Rethinking the Origins of Woman's Rights: Gender and Nineteenth-Century Political Culture

Abstract

How does an idea repeatedly declared unthinkable get raised among a small group of people, launched into public debate and become part of a conversation about the rights and responsibilities of the nation's citizens (p. 166)? That is the question posed by Lori Ginzberg in her intriguing new book on white women, politics, and intellectual life in the antebellum North. Ginzberg's approach to the question is novel. Rather than focusing on radical intellectuals or participants in social movements, she takes as her subject the political convictions of six white women from Jefferson County in upstate New York, who at first glance appear striking in their ordinariness (p. 20). Mostly middle-aged farm wives, the women lived near each other on remote and recently settled land near the St. Lawrence River. They were not wealthy, politically connected, or active in reform organizations. Yet, in August 1846, these ordinary farm women sent a petition to New York's constitutional convention demanding equal, and civil and political rights with men. The petition insisted the state had departed from the true democratic principles upon which all governments must be based by denying to the female portion of the community the right of suffrage and any participation in forming the government and laws under which they live (pp. 2-3). Ginzberg is obviously delighted to have found this petition. For a nineteenth-century historian keenly interested in gender and politics, it provides a remarkable counterpoint to the standard narrative of woman's rights activism in the United States. According to this now well-known story, the muchcelebrated 1848 convention at Seneca Falls represented the birth of woman's rights organizing. Antebellum activists were middle-class white women, many of whom had participated in the abolitionist movement before turning to woman's rights. They struggled to gain the vote for nearly three quarters of a century because of internal splits in the movement as well as the widespread