Seneca Falls Research Articles

The formation of women`s suffrage in the USA in the XIX-XX centuries

In the scientific article, the author analyzed the issue of the formation of women’s suffrage in the United States of America. The meaning of the “conference to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women” held in Seneca Falls in 1848 is revealed. The role of suffragettes, their complex international connections and strategies for the development of women’s rights are outlined. The achievements of Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Stuart, Francisca Anneke, Sarah Parker Remond, Stanton, Anthony, Ida Wells, Frances Harper, Churchy Terrell, Alice Paul and the social movement of abolitionists in the process of securing women’s rights, including women’s suffrage, are revealed. The importance of the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the International Women’s League, the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the International Council of Women, the National Association of Colored Women, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, and the Inter-American Commission on Women is characterized. The emergence of the internationalism of women’s suffrage, the spread of feminism is analyzed. The events and consequences of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the USA are summarized. In particular, it notes that the transnational legacy of the suffrage movement is evident in the ongoing aspirations of US women for full citizenship today. Then, as now, the struggle for women’s rights is linked to global movements for human rights – for immigrant, racial, labor and feminist justice. The internationalism of the women’s suffrage movement shows us that activists and movements outside the USA, as well as a wide range of diverse international causes, were crucial to the organization of what was considered such a quintessentially American right to vote. The emergence of women’s suffrage reminds us how much we have to learn from feminist struggles around the world. We see the prospects for further scientific research in the study of women’s suffrage in the states of the EU and other countries of the world and in their comparison. A scientific article can be useful for experts, historians and students.

The First Wave of Feminism: A Movement Created by and for Americans

This paper seeks to explore how Stanton, Anthony, and their peers’ social and legal activism led to the ratification of the 19th amendment. The first wave of feminism began in New York in 1848 when a group of abolitionist, feminist women met at the Seneca Falls Convention to discuss the social and civil rights of women in the United States. The first wave of feminism was the pursuit of greater liberty for women through suffrage, the right to an education, and the right to paid labor, without which women were treated as second-class citizens dependent on men and circumstance. The first wave authenticated the United States of America’s founding principle of democracy. Stanton and Anthony laid the foundational agenda for the first feminist movement by publishing speeches, articles, and books that served to educate all Americans on the necessity of women’s rights and their equal place in society. Examining first and secondary sources revealed that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, along with their peers, reconstructed the American identity to encompass women by demanding that Americans recognize the rights of women and their equal place in society through their social and legal activism, which demanded they be given the right to vote, the right to an education, and the right to paid labor.

Speech-Giving and the Woman Suffrage Movement: Exploring Government Databases for Women’s Voices

This article addresses the Woman Suffrage Movement of the 19th century and its continued significance through the exploration of primary source government documents that largely focus on speeches delivered by women, such as Isabella Beecher Hooker, to Congress and current documents that inform these speeches through relevant historical contexts, such as the Equal Rights Amendment. The goal of engaging with these government documents in this way is to encourage increased accessibility of government information relevant to the Woman Suffrage Movement in teaching and learning within libraries and the US K-12 education system.The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States was a major milestone in women’s fight for political, social, and economic equality.1 The movement can be traced back to the mid-19th century when a small group of women began advocating for women’s rights. In 1848, a group of women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. At the convention, they issued a “Declaration of Sentiments,” modeled after the Declaration of Independence, that demanded women’s right to vote and women’s equality with men.2 The document asserted that women had the same rights as men and called for the end of woman’s oppression.

Allison K. Lange. Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

Distinct among the many 2020 suffrage centennial books, Allison Lange’s Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement takes readers away from text-based sources and individual biographies to focus instead on the visual arguments that animated debates over women voting. Picturing Political Power analyzes the “public images” that helped develop a “shared national visual language, composed of symbols and gendered conventions” of what political womanhood should look like (6). Suffragists deployed images to “change minds” before they could “change laws,” just as their opponents relied on a standard stock of mannish women and demise-of-the-family images to uphold the status quo (6). Careful to distinguish between images that female activists fashioned for themselves and those fashioned for them, Lange effectively charts how, from the early 1800s until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, visual tools became increasingly vital in the suffrage arsenal. Suffragists’ early encounters with images of political womanhood put them on the defensive. After the publicity generated by the 1848 women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, newspapers and magazines across the country published cartoons depicting female activists as masculine ogres who threatened the patriarchal family and white supremacy. As the public became familiar with a wider array of female activists, these same mainstream magazines and newspapers began publishing adoring images of former First Lady Martha Washington to demonstrate that the appropriate way for women to engage in politics was indirectly via their husbands. Indeed, as Lange convincingly establishes, for much of the nineteenth century, Washington served as the “model for white feminine political power in the US,” not incidentally because she was dead (26).

"The Vane Sisters" and Women's Suffrage

Abstract: This article explores the possibility that Nabokov's famous example of trick reading and trick writing may be one of his most political pieces of writing as well. Drawing upon the author's insistence on the story's place of composition—Ithaca, New York—the article places the story within the context of the women's rights movement that was born in nearby Seneca Falls. The early women's movement was closely allied with spiritualism, a central topic in Nabokov's story. Combining close reading with an historicizing focus, the article discusses the poetics of the story while simultaneously exploring the relationship between sexual predation and the acute examination of a text. In the end, the article suggests that for all his vaunted non-politicism, Nabokov may have been a vessel possessed and guided by the demands for female "participation," just as his story's narrator was. On the plane of meta-fiction, the Vane sisters manage to vote.

Sustained Change: Design Speculations on the Performance of Fallow-Scapes in Time along the Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor, (ECNHC), New York

The paper explores the potential for adaptive mitigation at the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge, Seneca Falls, NY, USA, and surrounds, focusing on landscapes along the historic Erie Canal that inadvertently lowered the water table and shrunk adjacent wetlands. Now the Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor (ECNHC), Montezuma, NY, USA, the canal, and surrounds lack a clear identity but have the potential to be repurposed as green infrastructure to support climate mitigation through the application of natural climate solutions, namely reforestation. Reforestation has been shown to produce the highest potential performance for carbon sequestration, along with a multitude of co-benefits. However, most studies assessing capacity for climate mitigation using nature-based approaches operate at a high level via remote data and do not test hypotheses at smaller scales that require groundtruthing data, parcel-by parcel approaches, and an understanding of landowner values. The initial research question is: can landscape architecture design research contribute to a higher performance of secondary forests and non-productive farmland (fallow lands) for carbon sequestration, while at the same time activating economic territories and improving their landscape qualities? Comparative cartographies are developed to assess secondary forests, including past and future projections. Fallow lands are examined through mapping at various scales, fieldwork, and informal interviews. We find that farmland along the canal has been abandoned over time due to conditions that make farming difficult, such as periodic flooding, ponding of water due to poorly drained soils, and steep drumlin slopes. These same conditions have contributed to a landscape armature—an assemblage of landscapes including the old canal, barge canal and associated heritage landscapes, abandoned farmlands, and existing forests and wetlands. Secondary forests already existing in the area are high performing in relation to carbon sequestration but may lack climate resilience due to threats such as the emerald ash borer (EAB). Design intervention can help support enhanced sequestration, resilience, and adaptation by introducing unique tree plantings in the form of groves and hedgerows. Sustainability is approached by integrating quantifiable performances of secondary forests with projections of spatial, ecological, and cultural values and the continuing monitoring and management of forests over time. The aim is to build a method to test these lands with designs for tree plantings that reveal their potential for increased carbon sequestration, habitat connectivity, and enriched landscape identity.

Constraining fault architecture and fluid flow using crustal noble gases

Deformational features, such as faults, strongly affect the pathways, rates, and length-scales of fluid flow in sedimentary basins. The hydrologic properties of faults vary greatly, allowing them to exhibit hydrologic behaviors spanning the gamut from open and conductive pathways for fluid flow to closed barriers to fluid flow. As a result, determining the role of faults with respect to fluid flow and their impact on geologic fluid migration throughout the life cycle of sedimentary basins remains challenging. Previous studies interrogate fault behavior using structural characteristics of fault cores and damage zones or the geochemistry of fluid inclusions and mineral veins associated with these features. Here, we evaluate the utility of crustal noble gases as tracers of fluid flow in fault systems by examining the composition of a well-constrained fault system in the Northern Appalachian Basin. The Seneca Stone Thrust fault, located near Seneca Falls, NY, USA, displays ~5 m of offset in the Onondaga Limestone and Marcellus Shale. Significant loss of 4He and 21Ne* near the fault appears to occur prior to basin exhumation, likely resulting from compactive dewatering or hydrocarbon generation and migration. Subsequent cooling shifted fault function from acting as a conduit to acting as a barrier, allowing accumulation of crustal noble gases for extended geologic time (~140 Myr) apparently in a closed-system. We identify significantly lower [4He] and 4He/21Ne* in a discrete zone that includes the fault core and extends ~30 cm into the intensely fractured portion of the fault damage zone as compared to the rest of the fault damage zone (~5 m in width) and other nearby samples from the Marcellus Fm. in the quarry pavement. These results imply that the Seneca Stone Thrust fault has reverted to behaving like a localized conduit in recent geological time. We interpret the discrete zone of extreme 4He loss near the fault plane as evidence of recent focused fluid flow within the fault core at temperatures below 94 °C, possibly within the past ~45,000 years. Our data suggest that crustal noble gases can be used to evaluate the timing of crustal isolation and/or hydraulic communication in fault zones locally in the Marcellus Shale and potentially in other geological settings. Future work can further develop this approach to examine the long-term suitability of geological formations for permanent subsurface storage of CO2, other gases (e.g., H2), or nuclear waste, as well as to determine if various subsurface intervals represent zones of hydrocarbon accumulation and/or loss over geological time.

Echoes of Madame Bovary in Anna Karenina: A Comparative Study

The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway published in 1899 and 1926 respectively are two American novels that question the notions of gender ideology that prevailed at the time. The two novels were presented to the public during a time when there was a significant shift in the perceptions of gender roles in America. The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 followed by the first-wave feminist movement brought into discussion social, civil and religious rights of women. The Awakening revolves around the literal and figurative ‘awakening’ of Edna Pontellier “who refuses to be caged by married and domestic life and claims for herself moral and erotic freedom.” Edna defies the oppressive, traditional conceptions of marriage, motherhood and Victorian mores of the Creole community. The Sun Also Rises presents a redefinition of femininity and fusion of clearly gendered spaces in society through the characterization of Lady Brett Ashley. She comes across as a representation of the female self that underwent transformation from the “passive, private creature to [the] avid individualist in pursuit of new experiences.” Numerous studies have been conducted into the exploration of the struggle for autonomy and sexual freedom of Edna Pontellier and the seductive power of the expatriate Englishwoman, Brett Ashely, over the men around her which qualifies her as an extraordinarily independent woman. Nevertheless, they have failed to underline the defiant nature of the two characters and their attempt at the redefinition of assigned gender roles in the face of hegemonic and masculine forces at work in society and the present study seeks to fill that gap in the current scholarship. The study is a critical textual analysis of the two novels. The postcolonial feminist theories of Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak will be incorporated along with the social theoretical ideologies on power and hegemony by Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser to underline the self-individuation of the two women. Thereby, the intention of this study is to explore the gradual evolution and subversion of ascribed female gender roles in American literature corresponding to the social changes that took place in the late 1800s and mid-1920s, reflected through the progressive roles of Edna and Brett and its relevance to the self-liberation of women across time and space.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott: radical ‘co-adjutors’ in the American women’s rights movement

ABSTRACT Elizabeth Cady Stanton is widely considered to be the founder of the early women’s rights movement in America. She convened the first convention dedicated specifically to women’s rights in America, at Seneca Falls, New York, and she is credited with authoring the Declaration of Sentiments, arguably the founding document of the American women’s rights movement. Stanton’s unwavering insistence on women’s enfranchisement drove much of her efforts. The History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922), which Stanton initiated and coedited, is considered the definitive account of the early movement. For many commentators, the radicalism of Stanton’s claims sets her apart from other reformers. However, I argue that another women’s rights advocate, Lucretia Mott, is as radical as Stanton and, in some respects, perhaps more so. Mott held a comprehensive view of women’s rights that included, but was not limited to, women’s suffrage. Whereas Stanton sought to establish an organized reform movement and craft the official account of its origins, Mott resisted these efforts, instead preferring informal networks of activism and a more inclusive historical understanding. Whereas Stanton has been criticized for her elitist and racist views, Mott’s lifelong commitment to abolitionism and human rights never wavered.

The Power of Testimony: How narrative displaced invention

The Power of TestimonyHow narrative displaced invention Vivian Gornick (bio) Ionce wrote a book about the great nineteenth-century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I did that because I'd become embroiled in an argument over whether the women's movement could produce literature as well as testimony, and I'd gone looking for the poetry in the movement. In Elizabeth Stanton I found it. When that remarkable person sat down to explain women and equality to her government, testimony achieved poetry. She was born in 1815 in upstate New York into a rich and distinguished family of conservatives who opposed slavery but dreaded [End Page 176] social disorder. Elizabeth, alone among the Cadys, was possessed of a radical temperament. When at the age of twenty-four she fell in love with Henry Stanton, an impassioned abolitionist, she married him against her father's will, and the two went blithely off to England to attend the first international anti-slavery congress ever held. To her amazement the congress refused to seat her, as women were to be seen, not heard. Afterward, Stanton would often say that it was here in London in 1840 that for the first time in her life, she realized that in the eyes of the world she was not as she was in her own eyes; she was "only a woman." As an abolitionist she'd been a fellow traveler; now as a budding feminist she discovered that it was this cause that aroused her strongest feelings. She further discovered that for her, feeling strongly was associated—as it had been for men from time immemorial—not with falling in love but with agency: agency come to life through devotion to some large unmet human need that might have gone unaddressed for decades at a time but would not be permanently stilled. In 1848 Stanton, along with Lucretia Mott and three other progressive-minded women, held a two-day convention in Seneca Falls (the town in upstate New York where Stanton lived) calling for social and political equality for women. The event was life-changing. Thereafter she was defined by the intellectual excitement that the cause of women's rights aroused in her. She'd always known she had a good mind, but now, as the years after Seneca Falls wore on and she found herself writing petition after petition on behalf of equality for women, she discovered that she was a visionary thinker, one who saw hidden in the discrimination against her sex something of humanity writ large: its unholy predilection to aggress against itself, to inflict hierarchies of privilege and deprivation on one's fellow beings, to countenance with ease ourselves living contentedly in the light while others flounder and go under, living as they did in the dark. It was as though the human condition itself stood revealed in feminism's reawakened call for social justice. [End Page 177] As the decades wore on—the 1840s giving way to the '50s and '60s—and the feminist cause, long defined by the struggle for suffrage, made no real progress, the movement itself grew increasingly conservative. Stanton, however, remained unrelentingly radical and experienced a growing split between herself and her movement; very soon she found herself isolated. The more alone in the world she felt, the more philosophical she became. In 1892 she stood up to deliver her final public address, a speech that to this day remains one of the great entries in the canon of American personal essays. Its title: "The Solitude of Self." The thing she wanted her audience to consider, she said, was the individuality of a human being: that which Protestant American culture held as a first value. In one sense, the idea of the individual is a declaration of proud independence; in another, it is the recognition that we are, in fact, a world of Robinson Crusoes, all of us alone on the island of life, but none more so than women: No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an...

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones

Reviewed by: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones Monica L. Mercado (bio) Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All By Martha S. Jones. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 352 pages, illustrations, 6" x 9". $30.00 cloth, $16.99 ebook. If women's history was going to have a moment, 2020 was poised to be it. For years, women's history stakeholders looked forward to that year—now memorable for a global pandemic that disrupted even the best laid plans—to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With one sentence ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex"), US suffragists celebrated victory. Women's right to vote, requiring decades of continued action by women of color and their allies to extend and secure the franchise, has long been the subject of political and social histories. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, historian Martha S. Jones rewrites conventional narratives of women's rights in US history by centering the work of Black women, whose expansive politics, by necessity, addressed both sexism and racism. Building on the foundational work of late suffrage historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and published amid a wave of new books, podcasts, documentaries, museum exhibitions, and public sculpture timed to commemorate the "suffrage centennial," Vanguard is a standout volume that deserves our engagement long after 2020 is in the rearview mirror. But Vanguard is not a book about suffrage and suffragists. Those terms, Jones declares in her introduction, are "far too narrow to capture" the scope of Black women's activism (14). As the vanguard, the women Jones profiles are visionaries and volunteers, interrogating the meaning of freedom and demanding it for themselves and their communities. They joined clubs, churches, and conventions—and, as the endnotes underscore, historians still need to do a better job of acknowledging their contributions. The need for such a volume is clear, and it is personal to Jones, a native New Yorker and Johns Hopkins University professor. Movingly, Vanguard begins with a genealogy. Starting with her great-great-grandmother, Jones briefly unpacks the experiences of her ancestors, introducing us to Black women who "built power where [they] could" even when the vote was denied them (3). Club women, church women, educators, community organizers, fundraisers—each promoted a vision of "winning women's power that would serve all humanity" (8). The introduction lays the groundwork for Jones's argument that woman suffrage was only a small piece of Black women's politics; human rights, not women's rights, [End Page 427] might be a more appropriate term for the vanguard's imaginary in the wake of slavery and emancipation. If the chronological scope of Vanguard feels familiar—beginning around the time of the American Revolution and working its way toward the present—the stories Jones chooses to tell make for a fresh reworking of the history survey genre. There are familiar actors here, of course (Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell), as well as a host of new names (women like Troy, New York, speaker Elizabeth Wicks and New York City businesswoman Hester Lane). Most significantly, Jones maps out Black geographies that rarely intersect with formal suffrage organizing. The 1848 Seneca Falls convention is covered in just a handful of paragraphs, for example, enlarged with a few fascinating hints at the lives of free Black women who lived just a stone's throw from the meeting site. Instead, Vanguard takes seriously the middle decades of the nineteenth century as an era of conventions, plural. Black women attended, spoke up, and even lectured to other women and men at a host of women's rights conventions, colored conventions, and religious meetings. The founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) at the turn of the twentieth century solidified many of the networks that Black women forged in this earlier era, and shaped Black politics. "Black men...

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

“The Right of Suffrage Has Been Thrust on Me”: The Reluctant Suffragists of the American West

AbstractFrom nearly the moment the woman's suffrage movement began at Seneca Falls in 1848, anti-suffragists actively campaigned against it, claiming that woman suffrage would only destroy both American politics and the American family. However, despite their best efforts, states in the American West passed equal suffrage laws. Interestingly, once it passed in their states, anti-suffragists in the American West—albeit begrudgingly—exercised their right to vote. As equal suffrage continued to expand, the Western anti-suffragist strategy became the strategy of anti-suffragists everywhere. This essay examines three states that represent pivotal moments in the development of the anti-suffrage movement: Colorado, California, and Oklahoma. Shortly after Colorado passed equal suffrage in 1893 and California passed equal suffrage in 1911, anti-suffragists organized state and national associations. By the time Oklahoma passed its equal suffrage law in 1918, anti-suffragists were not only voting—they were also willing to run for office. Anti-suffragist strategy and rhetoric relied on how suffrage worked in the West, or at least anti-suffrage perceptions of it. In other words, women's suffrage in the West served as a catalyst for the anti-suffragist movement.

The Long History of Feminist Legal Theory

This chapter challenges the conventional idea that feminist legal theory began in the 1970s. The advent of legal feminism is usually placed in the second wave feminist movement, birthed by the political activism of the women’s liberation movement and nurtured by the intellectual leadership of women scholars newly entering legal academia. However, legal feminism has a much longer history, going back more than a century earlier. While the term “feminist” was not used in the United States until the 1910s, the foundations of feminist legal theory were first conceptualized as early as 1848 and developed over the next one hundred and fifty years. This chapter traces that development. It begins with the establishment of the core theoretical precepts of gender and equality grounded in the surprisingly comprehensive philosophy of the nineteenth-century’s first women’s rights movement ignited at Seneca Falls. It then shows how feminist legal theory was popularized and advanced by the political activism of the women’s suffrage movement, even as suffragists limited the feminist consensus to one based on women’s maternalism. Progressive feminism then expanded the theoretical framework of feminist theory in the early twentieth century, encapsulating ideas of global peace, market work, and sex rights of birth control. In the modern era, legal feminists gravitated back to pragmatic and concrete ideas of formal equality, and the associated legalisms of equal rights and equal protection. Yet through each of these periods, the two common imperatives were to place women at the center of analysis and to recognize law as a fundamental agent of change.

Starting from Seneca Falls by Karen Schwabach

Starting from Seneca Falls by Karen Schwabach

Radical Imaginings: The View from Atop a Slippery Slope

Radical Imaginings:The View from Atop a Slippery Slope Lori D. Ginzberg (bio) What were they thinking? As we consider the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment, let us abandon for a moment what we call the wisdom of hindsight and ask what the earliest advocates of woman suffrage imagined would happen once women secured the vote. Most Americans decried the mere suggestion of women's political equality as a radical disruption of God's and nature's plan and warned that votes for women would set the nation on the road to ruin. But what did the first generation of suffragists—who did not, after all, live to see what the consequences of enfranchisement would be—believe woman suffrage would accomplish, and how shocked, pleased, or dismayed would they have been by the results? Declaring women's right to full legal and political equality with men was breathtaking, reflecting a radical reimagining of political, religious, and marital hierarchies. Women's exclusion from the franchise, the earliest advocates of woman suffrage had concluded, was one of the foundations on which women's subordination to men rested; as such, it diminished their very humanity. They did not look to the vote for its practical, strategic, or legislative value. Indeed, as advocates of a moral transformation of society ("ultraists" in the terms of the day), they were deeply ambivalent about the compromises that seeking and using the vote would necessarily entail. "It is with reluctance that I make the demand for the political rights of women," Lucretia Mott asserted, even as she did so.1 To these activists, the demand for woman suffrage was a profound, if largely symbolic, step toward acknowledging the depth of women's subordination and establishing their full membership in the nation itself. Amid the commemorations of the centennial of woman suffrage, we might focus not only on its consequences and results but also on that first generation's hopes and fears and the fraught and twisted paths claims for justice take on their way to legislative results. It is worth recalling that the vote was but a fragment of what early women's rights activists demanded; few of them imagined that it would, or should, come to occupy center stage. If women's exclusion from the ballot was the most contested grievance expressed at Seneca Falls, it was in part because the abolitionists who attended the convention differed over the efficacy and morality of voting. Politics, many of them had long believed, offered little in the way of social transformation; it was best for the moral part of the community to refrain. In the late 1840s and 1850s, their commitment to moral suasion waned in the face of emerging electoral strategies [End Page 14] for reform; some African American abolitionists, desperate for a practical strategy that would actually end slavery, had already rejected it. Clearly times were changing: "No man or woman can be regarded as an entity, as a power in society, who has not a direct agency in governing its results," a Wisconsin legislative committee on woman suffrage declared. "Without a direct voice in molding the spirit of the age, the age will disown us."2 Not everyone, it should be noted, was on board with this shift. As late as 1856, while a Mr. Clark escorted the young African American activist Charlotte Forten home from a "very pleasant evening," she "vainly tried to persuade him that all political action was wrong."3 If it increasingly seemed obvious that lacking the vote was among the barriers to women "molding the spirit of the age"; for many radicals, electoral politics still offered more traps than solutions, compromises to the expansive moral vision that had long infused their approach to social change. But early women's rights supporters recognized exclusion when they saw it. Being denied the vote was insulting. Even if you did not want to vote, even if you did not think that voting accomplished much, the affront confirmed that women were not full and independent citizens of the United States. Indeed, two years before the Seneca Falls convention, six women in Jefferson County, New York, had petitioned their state's constitutional convention to grant women...

Letter from the Editors

Letter from the Editors Robert Chiles, Devin R. Lander, Jennifer Lemak, and Aaron Noble New York State has always played a central role in American history. The pages of this journal are filled with New Yorkers whose creations and concepts, innovations, activism—and at times, errors—have changed the world. In fact, it was here in the Empire State that the women's rights movement was born in Seneca Falls in 1848. This year marks the centennial anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Historians recognize that this proved a hollow promise, as many African American women (and men) would not have the real opportunity to vote until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. However, the Nineteenth Amendment was a fundamental step in the right direction, and it would not have happened without New York. Voter approval of the New York State women's suffrage referendum in 1917 was the national movement's first electoral win east of the Mississippi River. At a moment when the Empire State's political influence was approaching its zenith—including forty-three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and forty-five electoral college votes—the New York suffrage victory semaphored the approaching national triumph; and beginning in August 1920, women's suffrage was constitutionally guaranteed. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the planned celebrations in honor of the suffrage centennial have been curtailed or cancelled. However, by the time you receive this issue there will be a new statue in Central Park honoring women's rights pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth—New Yorkers all. This is the first statue in the park to depict real women. Other statues are in the works elsewhere in the state memorializing Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (Brooklyn), as well as one in Seneca Falls depicting Sojourner Truth, Quaker and early activist Marth Coffin Wright, a Seneca Woman (Laura Cornelius Kellogg), and the abolitionist and women's rights activist Harriet Tubman. At a moment of intense public debate about statues and historical memory, the unveiling of these monuments is a crucial step toward a more realistic presentation of our state's past, for even in 2020, women's representation in history still lags far behind that of men. [End Page vi] In honor of the suffrage centennial, this issue of New York History celebrates new historical research about the women's movement produced by women historians. Susan Goodier's article chronicles the African American activist Louisa Jacobs and the challenge of racism within the women's movement. Karen Pastorello's article discusses the variety of ways religion was used in the New York women's suffrage movement. Shellie Clark's article investigates gender and marriage roles in the nineteenth century through the lives of New Yorkers William Henry and Frances Seward. Lastly, our features (Artifact NY, Community NY, and Teach NY) all reveal dynamic ways the suffrage movement's history is being presented to the public throughout the Empire State. As we celebrate the long struggle of women's suffrage in New York State and across the nation, let us not forget the most important gift these women and men bestowed upon us—the right to vote. Be sure to exercise this right in November. Excelsior! The Editors [End Page vii] Copyright © 2020–2021 New York History

Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt

Reviewed by: Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt Bruce Dorsey (bio) Keywords Amy Kirby Post, antebellum reform, reform movements, women's rights, abolition, social justice Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. By Nancy A. Hewitt. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 440. Cloth, $39.95.) Histories of antebellum reform keep rolling off the presses with no signs of exhausting our interest or the range of possible interpretations. There are just too many profound and resonant issues and too many colorful characters to take our eyes off these reformers. Typically these histories fall into two groups: either monographs about specific social movements or biographies of eminent reformers. Nancy Hewitt's eagerly awaited biography of Amy Kirby Post illustrates that focusing on a single individual's life committed to social justice, when well rendered, is a method that still offers us great insights into the worlds of reform and beyond. Unlike the acclaimed reformers who have been the subjects of previous biographies, Amy Post was not known for being a public speaker, although she did give an occasional speech and hold her own in public debates. She was, instead, the kind of dedicated, behind-the-scenes activist who proved crucial to the success and longevity of any social movement. Hewitt employs the metaphor of a conductor to illustrate Post's rich and layered activism, exploiting both meanings of the term to reveal a radical's life work of "orchestrating movements of people and [End Page 168] resources and transmitting ideas and tactics from one campaign to another" (5). Post facilitated the movement of people necessary to abolish slavery and assist slaves in their journeys to freedom (Amy and her husband, Isaac, were principal conductors in the Underground Railroad alongside former slaves like Frederick Douglass), and she also arranged and orchestrated intimate ties among networks of radical reformers through friendships, letter-writing, organizing, and offering her home, in Rochester, New York, as a base of operations. In Hewitt's deft hand, Amy Post's significance emerges neither from her presence at great historical events (though she was an important figure at the first woman's rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848), nor from her famous publications (though she played a key role helping Harriet Jacobs publish her important narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in 1861). Rather, Post's story matters for its illustration of what a lifetime intertwined with reform looks like, and for the vital personal healing, support, and friendship that bound together a circle of the most important voices of progressive reform in the mid-nineteenth century. Post's reform work extended from abolition to free produce (a movement to boycott goods produced by enslaved labor) to assisting fugitive slaves before, during, and after the Civil War, to movements for American Indian rights, women's rights, spiritualism, alternative medicines, temperance, religious liberty, abolition of capital punishment, and universal (male and female) suffrage. The totality of these labors reflects not a gadfly but Post's powerful "universalist vision" of reform, a vision that simultaneously sought to achieve racial and gender equality, spiritual and physical health, and nothing less than peace and social justice. Perhaps most important, Post stood out among her peers for forging deep, long-lasting, and supportive collaborations with the most important African American activists of her day. Frederick Douglass, William Nell, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs (and their families) all counted Post as a friend, confidante, and trusted advisor, residing in her home for months or years at a time during their most productive periods. At the core of Post's vision of progressive reform was her active pursuit of what Hewitt calls "an interracial movement for social justice" (91). Few reformers even came close to the kind of racial egalitarianism and disdain for white privilege that the Posts displayed—a rarity that became glaringly evident as the women's rights and women's suffrage camps splintered over the racial and gendered meaning of citizenship after the Civil War. [End Page 169] Hewitt's narrative comes alive as these principal reformers converge in the penultimate chapter on the Civil War and...

Introduction

Introduction Liette Gidlow, Section Guest Editor (bio) As the debate over ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to enfranchise American women intensified after the Great War, both suffragists and antisuffragists believed that a great deal was at stake. Suffrage proponents promised that, armed with the ballot, women would tackle the great social issues of the day and usher in a new era of progress and peace. Antisuffragists, by contrast, worried that suffrage would damage women's elevated moral stature and threaten the very stability of life in the home. Now, in 2020, historians have the opportunity to reconsider those predictions using a century's worth of evidence. A hundred years out, what difference did the Nineteenth Amendment make? The Nineteenth Amendment is popularly celebrated for enfranchising half the population overnight and fulfilling the American promise of democracy. Two narratives, distinct but entwined, promote this perspective. In one version, aptly termed "the master narrative" by the historian Nancy Hewitt, the woman suffrage struggle started with Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls in 1848 and, after much struggle and sacrifice, succeeded with the ratification of the Anthony Amendment in 1920.1 In an alternative interpretation, the Nineteenth Amendment completed the American democratic project of suffrage expansion, a project that began in the early national period when states repealed freeholder restrictions and when a growing economy expanded property ownership and rendered them moot. The march toward full inclusion continued during the period of "Jacksonian democracy" when states granted "universal" suffrage to white men; traversed the color line with the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870; and concluded in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment brought women into the ranks of the voting public. Many historians, however, question both the framing and the tenor of these interpretations. They argue instead, for example, that woman suffrage was but one of many demands made by mid-nineteenth-century women's rights reformers, and often not their top priority; or that many aspects of women's lives and politics persisted across "the great divide" of 1920, emphasizing continuity, not change; or that electoral politics was but one tool women used to bring change to their communities. Some scholars [End Page 11] stress that alternative strategies, like labor mobilization and community organizing, sometimes yielded tangible results when voting did not or that some women, in particular African American women in the Jim Crow South, found that after ratification they still could not vote. Others further argue frankly that, on policy grounds, the Nineteenth Amendment was a bust: the voter turnout for women in the 1920s was low, the suffrage coalition splintered, and the newly enfranchised women failed to push through a fresh wave of progressive reform. In these interpretations, not much changed after women got the vote. The suffrage amendment—highly anticipated and hotly debated—landed with a thud.2 In this forum, women's history scholars with diverse areas of expertise navigate between a triumphalist narrative of progress and a dispirited narrative of failure. These essays, although varied in approach, share three common threads. First, they recognize the intersectional identities of the women whose stories they tell and offer interpretations that reflect these complexities. Second, they extend the field of vision both backward and forward in time—backward to recall a sense of contingency for historical actors who could not know that a federal woman suffrage amendment would be adopted, and forward to identify consequences of the amendment that may have taken decades to develop. Third, they interrogate the boundaries of the nation by considering internal "borders" created by processes of racial formation and settler colonialism, spaces that were incorporated into the nation but governed by what the political scientist Partha Chatterjee called "the rule of colonial difference."3 The authors in this forum also make the case that the significance of woman suffrage was not limited to women themselves. They illustrate how the question of women's right to vote was deeply implicated in the politics of white supremacy both before and after ratification. They highlight tensions that the amendment raised for women who, drawing on multiple sources of identity and affiliation, identified as members of communities instead of, or as well as, rights-bearing individuals. Individually and...

Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello

Reviewed by: Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello Natalie A. Naylor (bio) Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State By Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello. Ithaca: Three Hills, 2017. 316 pages, 6" x 9". $29.95 cloth. This year, 2020, is the Centennial of the 19th Amendment when women achieved the right to vote in the United States. Three years earlier, women in New York State won suffrage in a referendum in 1917, which was pivotal for the national movement. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello in Women Will Vote provide a comprehensive account of the suffrage struggle in New York in the seven decades that they dub "From Ridicule to Referendum" (1). Their useful Timeline begins in 1827 with the abolition of slavery in New York, and four events when women sought political rights in New York prior to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention (xv–xvii). The authors focus much of their attention on five disparate groups who have not received sufficient attention in most accounts: male suffragists, rural, working-class immigrant, African American, and radical women. Each of these groups is the subject of one of their chapters. Moreover, they want to emphasize upstate New York (defined as outside the metropolitan New York City area). In the nineteenth century, suffrage activities and organization were most extensive upstate. The New York State Woman Suffrage Association was organized in Saratoga in 1869 and held 47 yearly conventions to 1917 (Appendix 1 conveniently lists and maps the dates and locations). In the last decades of the century, suffrage activity was concentrated in the central and western counties of the state. Local leaders upstate regarded New York City as a "lost cause" (39). New York City, however, had a majority of the state's population after adding Brooklyn in 1898. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Martha Coffin Wright, Jean Brooks Greenleaf, and Lillie [End Page 150] Devereaux Blake were among the upstate presidents and leaders of the State Association. The Association worked on a variety of suffrage efforts, including petition drives, school suffrage, and legislative lobbying. By 1910, the state organization had 155 affiliated clubs in 26 counties with 555,00 members. The largest club was in Geneva with 400 members. More information might have been included on this organization, though by the early twentieth century, it was "dominated by an elite leadership primarily located in New York City" (50). National leaders from New York, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Carrie Chapman Catt, are included throughout the book. Others who played important roles nationally and in New York include Gertrude Foster Brown, Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Inez Milholland, Vira Boar-man Whitehouse, and Harriet May Mills. Except for Mills, who was based in Syracuse, each of these women was based in New York City. Information on rural upstate women is a major contribution. Churches, granges, lyceums, lecture circuits, women's clubs, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) all were involved in suffrage efforts in a "complex network" of "concurrent activism," which extended to the other groups discussed (3). Rochester, with 40 percent of its population immigrants in 1900, had many women working in the garment industry The analysis of suffrage in Rochester is insightful; both the city and county voted against suffrage in the 1915 referendum. Most of the African American suffrage leaders discussed were from New York City or Brooklyn, including Sarah Garnet, Verina Morton Jones, and Victoria Earle Mathews. Heather Jeffrey did form a Susan B. Anthony Club for Colored Women in Rochester; it, like most of the black organizations, had a broader focus than suffrage, also confronting racism. The attention paid to male suffragists is welcome, focusing on the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, founded in New York City in 1909. (Brooke Kroeger's Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, also published in 2017, provides further detail on men in the movement.) The activities of anti-suffragists are included throughout (Goodier had published No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement in 2013). Most of the radical women were based in New York City...