144; and Kansas 119; racism 116; and universal suffrage 116 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women 112 anti-woman suffrage activism 2 Antoinette Brown see Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Army Life in a Black Regiment 155 Assing, Ottilia 56 Associationism 80, 86 Bederman, Gail 126, 139n176 Beecher, Catharine E. 113–115, 124 Beecher, Eunice Bullard 113, 124–125 Beecher, Harriet Porter 113 Beecher, Henry Ward 5, 6, 8, 110, 125, 128; at AERA meetings 116, 118; and Beecher-Tilton scandal 122, 123; and cross-dressing 127–128; education 113; family 113; friendship with Theodore Tilton 124; and gender norms 126, 127; and “Gospel of Love” 113; infdelities 124; as minister 113; oratory of 113, 127; as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association 8, 122; and slavery 113–114; wedding 113; and women’s rights 114, 115; and McFarland-Richardson scandal 122; marriage 124; see also Beecher-Tilton scandal Beecher, Lyman 113, 127 Beecher, Roxana Foote 113 Beecher-Tilton scandal 122, 123–126; consequences on woman suffrage movement 125–126

Index Benson, George 24 Benson, Helen Eliza see Garrison, Helen Benson Berry, Dana Ramey 56 Black conventions see Colored Conventions black suffrage see woman suffrage Blackwell, Alice Stone 2, 95, 108nn195–196 Blackwell, Anna 80, 85–86 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown 84–86, 89, 100n60 Blackwell, Elizabeth 80, 83 Blackwell, Ellen 80 Blackwell, George 96 Blackwell, Hannah 86 Blackwell, Henry B. 6, 54, 77, 78, 93, 96, 125, 128, 143; affair 123; at AERA meeting 119; and breadwinning 96; common points with Stephen S. Foster 8; courtship of Lucy Stone 7, 80, 82–83, 84, 87, 96; and domestic life 95; family 80; and free love 85–87; interferences 122–123; at International Council of Women 144; and Kansas 119; marriage 78–79; and masculine ideals 95; and men’s role in women’s rights movement 142, 144; racism of 119; speech at Cleveland convention 7, 77, 84, 91; views on marriage 94, 149; wedding 83; and women’s infuence 123; and “woman’s rights” as “man’s rights” 115; as women’s rights activist 80 Blackwell, Marian 80, 83 Blackwell, Samuel, Sr. 80 Blackwell Emily 94 Bloomer costume 93, 104n121 “Boston clique” 16, 21 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society 16, 17, 36n45 “Boston mob” (1835) 16, 19–20, 26, 35n31 Boston Public Library 144 Boston Vigilance Committee 154 Bowen, Lucy Maria 124 Bradburn, George 20, 30, 45n182 Branch, Julia 85, 103n103 Brisbane, Albert 80 Bristol Anti-Slavery Society 52 Brook Farm 80, 98n27, 142–143 Brown, John 44n157, 114, 154 Buffum, James 52

189

Bullard, Eunice see Beecher, Eunice Bullard Burleigh, Charles C. 18–19, 126 Bush, Abigail 62 Chandler, Elizabeth 17 Channing, Edward Tyrrel 20, 142 Channing, Mary see Higginson, Mary Channing Channing, William Henry 84, 85, 115 Chapman, Maria Weston 16, 22, 23, 38n75, 52, 143 Child, Lydia Maria 18, 22, 128 Civil War 114, 129n3, 143, 147, 153, 155, 165n134, 165n144 Coffn, Lucretia see Mott, Lucretia colonization 34n22 the Colored American 30 Colored Conventions 4, 17, 111; work of black women in 11n22 Combe, George 62 Comstock, Anthony 124 “conference of the pioneers” see International Council of Women courtship 54, 81 Covey, Edward 52, 154 Curtis, George William 157 Davis, Edward M. 63–65 Davis, Paulina Wright 81 deFord, Miriam Allen 157 Delany, Martin 60 Dickinson, Anna 119 Dickinson, Emily 144 divorce 77, 85–87, 102n92, 128 domestic abolitionism 26, 55 domestic work: as example of citizenship 11n24; as political work 4 Douglass, Anna Murray 52, 56, 63, 158; conception of marriage 7; and daughter 152; death of 141, 147; as domestic abolitionist 55; and housekeeping 55, 56, 57, 58; illiteracy 55; marriage 53, 55, 57, 112; uprooting 55; wedding 52 Douglass, Frederick 5, 6, 7, 51, 60, 81, 92–93, 122, 141, 153; absences 55; activity in black networks 6; at AERA meetings 119; conception of marriage 7; and defnitions of masculinity 153–154; experience of slavery 6, 52; fame of 163n89; and female education 152; at

190

Index

First National Woman’s Rights Convention 56; frst wedding 52; and gender roles 57; independence of 59; at International Council of Women 9, 141, 142, 144; and joint ownership of marital property 63; marriage with Anna Murray Douglass 53, 55, 57, 112; marriage with Helen Pitts Douglass 146, 148, 149; oratory 156; and passage of time 156; physicality of 156; and privacy 56–57; relationship with Robert Purvis 127, 139n184, 149; rumors of infdelity 56; second wedding 141, 147; and “self-made manhood” 59, 75n125; and split of American Anti-Slavery Society 119; stay in Great Britain (1845–1847) 52, 55, 56; support of women’s rights 49, 53, 61, 65, 66n10; unique position in historiography 6, 13n38; and urgency of black suffrage 119; views on marriage 151; and violence 154; white abolitionists’ bias against 52, 56, 58–59; and woman suffrage 61, 145, 146, 151, 154; and women’s rights activism as gratifcation 157; at women’s rights conventions 1, 7, 49, 60–62; and work 58, 59 Douglass, Helen Pitts 141, 147, 148 Downing, George T. 117–118 DuBois, Ellen Carol 5, 109 Dudden, Faye E. 5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 142 empathy 18, 23, 40n105 Equal Rights Amendment 2 evangelicalism 20 Fell, Leah 24 female infuence 17–18, 27, 117, 123 Female Literary Association 17 female supplicant 18, 36n50 feminism: connections with other movements 5, 157; see also women’s rights; women’s rights movement Fifteenth Amendment: black men v. white women in 8, 118; as confict between women and men 110; consequences on women’s rights movement 128; debates over as continuity of antebellum debates 5, 110; debates over as turning point for U.S. feminism 5, 110; invisibilization

of black women in debates over 8; split over 5, 6, 8, 109 Follen, Charles 21, 47n200 Foreman, P. Gabrielle 49 Forten, Charlotte 16, 111 Forten, James 16, 25, 26, 111, 112 Forten, Margaretta 88, 112 Foster, Abby Kelley 7, 18–19, 45n177, 47n207, 78, 93; courtship by Stephen S. Foster 81–82; criticism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton 118; death of 141; election to executive committee of American Anti-Slavery Society 22, 112; and housekeeping 94; marriage 78, 79, 94; resistance to marriage 78; at temperance meetings (1853) 88, 89; views on marriage 93; wedding 83–84 Foster, Asa 79 Foster, Paulina Wright 94 Foster, Stephen S. 6, 7, 78, 93, 127; and abolitionism 79; at Cleveland convention 91; common points with Henry B. Blackwell 8; courtship of Abby Kelley 81–82; criticism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton 118; as daughter’s primary caretaker 96; death of 141; and domesticity 95; at Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention 116; family 79; on inclusion of woman suffrage in abolitionist platform 109, 117, 118, 120–121; marriage 78, 79, 94; and masculine ideals 95–96; views on marriage 85; wedding 83–84; and “woman question” 79 Fourierism see Associationism Fourteenth Amendment see Fifteenth Amendment Fowler, Lydia F. 88 Free Convention (1858) 85 free love 80, 125 Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania 58, 112 Fremont, John C. 109 Fuller, Margaret 142, 144, 152 Gage, Frances D. 87 Gage, Matilda Joslyn 117, 120, 122 Garnaut, Phoebe 31 Garrison, Ellen Wright 149, 153 Garrison, Frances Lloyd 15, 34n16 Garrison, Helen Benson 7, 18, 25, 31, 55, 56; as “conventional

Index housewife” 25; courtship by William Lloyd Garrison 24; and domestic abolitionism 26; frustration 26; marriage 32; on role as William Lloyd Garrison’s wife 24; wedding 24 Garrison, Wendell Phillips 15, 31, 47n204, 115 Garrison, William Lloyd 1, 5–7, 14, 16, 20, 21, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 77, 80, 92, 111, 127; absences 25, 26, 31; as breadwinner 25; childhood 15; complementarity with Wendell Phillips 15; courtship of Helen Eliza Benson 24; death of 141; and discourse of female infuence 18; and dissolution of American AntiSlavery Society 109; and domesticity 26; education by black activists 16; friendship with Wendell Phillips 15; as husband 24; leadership of abolitionist movement 14; and literature 15; at London convention 30, 31; marriage 24, 27, 32; and nonresistance 22, 154; and printing 15; self-defnitions of masculinity 20, 21; stay in England (1833) 17, 24; support of women in abolitionism 17, 18, 19; wedding 24 Garrison, William Lloyd, Jr. 114, 149, 153 Garrisonians 23, 26 Genius of Universal Emancipation 15, 16 Greeley, Horace 90, 91 Greene Ann see Phillips, Ann Greene Grew, Henry 29, 45n182 Grew, Mary 28, 29, 36n45, 50, 144 Griffths, Julia 56, 59 Grimke, Angelina E. see Weld, Angelina Grimke Grimke, Francis 147 Grimke, Sarah M. 21–22, 43n144 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins 116, 120, 135n123 Hartman, Saidiya V. 40n105, 59 The Heroic Slave 154 Hicks, Elias 50, 51 Hicksites 50, 51 Higginson, Louisa Storrow 142 Higginson, Mary Channing 143, 149 Higginson, Mary Thatcher 149 Higginson, Stephen 142

191

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 6, 77, 78, 83, 86, 91–92, 93; absence from International Council of Women 8, 142; admiration for Margaret Fuller 152; and American Woman Suffrage Association 121, 143; and Civil War 143; and defnitions of masculinity 153–154; and difference between the sexes 145, 150, 151–152; and domestic life 149; family 142; as father 142, 145, 149; and female education 152, 153; on Henry Ward Beecher 138n165; homosexuality 156; life in Worcester 143; literary career 143; and love of children 153; and male privilege 145; on men as allies 146; and men’s “feebler voices” 1, 2, 4, 9; as minister 143; mother’s infuence 142, 143; and passage of time 156, 157; physicality 156; relationships with young women 153; rumors of infdelity 149, 153; second marriage 142, 146, 149, 150; and sense of vulnerability 156–157; support of women writers 144; at temperance meetings (1853) 88–89; views on marriage 149, 152; and war 154, 155; and woman suffrage 145, 154; on women’s opposition to their enfranchisement 146; and women’s rights 143; and women’s rights activism as gratifcation 157; writings on women’s rights 91, 142–145 the History of Woman Suffrage 32n2, 60, 112, 120, 121, 141 Holley, Sally 21 Hooker, Isabella Beecher 123–125 Hunt, Jane 59 Hunt, Richard 59 International Council of Women 8, 9, 112, 126, 141, 142, 144 Jackson, Francis 21, 29, 47n200 Jackson, Helen Hunt 149 Jones, Martha 5, 18, 93 Judah, Harriet 111 Kelley, Abby see Foster, Abby Kelley Kimber, Abby 14 Lane, Hester 22 Lane Theological Seminary 113 Lerner, Gerda 3, 10n15

192

Index

Lewis, Edmonia 134n92 the Liberator 16, 17, 27, 30, 36n56, 56, 57, 127, 129n5 Lincoln, Abraham 109, 129n3 Livermore, Mary 125 Loguen, Jermain 60 London convention see World’s AntiSlavery Convention (1840) Lundy, Benjamin 15 McClintock, Elizabeth 59, 60, 63–65 McClintock, Mary Ann 59 McFarland, Abigail 122 McFarland, Daniel 122 male privilege 10n17, 145, 158 manhood see masculinity marriage: as companionate marriage 93; as controversial issue 8, 84; as end of women’s militant careers 93; interracial marriage 147, 148; as partnership 8, 83, 96; symmetry in 83; as test 24; see also abolitionist marriages; “women’s rights marriages” married women’s property rights 63, 84 Marshall, Susan E. 2 masculinity 4, 20, 52, 58, 59, 126, 127, 153–154; and the domestic sphere 43n145; evolving notions of 128; middle-class masculinity 26; war as defning element of 154 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society 15, 16, 21, 22, 28–30 May, Samuel J. 1, 17, 19, 26, 48, 109, 119 Men’s International Alliance 157 Miller, Jonathan 29 “Mob Convention” see World’s Temperance Convention (1853) Morrison, Toni 39n87 Mott, Adam 50 Mott, James 6, 7, 54, 59, 65, 80, 83, 112, 116; as breadwinner 54, 58; as businessman 50, 58; courtship 54; death of 141; and domesticity 54–55; family 49–50; as Garrisonian 50; and gender egalitarianism 51, 53; and gender roles 57, 58; at London convention 51; marriage 54; as model 54; and Quakerism 50; at Rochester convention 62; at Seneca Falls convention 1, 7, 48–49, 60, 62; and support of wife’s views 51; views on women’s rights 51, 61; wedding 54

Mott, James, Sr. 49–50 Mott, Lucretia 14, 18, 22, 50–52, 54, 59, 64, 65, 80, 86, 116, 117, 122; courtship 54; death of 141, 144; and “Discourse on Woman” 54, 57; and domestic sphere 54–55; as Garrisonian 50; at London convention 29, 51; and gender roles 57; marriage 54; marriage ideal 54; as model 54; and Quakerism 50; at Rochester convention 62; at Seneca Falls convention 62; visibility as reformer 51; wedding 54; and woman suffrage 61 Murray, Anna see Douglass, Anna Murray Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 52 National Woman Suffrage Association 2, 8, 109–110, 121, 123–126, 135n123, 141, 157 Nell, William C. 60, 62, 141 New England Non-Resistance Society 22 New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society 79 Nichols, Mary Gove 85–86 Nine Partners 50, 54 nonresistance 22, 50, 109, 154 the North Star 49, 56, 60, 61 Parker, Theodore 78, 80, 115 Patton, Abby Hutchinson 123 Pease, Elizabeth 31, 42n139, 47n200 Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society 116 Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery 50 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society 16, 18, 28, 112 Philadelphia Vigilance Committee 112 Phillips, Wendell 1, 5–7, 14, 26, 27, 31, 32, 49, 51, 78, 86, 91, 92, 94, 95, 113, 127, 128, 143, 155, 157; and abolitionist movement 15, 16; adoption of Phoebe Garnaut 31; and black suffrage 117; as breadwinner 25; childhood 15; complementarity with William Lloyd Garrison 15; death of 141; and divorce 87, 128; and domestic sphere 27; family 16; and female infuence 117; and Fourteenth Amendment 133n81; friendship with William

Index

193

Remond, Charles Lenox 30–31, 46n193, 60, 88, 118, 127, 141 Remond, Sarah Parker 88, 118 the Revolution 110, 119, 127 Richardson, Albert 122 Richardson, Ellen 52 Rogers, Nathaniel P. 79 Rose, Ernestine L. 92

Lloyd Garrison; as husband 24; on inclusion of woman suffrage in American Anti-Slavery Society platform 109, 114, 116–117, 118; at London convention 28, 30, 46n187; marriage 24, 25, 27, 31; meeting with wife 23–24; as orator 16, 156; as president of the American AntiSlavery Society 109; privilege of 158; self-defnitions of masculinity 20, 21, 89; support of women’s participation in abolitionism 19, 22; wedding 24; as wife’s caretaker 27; and woman suffrage 48; on women’s rights movement 158; at World’s Temperance Convention (1853) 89 Phillips, Ann Greene 7, 15, 16, 19, 28; health 15, 16, 23, 25, 27, 31, 149; adoption of Phoebe Garnaut 31; death of 141; infuence on husband 16; marriage 31; wedding 24 Pillsbury, Parker 43n142, 116 Pitts, Helen see Douglass, Helen Pitts Plymouth Church 113, 114, 124 Porter, Samuel Drummond 59 Post, Amy Kirby 148 Prescod, Samuel Jackman 29–30 Purvis, Harriet Forten 88, 111, 112, 132n77, 135n123, 141 Purvis, Robert 6, 8, 16, 60, 88, 120, 128, 130n24; activism 111–112; at AERA meeting 117; on blacks’ disenfranchisement 111, 126; defense of woman suffrage 112–113, 118, 120; equal rights rhetoric 116; family 111; on father 111; frst marriage 112; and gender norms 126; as gentleman 20–21, 126; identifcation with black race 111; at International Council of Women 144; opposition to Fifteenth Amendment 8, 110; relationship with Frederick Douglass 127, 139n184, 149; relationship with James Forten 111; remarriage 149; as selfess ally 126; and “woman question” 112; work with women 112 Purvis, Tacie Townsend 149 Purvis, William 111

Seiler, Laura Ellsworth 157 Seneca County Courier 60 Smith, Gerrit 62, 92 Smith, James McCune 89 Southwick, Anna 63, 64 Sprague, Rosetta Douglass 55, 152 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 14, 59, 61, 65, 77, 121, 122, 128, 143, 146, 148; and American Equal Rights Association 115–118; association with Victoria Woodhull 126; and Beecher-Tilton scandal 123; on divorce 85, 87; on “Educated Suffrage” 119; and free love 125; at International Council of Women 144; and Kansas 119; on men’s feminism 110; racism 119; and rumors about Henry Ward Beecher 127–128; at Seneca Falls convention 1, 7, 60–61; and support of Douglass 147–148 Stanton, Henry B. 61 Stewart, Maria W. 17 Stone, Lucy 7, 54, 77, 78–80, 87–88, 90, 91, 92–93, 122, 143; at American Equal Rights Association meetings 120; on Beecher-Tilton scandal 125; biography of 2; choice of married name 93–94; claim for autonomy 94; courtship by Henry B. Blackwell 80, 82–83, 84, 87, 96; on divorce 85, 86; fnancial independence 96; on free love 86, 87; at International Council of Women 144; and Kansas 119; marriage 78–79, 94; miscarriage 95; resistance to marriage 78; on single life 84; on Sixteenth Amendment 120; at temperance meetings (1853) 88; views on marriage 83, 93–94; wedding 83; withdrawal from activism 95 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 113, 114, 124

Quakerism: and gender equality 7, 50–51; and pacifsm 58 Quincy, Edmund 62

Tappan, Arthur 22, 25, 113 Tappan, Lewis 22 Taylor, Bayard 126

194

Index

Taylor, Emily Winslow 144 temperance movement 85 Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn 5 Thompson, George 17, 20, 27, 31, 42n138, 46n187 Tilton, Elizabeth 123, 124 Tilton, Theodore 115, 122, 123, 124; friendship with Henry Ward Beecher 124; marriage 124 Train, George Francis 110, 119 Truth, Sojourner 135n123, 141 Union Woman Suffrage Association 122 universal suffrage see woman suffrage Warren, Anne Weston 19 Weld, Angelina Grimke 21–22, 25, 79, 93 Weld, Theodore D. 25, 100n60, 113 Whitman, Walt 156 Whole World’s Temperance Convention 89–90 “woman question” 19, 21–24, 31, 39n92, 80; as “man question” 14, 15; as narrowly framed 32; as personal and political 15 the Woman’s Journal 125–126, 143 “woman’s rights men” 5, 91–92; as allies 1, 3, 23, 65, 88, 89, 158; articulation of women’s rights and personal lives of 4; as “cumbersome allies” 3, 158; defense of women by 19–20; diversity of trajectories of 5; and experience of gender oppression 90; as feminized 4; as ideal male partners 7; as legitimate actors of women’s rights movement 90–92, 96; marginal position of 9; marital arrangements of 4; on men’s responsibility for women’s oppression 92; as “pro-feminist” 10n15 woman suffrage 63, 125, 126, 143, 147, 151, 153; in American AntiSlavery Society platform 109, 114, 120–121; and black suffrage 115, 117, 118, 120; as central demand 77, 84; as conservative demand 101n77; opposition to 2, 114, 154; at Seneca Falls convention 7, 48, 49, 60–61, 77, 84

women’s rights: as autonomous discourse 49; at black associations’ meetings 60; as disinterested and personal 2, 6; as “man’s rights” 2, 8, 92, 110, 115; men against 120; as test 63–65 women’s rights conventions: black women’s participation in 92, 93, 110; and confrontation of ideas 87; Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention (1866) 114, 115, 116, 124; Fifth National Woman’s Rights Convention (1854) 88, 112; First National Woman’s Rights Convention (1850) 56, 77, 79, 80, 143; Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention (1853) 7, 48, 77, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92; men’s participation in 6; as places of chaos 88; Rochester convention (1848) 49, 60, 62–63; Salem convention (1850) 90; Second National Woman’s Rights Convention (1851) 84; Seneca Falls convention (1848) 1, 48, 59–60, 63, 144; Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention (1856) 84, 85, 87, 91–92, 93–94; Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention (1860) 87; Third National Woman’s Rights Convention (1852) 84; as tip of the iceberg 4 “women’s rights marriages” 78 women’s rights movement: as for and by women 2; during Civil War 109; men’s place in 90–92, 128, 157; as white women’s rights movement 5, 8, 11n25, 110; see also women’s rights Woodhull, Victoria 123–126, 137n153, 137n155, 137nn157–158, 149 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention (1840) 7, 20, 27–32, 144; American delegates at 28; invisibilization of black women at 65; British delegates at 28; British female abolitionists at 29; and construction of feminist consciousness 14; memory of 14; and women’s exclusion from proceedings 14, 28, 30 World’s Temperance Convention (1853) 88–89, 115 Wright, Francis 81 Wright, Martha C. 59, 64, 87, 122, 123, 128, 149