of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, read in part as
follows:
[The pastoral letter] says, “We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem to threaten the f e m a l e c h a r a c t e r with wide-spread and permanent injury. ” I rejoice that they have
called the attention of my sex to this subject, because I believe if
woman investigates it, she will soon discover that danger is impending, though from a totally different source. . . danger from those who, having long held the reins of usurped authority,
are unwilling to permit us to fill that sphere which God created
us to move in, and who have entered into league to crush the
immortal mind of woman. I rejoice, because I am persuaded that
the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted, even by some of those who are now endeavoring to smother the irrepressible desire for
mental and spiritual freedom which glows in the breast of many,
who hardly dare to speak their sentiments. 15
In this confrontation with the Massachusetts clergy, the
women’s rights movement was bom in the United States. Two
women, speaking for all the oppressed of their kind, resolved
to transform society in the name of, and for the sake of,
women. The work of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, so profound in its political analysis of tyranny, so visionary in its revolutionary urgency, so unyielding in its hatred of human
bondage, so radical in its perception of the common oppression of all women and black men, was the fiber from which the cloth of the first feminist movement was woven. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone
— these were the daughters of the Grimke sisters, birthed
through their miraculous labor.
It is often said that all those who advocated women’s rights
were abolitionists, but that not all abolitionists advocated
women’s rights. The bitter truth is that most male abolitionists
opposed women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, a former black
slave who strongly supported women’s rights, described this
opposition in 1848, right after the Seneca Falls Convention:
A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far
more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the
good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of
women. It is, in their estimation, to be guilty of evil thoughts, to
think that woman is entitled to equal rights with man. Many who
have at last made the discovery that the negroes have some rights
as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be
convinced that women are entitled to any.. . . [A] number of
persons of this description actually abandoned the anti-slavery
cause, lest by giving their influence in that direction they might
possibly be giving countenance to the dangerous heresy that
woman, in respect to her rights, stands on an equal footing with
man. In the judgment of such persons, the American slave system, with all its concomitant horrors, is less to be deplored than this wicked idea. 16
In the abolition movement as in most movements for social
change, then and now, women were the committed; women
did the work that had to be done; women were the backbone
and muscle that supported the whole body. But when women
made claims for their own rights, they were dismissed contemptuously, ridiculed, or told that their own struggle was self-indulgent, secondary to the real struggle. As Elizabeth Cady
Stanton wrote in her reminiscences:
During the six years [of the Civil War, when women] held their
own claims in abeyance to those of the slaves. . . and labored to
inspire the people with enthusiasm for [emancipation] they were
highly honored as “wise, loyal, and clearsighted. ” But when the
slaves were emancipated, and these women asked that they
should be recognized in the reconstruction as citizens of the Republic, equal before the law, all these transcendent virtues vanished like dew before the morning sun. And thus it ever is: so long as woman labors to second man’s endeavors and exalt his
sex above her own her virtues pass unquestioned; but when she
dares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives,
manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects
for ridicule and detraction. 17
Women had, as Stanton pointed out, “stood with the negro,
thus far, on equal ground as ostracized classes, outside the
political paradise”; 18 but most male abolitionists, and the
Republican party which came to represent them, had no
commitment to the civil rights of women, let alone to the
radical social transformation demanded by feminists. These
male abolitionists had, instead, a commitment to male dominance, an investment in male privilege, and a sustaining belief in male supremacy.
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment which enfranchised
black men was ratified. In this very amendment, the word
“male” was introduced into the United States Constitution for
the first time—this to insure that the Fourteenth Amendment
would not, even accidentally, license suffrage or other legal
rights for women.
This betrayal was contemptible. Abolitionist men had betrayed the very women whose organizing, lecturing, and pamphleteering had effected abolition. Abolitionist men had
betrayed one half the population of former black slaves—
black women who had no civil existence under the Fourteenth
Amendment. Black men joined with white men to deny black
women civil rights. Abolitionists joined with former slaveholders; former male slaves joined with former slaveholders; white and black men joined together to close male ranks
against white and black women. The consequences for the
black woman were as Sojourner Truth prophesied in 1867,
one year after the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed:
I come from. . . the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be
free indeed.. . . There is a great stir about colored men getting
their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if
colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you
see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will
be just as bad as it was before. 19
If slavery is ever to be destroyed “root and branch, ” women
will have to destroy it. Men, as their history attests, will only
pluck its buds and pick its flowers.
I want to ask you to commit yourselves to your own free