Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists (12 page)

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Authors: Sally Roesch Wagner

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Four years later, in her maiden speech at the third National Women’s Rights Convention, held in Syracuse during 1852, Matilda Joslyn Gage pointed out the connection between lack of employment, unequal pay, and marriage:
Because all lucrative and honorable means of support have been seized by men, ... women have been driven to marriage as a necessity ... or driven to a life of pollution, by the insufficiency of wages in those departments of labor which she is legitimately permitted to enter ... men’s wages are from one-half to two-thirds greater than woman’s.
43
 
How far removed was this life from that of Haudenosaunee women doing respected, satisfying, enjoyable work which gave them economic autonomy?
Alice Fletcher talked about her conversations with Native women who were well aware of their superior rights:
As I have tried to explain our statutes to Indian women, I have met with but one response. They have said: “As an Indian woman I was free. I owned my home, my person, the work of my own hands, and my children could never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law.”
44
 
Fletcher found a similar response among Indian men:
Men have said: “Your laws show how little your men care for their women. The wife is nothing of herself. She is worth little but to help a man to have one hundred and sixty acres.” One day, sitting in the tent of an old chief, famous in war [one source says this is the Lakota medicine man, Sitting Bull], he said to me: “My young men are to lay aside their weapons; they are to take up the work of the women; they will plow the field and raise the crops; for them I see a future, but my women, they to whom we owe everything, what is there for them to do? I see nothing! You are a woman; have pity on my women when everything is taken from them.”
45
 
Political Outsider and Lawbreaker
 
The vote was the major tool that women could use in the white nation to gain their rights. They believed suffrage was their inherent right in a Republic based upon the consent of the governed. The government believed otherwise. State laws denied women suffrage and, in 1874, the United States Supreme Court ruled that they had the constitutional right to do so. Women did not achieve a recognition of their constitutional right to vote in the United States of America until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally enacted in 1920, seventy-two years after the struggle began. EuroAmerican women came from an age-old tradition of political slavery, as Stanton charged in “The Declaration of Sentiments”:
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. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.... Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen ... he has oppressed her on all sides.
1
 
Suffragists waged a campaign of civil disobedience during which they broke the law (by voting), refused to pay their taxes (no taxation without representation), and accused the government of failing to live up to its founding principle—a government based on the consent of the governed.
“I am a citizen of the United States and the state of New York, and demand the right to vote for the rulers and laws by which I am governed,” wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the
Centennial Autograph Book
at the Philadelphia Commemoration on July 4, 1876. Twenty-eight years after their first call for the vote, the suffragists of the National Woman Suffrage Association chose their words carefully. Women already had the right to vote, they argued. Were they not citizens of a Republic based on the consent of the governed? Did they not pay taxes? How wrong it would be to
ask
for a right denied them; no, they
demanded
that the federal government protect them in exercising that right.
Matilda Joslyn Gage, the movement’s foremost theoretician, outlined their position in her “Woman’s Rights Catechism”:
Q: From whence do governments derive their just powers?
A: From the consent of the governed.
(Declaration of Independence)
Q: Are rights granted people by governments or through constitutions?
A: No. Rights existed before governments are founded or constitutions created.
Q: Of what use then are governments and institutions? A: To protect people in the exercise and enjoyment of their natural and fundamental rights, which existed before governments or constitutions were made.
(Declaration of Independence
and
Constitution)
Q: What is a citizen?
A: In the United States, a citizen is a person, native or naturalized, who has the privilege of exercising the elective franchise.
(Webster)
Q: What persons are citizens of the United States?
A: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside.
(14th Amendment)
Q: What right has a citizen of the United States?
A: The right to vote ...
Q: Are those persons who, under color of law, forbid woman the ballot, law-keepers or law-breakers?
A: They are law-breakers, acting in defiance to both National and State law, in thus refusing to women citizens the exercise of a right secured to them by the Constitution of the United States; and they render themselves liable to prosecution thereby.
2
 
In this interpretation, each state was therefore a law-breaker for having laws that denied women their legal right to vote. Schooled in the anti-slavery movement, the suffragists knew that unjust laws must not be obeyed. Just as they had refused to obey the Fugitive Slave Act, they now broke the law that denied them citizenship. Gage’s “catechism” laid the groundwork for a brilliant campaign of civil disobedience.
From Maryland to Washington Territory, from Fayetteville, New York, to South Newbury, Ohio, women by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, broke the law and voted in the decade after the Civil War. In Washington, D. C. over seventy women marched to the polls in a single day. In Vineland, New Jersey, 183 women attempted to vote over a four-year period. Not all the resisters were white. African American women voted in South Carolina, where the suffragist Rollin sisters wielded such influence that their home was called the unofficial Republican Party headquarters. In Michigan, Sojourner Truth, the famous former slave, joined other women at the polls.
3
Susan B. Anthony’s arrest and trial for voting in 1873 drew the nation’s attention. By then, countless women throughout the country had presented themselves at the polls and none had been arrested. When the government arrested Anthony, the best-known suffragist in the United States, both Gage and Anthony understood that this would be the government’s test case. Organizing a whirlwind speaking tour, they brought their cause to upstate New York villages, educating potential jurors in the county where the case would be heard. By the time Anthony went to trial, people knew that “taxation without representation” had surfaced for a second time as a burning issue in the country.
Gage described the inexperienced presiding judge as “a small-brained, pale-faced, prim-looking man,” who displayed his nervousness the day of the trial, realizing that the jurors probably knew the significance of the case. “This was the first criminal case he had been called on to try since his appointment and, with remarkable forethought, he had penned his decision before hearing it,” Gage wrote.
4
The judge did not allow the jury to decide the case, nor did he consult them or allow them to indicate their opinion in any way. Judge Hunt found Susan B. Anthony guilty of voting, an act expressly forbidden to women under New York State law, and fined her one hundred dollars, plus costs. Anthony refused to pay, protesting:
May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.... And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.’
5
 
Her defeat was simply a skirmish. The suffragists intended to win the struggle with the second part of their strategy. All around the country, women brought suit against the voter registrars who refused to accept their ballots.
Virginia Minor’s case began in St. Louis when Reese Happersett, the registrar of voters, refused to place her name on the list because “she was not a ‘male’ citizen, but a woman,” and therefore ineligible to vote in Missouri. In association with her husband Francis (married women under the common law were unable to bring suit independently of their husbands), Virginia Minor sued for damages. They lost in the Circuit Court and on appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court. Finally they carried their case to the Supreme Court, with Francis Minor acting as chief attorney. An active member of the National Woman Suffrage Association, along with his wife, Francis Minor argued what would become the landmark case for woman suffrage. The decision was unanimous. “If the courts can consider any question settled,” the nine white men sitting on the Supreme Court agreed, “this is one.” Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite’s unanimous opinion stated, “[t]he Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one.” Suffrage is not coexistent with citizenship, the Court declared, and states have the absolute right to grant or deny suffrage. Women did not have the right to vote protected in the United States of America, the Supreme Court ruled.
6
The setback was as astonishing as it was embittering. Woman suffrage had logic on its side. All tax-paying citizens of the Republic clearly had the inherent right to give their consent to the laws under which they were ruled and the representatives who made those laws. Even Professor Walker’s basic
Introduction to American Law
supported the women’s rights advocates:
Women have no part or lot in the foundation or administration of the government. They cannot vote or hold office. They are required to contribute their share, by way of taxes, to the support of the Government, but are allowed no voice in its direction. They are amenable to the laws, but are allowed no share in making them. This language, when applied to males, would be the exact definition of political slavery.
 
The National Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1876 decided to protest against the government’s treatment of women by (illegally) presenting a Declaration of Rights of Women at the official Centennial celebration, declaring:
Whereas, The women of this nation to-day, under a government which claims to be based upon individual rights, to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in an infinitely greater degree are suffering all the wrongs which led to the war of the revolution; and
 
 
Whereas, The oppression is all the more keenly felt because our masters instead of dwelling in a foreign land, are our husbands, our fathers, our brothers and our sons; therefore, Resolved, That the women of this nation, in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution, than the men of 1776.
 
Resolved, ... that, as Abigail Adams predicted, “We are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by laws in which we have no voice or representation.
7
The National Woman Suffrage Association had counted on the government being true to its own principles. They believed it would only be necessary to point out that the government was not living up to the founding philosophy of the country for change to occur. What they had not counted on was the sharp moral edge—backed up by the pulpit—of their opponents. “Wives, submit to your husbands,” the anti’s intoned, quoting St. Paul to prove that women must be subordinate to men. Religious conservatives warned that the divine order of the universe would be overturned if wives stood beside their husbands at the polling place.
Was the political subordination of women universal? If women had always been under the control of men, the suffragists would have to grudgingly admit that woman’s second-class status probably revealed a divinely inspired or natural order. An exception would throw into question the universal, natural argument. The evidence of even one culture where women stood equal to men in decision-making authority would reveal the EuroAmerican practice of denying women suffrage to be an arbitrary exercise of male power.
Once again, the suffragists did not have far to look for the example they sought. Their closest cultural neighbors, Haudenosaunee women, possessed decision-making authority equally with men. Political rights were not new to these women. Their democratic government rested on decision-making by all men and women. United States women citizens had to break from their religious and political tradition in order to have a part in their government. On the other hand, woman’s political participation
was
traditional for the Haudenosaunee, who believed the mutual authority of women and men was divinely inspired and necessary to maintaining the natural balance of the universe.

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