Aside from the antislavery movement, perhaps the most significant social activism in nineteenth-century America occurred within the women’s movement. Many of America’s earliest women’s-rights activists, such as Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, first became radicalized by the antislavery movement, one of the first social movements that accepted women as activists. By getting outside the domestic sphere and working for abolition, many American women realized the power of organization to transform society. Many also were drawn to abolitionism because they compared their own oppression to slavery. These parallels were especially clear to Black women such as Sojourner Truth, an ex-slave turned abolitionist, feminist, and evangelist; her speech “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” at the 1851 women’s-rights meeting in Akron, Ohio, revealed how sexism combined with racism and slavery.

Historians of the American women’s movement trace its beginning to the women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. This convention, led by Stanton and Mott, issued a Declaration of Sentiments that was modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The convention’s philosophy and goals were influenced by Enlightenment thought, specifically John Locke’s concept of “natural rights.” The Declaration of Sentiments listed the many injustices suffered by women and their lack of political, economic, and educational rights and opportunities. Although the convention was organized and led by women, men attended, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and signed the declaration. Not surprisingly, it was widely criticized as a threat to the status quo of gender relations and roles.

The ideological context surrounding the American women’s movement included two overlapping concepts that permeated American culture: the notion of “separate spheres” and what historian Barbara Welter has termed the “Cult of True Womanhood.” Many Americans believed that there were two separate spheres appropriate for women and men—the woman’s sphere was domestic, while the man’s sphere was public. Women were expected to stay home, bear and raise children, and keep the house in order, while men were expected to be breadwinners in the workplace. Although many women were forced by economic necessity to go outside their sphere to find work to supplement their husbands’ income, these realities did not alter the notion that women belonged at home.

The Cult of True Womanhood was a set of ideologies that also defined “true” women as domestic, but also as pious, sexually pure, and submissive to men—to their fathers before marriage and to their husbands after. They were expected to be moral guides to their children, and while they could have a positive moral influence on their husbands, they could not refuse to obey them.

Compared to twenty-first-century feminism, the beliefs of some early women’s-rights activists seem conservative and uncontroversial. While Margaret Fuller argued in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,” others, like Catharine Beecher, accepted the notion of separate spheres and merely wanted the two spheres to be considered on an equal level. Others, like Susan B. Anthony, were committed to the temperance movement, which they felt would help women who were abused by their alcoholic husbands.

Unlike later feminists, most members of this first generation of feminists did not advocate abortion rights, fight for access to birth control, or accept lesbianism. Most of them were devoutly religious, though they rejected biblical sexism and argued that God created man and woman as equals. This first wave of American feminism was more concerned about domestic abuse, unequal pay for men and women, women’s lack of property rights, educational opportunities, divorce rights, and voting rights. Many members of this movement were disappointed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which lifted racial barriers for voting but continued to exclude women from the polls. This fractured the coalition between the women’s movement and the abolitionist movement, and some white feminists turned away from the fight for racial civil rights. Women were not given the right to vote until fifty years later, when the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920; this event signaled the end to the first wave of the American women’s movement.

The women’s movement encouraged many American women to enter the literary realm, and much of the best polemical and imaginative literature was from those who wrote about their experiences in a patriarchal society as well as other important issues. Although her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an abolitionist novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe emphasized the importance of the feminized domestic sphere as a site of resistance to slavery. The novel’s phenomenal success, along with the popularity of Susan Warner’s 1850 novel, The Wide, Wide World, and the works of Fanny Fern, encouraged other aspiring female writers.

Although her novel Hope Leslie (1827) was written before the women’s movement began, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s young female characters served as role models to her female readers. A later novelist, E. D. E. N. Southworth, also went against conventional gender notions with her young heroine Capitola Black in the 1859 novel The Hidden Hand. The extraordinary imagination and intellect manifested in the writings of Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson put to rest any notion of women’s intellectual inferiority.

The letters of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of a South Carolina slaveholder who became abolitionists, examined how the intersections of patriarchy and slavery denigrated both Black women and white women. Sojourner Truth, despite her illiteracy, showed her cleverness and strong will in advocating women’s rights as well as abolition, and the intersecting oppressions endured by enslaved women were eloquently expressed in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and the works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. One of the most powerful depictions of industrial exploitation during this period is Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861).

Topics for Discussion and Research

1. Stanton, Anthony, Truth, the Grimké sisters, and other leaders of the early American women’s movement hoped to improve conditions for women not only of their own time but also of future generations. To what extent do you think they succeeded? Consider the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century American society has been influenced by the women’s movement and nineteenth-century women’s literature.

2. Compare nineteenth-century literature written by women to literature written by their male contemporaries. Are the texts produced by each distinctive in terms of style or subject matter, or are they mostly similar? One pair of texts that might be interesting to compare are two slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass’s A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Those who wish to learn more about sentimental literature (much of which was written by women) might consult Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs and Shirley Samuels’s The Culture of Sentiment.

3. To what extent are the issues raised by nineteenth-century American women writers specific to their time period? One might begin by examining primary texts such as Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, or Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838). Some helpful biographical and historical studies of the issues raised by women’s rights advocates include Ellen Carol DuBois’s Feminism and Suffrage and Judith Wellman’s The Road to Seneca Falls.

4. As stated above, the American women’s movement was in many ways born in the antislavery movement. Consider the similarities and differences between the two movements in terms of their beliefs, their rhetoric, their strategies, and the problems they addressed. DuBois’s Feminism and Suffrage and Lawrence J. Friedman’s Gregarious Saints are two useful starting points for research on these two movements. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne’s The Abolitionist Sisterhood is a good source for those interested in the role of women in the American abolitionist movement.

5. To what extent did the early women’s movement in America address the issues of race and slavery? What roles did African American women such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs play in the movement, and what impact did they have? Students may wish to consult biographies of these two black feminists; see Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth and Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs: A Life.

Resources
Primary Works
Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835–1839 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
A collection of documents by the sisters relating to women’s rights and abolitionism.

Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
Contains eight recent essays about Stanton and several of her speeches, articles, and essays.

Biography
Pamela R. Durso, The Power of Woman: The Life and Writings of Sarah Moore Grimké (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2003).
A biography of the elder Grimké sister that examines her feminist and antislavery writings.

Grace Farrell, “Beneath the Suffrage Narrative,” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Études Américaines, 36 (2006): 45–65.
Explains the role of feminist activist Lillie Devereux Blake in the American women’s movement and her exclusion from feminist historiography in Susan B. Anthony’s History of Woman Suffrage.

Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
The definitive Stanton biography.

Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters From South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
A comprehensive biography of the Grimkés.

Nell Irvin Painter, “Difference, Slavery, and Memory: Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 139–158.
Examines Truth’s relationship to the women’s rights and abolitionist movements and the construction of her persona.

Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996).
The authoritative Truth biography.

Criticism
Naomi Greyser, “Affective Geographies: Sojourner Truth’s Narrative, Feminism, and the Ethical Bind of Sentimentalism,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 79 (June 2007): 275–305.
Discusses Truth’s ethical uses of sentimentalism and analyzes how it rhetorically confined her.

Mary Loeffelholz, “Posing the Woman Citizen: The Contradictions of Stanton’s Feminism,” Genders, 7 (March 1990): 87–98.
Examines Stanton’s arguments for married women’s property rights without denying their bodily nature in an 1860 speech.

Alison Piepmeier, “‘As Strong as Any Man’: Sojourner Truth’s Tall Tale Embodiment,” in Women as Sites of Culture: Women’s Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, edited by Susan Shifrin (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 25–36.
Argues that Truth borrowed from the tall-tale genre to define herself as a female hero.

History
Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).
A history of the American women’s movement from the Seneca Falls Convention to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
A historical account of the birth of the American women’s movement with an emphasis on Stanton.

Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).
Studies the intersections of gender, class, and racial ideologies in the activism of antislavery feminists.

Categories: Literature

Tags: 19th Amendment, 19th century feminism, abolition and feminism, American Feminism, American feminism history, black women in feminism, Catharine Beecher, Cult of True Womanhood, Declaration of Sentiments, early American female authors, early feminist literature, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emily Dickinson feminism, Feminism, feminist abolitionists, feminist literary history, feminist thought in literature, feminist writers 1800s, First Wave Feminism, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Grimké sisters letters, Harriet Beecher Stowe feminism, Harriet Jacobs feminism, history of women's rights USA, Hope Leslie novel, Lucretia Mott, Margaret Fuller, Rebecca Harding Davis, Seneca Falls Convention, separate spheres ideology, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, The Hidden Hand novel, women in abolition, women’s rights movement, women’s suffrage movement