On
July 19th, 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration
of Sentiments at the first women’s rights convention
in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton and other early supporters of
the women’s rights movement set a wave of progress
in motion that moves us to this day. But the long struggle to win the vote
for women is only one example of the extraordinary fortitude of
19th century woman activists.
Support for Stanton’s
demand for enfranchisement was not universal— at a time when
the ideology of domesticity was in full flower, the suggestion that
women had inalienable rights and civic responsibilities was treated
with derision by most men and many women. However, even wives and mothers who
openly rejected the appeal for women’s suffrage were poised
to expand their social influence beyond the boundaries of the domestic
sphere.
During the Victorian
and Progressive eras (1830 to 1920) millions of middle-class homemakers took part in grassroots political action through affiliation
in women’s voluntary organizations. Rather than challenging
the status quo of male dominance, reform-minded clubwomen exploited
the cultural ideology of their day— an idealization of womanhood
that granted women moral superiority and absolute authority in
all matters related to the health and welfare of the family—
to achieve their political goals.
From pure food and milk
to better wages for women workers, reforms championed by women’s
groups in this period were aimed at protecting the well-being
of mothers and children and preserving the maternal-child bond.
These campaigns proved to be highly effective— so effective
that the activities of women’s voluntary organizations were
central to the enactment of some of the earliest social policies
in the United States.
Women
in a changing world
The rapid advance of
industrialization, immigration and urbanization in the second half of the 19th century produced profound
changes in family life— and a host of social
problems of staggering proportions. While men shifted their attention
to the worldly affairs of commerce and public life, women were expected
to fulfill their part of the social compact through selfless dedication
to motherhood and housekeeping. Wives and mothers were celebrated
as the moral guardians of the household, and educators, politicians
and clergymen frequently called upon mothers to apply their specialized
talents to the betterment of the human race, one well-reared child
at a time.
When viewed through a
feminist lens, 19th century social conditions appear inordinately
oppressive to women. Certainly, married women were deprived of the
most basic rights of citizenship— a wife had no legal claim
to personal property, or even to her own wages. As Elizabeth Cady
Stanton wrote in her Seneca Falls Declaration, when a woman
married, she became “in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”
Paradoxically, the gendered
division of power inherent in the ideology of “separate spheres”
germinated new cultural attitudes which allowed women to flourish
as social actors. The Victorian notion of “true
womanhood” upheld the “feminine” virtues of
purity, piety, domesticity and submissiveness as the moral antidote
to the corrupting influence of the free market. An emphasis on care-giving
as a “sacred” duty provided homemakers with a sense
of higher purpose, and women were urged to develop mastery over
all things in the private domain. Furthermore, the popularization
of domesticity through novels, homemaking manuals and magazines
such as Godey’s Ladies Book and Ladies Home Journal
prompted women to cultivate a resilient collective identity based
on the ideal qualities of motherhood.
The combination of moral
empowerment, feminine mastery and collective identity was a potent
mix for conceptualizing a broader political role for middle-class
mothers at a time when women and children from less fortunate families
were suffering from the devastating consequences of urban poverty. Although
women were chided to direct their growing sense of social agency
to home, church and charity, dutiful wives and mothers began organizing
for the common good as early as 1830. |
