American Experiment (73 page)

The test was whether the rank and file could be organized for economic action. Occasional sporadic strikes broke out. In the winter of 1834, eight
hundred of Lowell’s female operatives turned out to protest the 15 percent wage cut. They marched on other mills and held an outdoor rally, to persuade fellow workers to join them. Their statement of principles, headed
“UNION IS POWER,”
invoked the spirit of our “Patriotic Ancestors” who had preferred privation to bondage, and asserted that the “oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us.” The mill owners were aghast. Describing the strikers’ procession as an “amazonian display,” the agent of the Lawrence Company complained that “a spirit of evil omen” had prevailed over the “friendly and disinterested advice” that had been given by the company to the “girls of the Lawrence mills.” The owners coolly waited, adamant, and the strike spluttered out as women returned to work or left town. Other walkouts were hardly more successful.

Turning to political action, women mill hands sought to achieve the ten-hour day through state legislation. The leader in this effort, the indefatigable Sarah Bagley, was described as a “fiery and persuasive leader, as effective in a small committee meeting as she was addressing a crowd.” Working closely with other militants such as Mehitable Eastman and Huldah Stone, Bagley founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association and soon attracted several hundred members. She edited
The Voice of Industry
, a labor newspaper originally published by the New England Workingmen’s Association but later purchased by the LFLRA. Hoping to build a united New England labor movement, LFLRA leaders began organizing branches in a half dozen mill towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Their main target was the Massachusetts legislature in general and in particular William Schouler, chairman of the Committee on Manufactures. After the LFLRA had collected 2,000 signatures on a petition denouncing working conditions in Lowell and calling for the ten-hour day, Schouler headed an investigating committee that vaguely favored shorter workdays and better ventilation but concluded that “the remedy is not with us. We look for it in the progressive improvement in art and science, in a higher appreciation of man’s destiny, in a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority.” When Schouler was beaten for re-election, the LFLRA claimed a victory and moved that the voters of Lowell be formally thanked for consigning Schouler to “the obscurity he so justly deserves.” Schouler then pursued a personal vendetta against Sarah Bagley in his paper, the Lowell
Courier.

The fact that the women had to thank the voters of Lowell betrayed their central political weakness, for it was men they were thanking, men who had the vote. If women had their own concept of liberty—liberty from harsh working conditions, liberty to strike and protest—the political
establishment had its concept: liberty of contract. When workers gained a ten-hour law in New Hampshire, the legislature included a free contract exemption at the request of the mill owners, who soon signed up women willing to work twelve hours. In Massachusetts, the indomitable Bagley finally gave up and faded from the labor scene. The Middlesex mills of Lowell again cut wages in 1850, by one-quarter, and this time the employers used the blacklist to punish protesters.

Factory women turned first to direct economic action, such as strikes, and only then to the political. Middle-class women stressed political action to meet their needs. Above all; leaders among middle- and upper-class women felt keenly their need and right of the ballot. In the heady political days of the mid-1830s, they had begun to organize, starting with charity clubs called “female fragment societies.” Their concerns tended to be more diffuse than those of the mill workers. Education was central, and they were proud of Emma Willard’s achievements in founding in 1821 a model school, the Troy Female Seminary, with a curriculum of science, mathematics, geography, and history said to equal that of the best men’s colleges, and a teacher-training program that was superior. Oberlin began to admit women to higher education in 1833, though this was admittedly to help meet the needs of male scholars for meals and laundry—and for high moral conduct that would shame the male students out of indulging in the depravities of “monastic society.” Middle-class women were also taking the lead in temperance movements, charity issues, and marital rights. But many focused on the two great political issues, slavery and the suffrage.

When the National Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in the spring of 1838, crowds hostile to the emancipation of slaves and women broke down the doors and set fire to the building. As the flames rose, the mob began to make its way to the home of Lucretia Mott, the demure Quaker preacher who had organized the Philadelphia branch. “I felt at the moment,” she wrote later, “that I was willing to suffer whatever the cause required.”

Several American antislavery societies sent women as delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in June 1840. The convention refused to seat the women delegates with the men and assigned them seats in the gallery. Lucretia Mott, in her dove-gray coal and white cap, walked down Great Queen Street deploring this segregation arm and arm with another delegate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a graduate of the Troy
Seminary and a young bride of twenty-five, who had come to the convention with her abolitionist husband as part of their honeymoon. The two women agreed to hold a women’s rights convention on their return to America. It was almost eight years before Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by then living in Seneca Falls in upstate New York and feeling rather isolated, had a chance to take up the question with Lucretia Mott, who was attending a Quaker meeting in the area. They agreed to put an advertisement in the
Seneca County Courier
calling for a “Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women,” on July 19-20, 1848, in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls.

It was a faltering start. The chapel was locked when the organizers arrived—only by accident?—and Mrs. Stanton’s nephew had to be boosted through a window to unlock it. The meeting was to be for females only, but forty men turned up with the two hundred and fifty women and had to be admitted. This was just as well, because no woman present quite dared to preside over the meeting and Lucretia Mott’s husband, James, took the chair. Mrs. Stanton gave a maiden speech of ample proportions and noble sentiment.

In a brilliant stroke, the delegates proclaimed their principles in the form of a new Declaration of Independence for women: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position…to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.…We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.…The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Then the list of grievances: man had not permitted woman to vote; had compelled her to submit to laws in the forming of which she had had no voice; had “made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead”; had taken from her all right in property; had passed grossly unfair divorce laws; had denied her a college education; had excluded her from the ministry. The convention passed resolutions calling for equal rights in trades, universities, and professions; equality in marriage; equal rights as to property, wages, and children; equal rights to make contracts and to testify in court. But the suffrage? That resolution carried by only a small majority. Lucretia Mott herself dared not support it.

Other women’s rights conventions followed: Rochester, Akron, Worcester, Syracuse. The journey to the voting booth would take far longer than
the most pessimistic leader might have dreamed. Only one woman present at Seneca Falls would vote for President by living long enough to vote in 1920.

Of the score or more grievances proclaimed in their Seneca Falls declaration, middle-class women often felt most keenly their status as legally inferior in marriage. The wife “is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming…her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.” Feminists were outraged by the common law, under which a married woman was unable to contract with her husband or with third parties, could not convey real or personal property to or from her husband, and hence by extension could not lawfully engage in trade without her husband’s consent. While some of the harsher applications of common law were being corrected through equity jurisprudence on a state-by-state basis, the wife’s relationship to her husband was much like that of ward to guardian.

Despite the handicaps a woman assumed thereby, nearly all of them did marry: save as homemakers and housekeepers, how could they keep themselves? Perhaps by teaching school, but these positions were limited. Spinsters usually stayed at home to care for elderly parents, or paid for their keep by domestic labor in the kitchens of brothers and sisters. Marriages were permanent, if only because the alternative was hardly thinkable. Divorce was almost impossible; in many states it required a special legislative petition, as did Rachel Robards Jackson’s divorce. In most cases a woman relinquished property, home, and children to her ex-husband. While feminists had made some progress by mid-century in improving the status of married women—Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped persuade New York to recognize a wife’s right to her separate property—divorce remained almost immune to major reform.

For many middle-class women, the main block to self-realization was less the law than social and psychological circumstance. For some, rising affluence, and the goods and comforts that came with it, elevated their feelings of need rather than satisfied them. Family duties in particular barred them from rewarding occupations and professions. Millicent Leib Hunt in Detroit rebelled against her domestic chores, assuaging her anger by writing in a diary about her duty. She tried to deny her “selfish” wishes for pretty clothes. Of her husband she vowed “never to oppose his opinions but by gentle and affectionate reasoning.” She would always “offer him the choicest morsels at table” and manifest a “quick and ready compliance with his wishes.”

For a time, Lydia Maria Child seemed immune to this kind of problem.
In her early twenties, she published two popular novels, earning a literary reputation. At thirty-one she wrote a tract,
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
, electrifying the antislavery world, but it lost her sales on her popular writing. Boston exacted its sternest penalty when the Atheneum canceled her free membership. Moving from Boston to New York, she edited during the 1840s the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
, a militant weekly. In her newspaper writings and numerous letters she displayed a penetrating intelligence and unusual compassion. She commented on everything—on the machinations of compromising party politicians, on abolitionist backsliders, on Fourier (“I think Fourier means that society ought to be so constructed that every passion will be excited by healthy action on suitable objects”), on the failings of the “Swig” hard-cider party, and always on the flowers and birds and trees that she loved. She knew and influenced the movers and shakers of reform.

But Lydia Maria Child was married—to David Lee Child, who shared her concerns and passions but apparently was frustrated in his own career and dependent on his wife. By 1850 she was writing a friend that the “experience of the last eight years has terribly shaken my faith in human nature” and “my own strong and electric nature.” She had all along hoped, she wrote two years later, after retiring to the country, that the time would come when household work and cares would leave her enough time to earn something again by writing. “But what with cooking, taking care of milk, making butter, picking and preparing vegetables, keeping the house tolerably clean, washing dishes, seeing that nothing moulds, ferments or freezes, ironing clothes, making and mending clothes, for myself and David, &c. &c. I find that the treadmill
never
stops.…Six weeks often passes without my even looking into a book or touching a pen.”

This was the vibrant voice of a middle-class woman. A few years earlier, Mehitable Eastman had spoken with equal feeling for working-class women: “Never while we have hearts to feel and tongues to speak will we silently and passively witness so much that is opposed to justice and benevolence…never, while we are conscious of powers undeveloped, affections hemmed in, energies paralyzed, privileges denied, usefulness limited, honors forfeited, and destiny thwarted…” Powers undeveloped, destiny thwarted—here spoke the authentic voice for the unfulfilled needs of women. But how could awareness of these needs be raised to a higher level of consciousness—and to a broader economic and political effort? It is a curious irony of life that the same conditions that create a potential for us and create our awareness of that potential, are the same conditions that stand most powerfully in the path of realizing that potential.

When Frances Wright made her first trip to the United States, the voyage could hardly have been more pleasant, considering the conditions of ocean travel at that time. The twenty-three-year-old orphan and heiress was neither nervous nor seasick during the month-long crossing. She liked the kindly, weather-beaten old captain, the cheerful and obliging crew. Her ship—the American-owned packet
Amity
—was well named, she felt, as she never heard a dispute on board save for one evening when a young Scotsman fell into an argument with an older Englishman over the question of grace and predestination. She listened for a while, but “in the middle of a nicely drawn distinction on the part of the Englishman, between foreknowing and fore decreeing, I fell asleep, and waked to no other noise than the creaking of timber and lashing of the waves.”