Women and Politics in the Era before Seneca Falls

Abstract

To most Americans of the early nineteenth century, and were mutually exclusive categories. Politics was a public endeavor and as such belonged to the world of men. Women's world, or sphere, to use the widely employed term, was to revolve around the private arena of home and family. Home is [woman's] appropriate sphere of action, wrote Mrs. A. J. Graves in 1841; and whenever she neglects these duties, or goes out of this sphere of action to in any of the great public movements of the day, she is deserting the station which God and nature have assigned to her. If man's duties lie abroad, she reasoned, woman's duties are within the quiet seclusion of the home.' Such sentiments were part of the accepted wisdom of early nineteenth-century life. Even as Graves wrote, the conventional wisdom was under challenge by abolitionists and moral reformers. Indeed, her critique of women who mingle in any of the great public movements of the day clearly referred to them. By speaking out on issues such as slavery, by mobilizing women to lobby for specific legislation, and by engaging in petition campaigns to Congress, activist women had already defied accepted conventions. They had also begun to reconceptualize women's relationship to politics and to question exclusion from voting, which emerged in the 1840s as a key symbol of male political privilege. The debate at the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) over whether women should exercise their sacred right to the elective