The history of American feminism—the self-conscious desire to achieve sexual equality—began soon after the Revolution, when women's rights tracts first appeared in print. Citizens of the late eighteenth century might read Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft's treatise on Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) or Judith Sargent Murray's essays in New England magazines. Both authors urged increased independence for women through access to education. The egalitarian spirit that pervaded their works reappeared in many ways over the next two centuries.
During the early nineteenth century, women participated in numerous efforts to improve women's status, defend their interests, and increase their rights. Educators, such as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, and Catharine Beecher, promoted advanced training for women in female academies and seminaries. Thousands of women in the 1830s and 1840s joined moral reform societies, organized to end licentiousness, seduction, and prostitution. Female temperance societies strove to save abused wives and families from drunken spouses. Individual reformers spoke out for women's rights. Scottish radical Frances Wright, a follower of Robert Owen, addressed eastern audiences on women's need for equal education, legal equality, and divorce rights. Another Owenite, Ernestine Rose, campaigned for married women's property rights. Author Margaret Fuller led "conversations" among Boston women devoted to "woman and her rights." Among women in the antebellum North, the "woman question" became a lively issue.
The first women's rights movement emerged in part from women's sense of alliance with one another and their shared discontents. It arose also from their experience in reform, especially antislavery. William Lloyd Garrison's wing of abolition, the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), welcomed women into its ranks and introduced them to politics. Fervent campaigners, such as Philadelphia Quaker Lucretia Mott, Sarah and Angelina Grimké of South Carolina, and Abby Kelley of Massachusetts, served as organizers and lecture agents. But their activism evoked disputes about women's role in public life. Forced to defend their right to speak to audiences of both men and women, the Grimké sisters became advocates of sexual equality. "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own," Angelina Grimké declared in 1836. Younger women in abolitionist circles, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, learned political tactics and absorbed the Garrisonian ideology of human rights.
The first women's rights meeting, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, capitalized on women's antislavery experience. Called by Mott and Stanton, who had met at an 1840 antislavery convention in London, and some Quaker friends, the convention attracted about three hundred women and men. One-third of the participants signed a "Declaration of Sentiments," modeled on the Declaration of Independence and drawn up by Stanton. The declaration denounced the "absolute tyranny" of men and presented resolutions demanding equal rights for women in marriage, education, religion, employment, and political life. This manifesto channeled a diffuse array of grievances into an agenda to change women's lives. The call for the vote, the most controversial resolution, directly challenged male dominance. Unlike the others, which were unanimously adopted, it won approval by a bare majority only after strenuous efforts by Stanton and abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
During the 1850s, the new women's rights movement promoted its broad agenda through annual conventions. Its leaders waged legislative campaigns to attain married women's property rights and worked independently to rouse support. Susan B. Anthony canvassed New York State, organizing meetings and seeking recruits. But limited by its abolitionist affiliation, the movement was unable to expand its small following. During the Civil War, women's rights leaders maintained their antislavery stance. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 made abolition of slavery a Union war goal, they organized the National Women's Loyal League to support the Union war effort, promote the Thirteenth Amendment, and press for woman suffrage.
The immediate postwar years proved a crucial period for women's rights. The controversial issue of black political rights—and debate over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—quickly made woman suffrage the most prominent of women's demands. Women's rights leaders formed the Equal Suffrage Association of 1866 to strive for both black and woman suffrage and joined a referendum campaign on these issues in Kansas in 1867. But in that state, male abolitionist support for woman suffrage dwindled. Alienated from their former allies in the antislavery movement, Stanton and Anthony began to campaign independently. Through their publication Revolution, financed by the eccentric Democrat George Francis Train, they promoted a broad spectrum of women's rights—equal suffrage, equal pay, marriage reform, more liberal divorce laws, and "self-sovereignty." They denounced the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised only black men and which other women's rights leaders endorsed. In 1869, two rival suffrage movements emerged. The New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association (nwsa) led by Stanton and Anthony, accepted only women and opposed the Fifteenth Amendment. The Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association (awsa), which included men, supported black suffrage as a step in the right direction. Among its leaders were Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe.
The new woman suffrage associations followed separate paths for two decades. The nwsa campaigned for a federal woman suffrage amendment, but made no progress. The awsa published the Women's Journal and waged state campaigns, but lost all state referenda. By 1890 only Utah and Wyoming had enfranchised women. Although women had acquired partial voting rights (in local elections or school board elections) in nineteen states, equal suffrage remained elusive. Meanwhile a larger "woman movement" developed. Women's clubs, which started in 1868, multiplied. The clubs promoted self-education through cultural discussions, and after their federation in 1892, turned their attention to civic affairs. Black women's clubs, which also federated in the 1890s, supported racial causes, discussed women's issues, and worked on philanthropic projects. The huge Woman's Christian Temperance Union attracted members by the thousands. Under the leadership of Frances Willard, many members supported woman suffrage. Other women became involved in the campaign for higher education, the establishment of women's colleges, and the promotion of women into the professions.
Although suffragists won no major victories, the growing woman movement provided a potential constituency. The ranks of women activists increased in the Progressive Era with the emergence of new women's organizations devoted to reform. Such endeavors as the settlement movement, the National Consumers League (1899), the Women's Trade Union League (1903), and the women's peace movement abetted the suffrage crusade. By taking part in public affairs, women reformers helped legitimize suffragist claims. Advocates of the ballot had always combined demands for sexual equality (women deserved the vote) with arguments based on sexual difference (women would bring special qualities to politics). During the progressive years, suffragist rhetoric tilted toward an emphasis on the good that women would do for society if enfranchised.
In 1890, the rival women suffrage organizations united in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa) and began the long path toward victory. Under the leadership of Anna Howard Shaw (1904-1915) and Carrie Chapman Catt (1900-1904, 1915-1920), the nawsa ran a propaganda crusade and campaigned in the states. In its final decade, the suffrage movement built up the momentum that had thus far eluded it. By now, the ballot symbolized all the rights for which women had campaigned. During World War I, conflict arose between the nawsa and Alice Paul's more militant National Woman's party, which waged hunger strikes and picketed the White House. In 1919, Congress at last approved woman suffrage and in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by the states.
In the last decade of the suffrage campaign, the word feminism first came into use. Its appearance marked a watershed dividing the long suffrage crusade from modern feminism. During the course of the struggle for suffrage, the ballot had assumed paramount importance, obliterating the once-broad agenda of women's rights. To Susan B. Anthony, suffrage had been "the pivotal right, the one that underlies all other rights." Modern feminists envisioned a new type of emancipation embracing political equality, economic independence, liberation from convention, and changed relations between the sexes. "All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," one adherent explained in 1913. Modern feminism embodied paradoxes. Its supporters stressed, variously, women's equality with men and differences from men. They advocated both individualism and gender solidarity. Similar contradictions had long been evident among feminists, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose Women and Economics (1899) energized turn-of-the-century activists.
With suffrage achieved, the contradictions within feminism led to conflicts among feminists. These conflicts emerged in the 1920s, a high point of feminist activity. The suffrage movement remobilized for future battles. The nawsa became the League of Women Voters, which sought to educate women about politics and maintained a nonpartisan stance. Disputes erupted between the National Woman's party, which proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (era; 1923), and reform-minded activists in the League of Women Voters and other women's organizations, which opposed it. An era, the reformers claimed, would vitiate laws protecting women workers. Adding to the conflict within the movement was the apparent failure of woman suffrage to change politics. Women failed to vote as a bloc, support women candidates, or effect reforms. Passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided funds for maternal and child health clinics, represented the sole legislative triumph of the suffrage movement. Another set of problems was loss of constituency, failure to connect with the next generation, and diversion of feminist energies into careerism or new causes, such as birth control. Finally, feminists of the 1920s might face attacks for trying to dismiss sex differences or, alternately, for dwelling on them and fostering "sex antagonism."
The spirit of social reform dominated women's work in public life during the 1930s. Women who filled important posts in the New Deal—the circle of women around Eleanor Roosevelt—came from the reform-minded wing of the women's movement. Like Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and Mary W. Dewson, head of the Women's Division of the Democratic party, they had experience in settlements, women's clubs, and social welfare, and they opposed the National Woman's party position on an era. Often staunch defenders of women's interests, they described themselves as reformers, not feminists.
The feminist movement reached a low ebb during the 1940s and 1950s. Now aging or retiring, the veterans of the last feminist wave were not replaced by newcomers. Old organizations shrank and vanished or else lost their feminist drive. The remnant of the National Woman's party, the only group still committed to sexual equality, had little influence. World War II undermined women's egalitarian goals. During the war, women won attention as workers in defense industries, but in public life women had little impact on policymaking. The postwar era represented a nadir of feminist history. Characterized by suburbanization, consumerism, and the baby boom, the 1950s constituted a domestic decade. Mass culture emphasized women's family roles, disparaged career women, condemned working mothers, and labeled feminism a form of deviance.
Yet the 1950s saw some important developments that would contribute to the revival of feminism. One was the rapid expansion of higher education. Although the proportion of women among college students fell during the postwar years, their numbers kept rising. This meant a far larger constituency of educated women, always the nucleus of feminist movements. Another major development was the steady, incremental increase of women, notably married women, in the postwar labor force. The rising number of working wives reflected the impact of birth control; women now completed their families at younger ages. It also reflected the postwar growth of the middle class. Among upwardly mobile Americans, the desire to maintain a middle-class lifestyle began to legitimize the two-income family. These developments set the stage for a feminist revival in the 1960s.
Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America (1978); William L. O'Neill, Feminism in America (1969; 2nd ed., 1989).
Nancy Woloch
See also American Woman Suffrage Association; Equal Rights Amendment; League of Women Voters; Married Women's Property Acts; National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman's Party; Seneca Falls Convention; Suffrage; and entries for individual feminists.
