THE CONSTRAINTS OF WOMANHOOD
In the early 19th century, American society expected women to abide to a life of “domesticity, and Republican motherhood.”(1) The accepted role of women in society was to stay at home, hidden from society, so they could devote all their time to properly raising their children. This subordinate position left women disenfranchised and with little voice, further giving them no way to defend themselves against the many wrongdoings against them.
SENECA FALLS
THE BLOOMER CAMPAIGN
SOCIAL ACTIVISM
MARRIAGE
The Seneca Falls Convention helped make the Women’s Rights Movement a national issue, as it drew key Suffrage leaders like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but also in attendance were leaders from the Abolitionist Movement like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Stanton along with the other activists drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, which voiced their grievances and demanded legal justice for women. Stanton used the same structure and content that Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers did while drafting the Declaration of Independence, except this time she made sure to include the ladies.
The Declaration denounced the disenfranchisement of women, and how this denial to “exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise… has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.”(2) The denial of this necessary right left women with no protection against the irrepressible power of men; as Stanton explains in the Declaration, “He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments… He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all being closed against her.”(3)
The Seneca Falls Convention not only brought light to the issues facing women, this convention organized and gave rise to the Women’s Rights Movement in America.
While concurrently fighting against the legal discriminations faced by women, groups of activists began to also focus on the oppressive style of clothes that women in the 19th were forced to wear. The long, corseted dresses that women wore were heavy and restricting. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton illustrated in a letter to the Dress Reform Convention of 1857, "[Women's] dress ... perfectly describes her condition...Her tight waist and long trailing skirts deprive her of all freedom of breadth and motion. No wonder man proscribes her sphere. She needs his aid at every turn.”(4) The restrictive nature of their clothing pushed women like Amelia Jenks Bloomer to promote new styles of clothing that were less restricting, thus allowing women to be more mobile in society and able to work.(5) The most popular dress reform that came to be during the 19th century was the Bloomer Campaign, named after Amelia Bloomer. Women who supported the extremely progressive clothing opted to wear long loose pants, called bloomers, instead of the standard, yet burdensome, dress.(6) While bloomers gained popularity among extreme activists, the movement failed to reach a broad scope of American women because of its radical nature. Many women, regardless of the extent to which they supported women’s rights, found wearing bloomers highly inappropriate due to their similarity to women’s undergarments of the time.
Not only did women push for more practical clothing, female activists pushed against the sexualization of their clothing. Religious groups along with women’s rights activists took issue with how the accepted fashions of the time had unnecessarily tight waists and exposed chests.(7) By being allowed to wear simpler and less revealing or sexualizing clothing, women believed that they “would have more freedom from the demands of coarsely passionate men.” (8) Dress reform activists hoped that men would begin to see women as equals within society, rather then homemakers and objects of lust.
The objectification of women through their clothing further subordinated women within society; but as the Women’s Rights Movement grew, more women began to challenge the oppressive nature of women’s fashion.
Mobilized women’s activists continued to abide to the expectations of republican motherhood, which was reflected in their reform efforts. Early reform groups “[served] as moral guardians by… [concentrating] their evangelical energies in the areas of moral reform (the eradication of prostitution), temperance associations, and abolitionism.”(9) They became most involved with the temperance and abolition movements, helping each movement with its respective goals.
However, leading up to the Civil War, women became increasingly involved with the abolition movement. Women empathized with slaves and freed African Americans who were disenfranchised, and denied similar basic rights. The Abolitionist movement echoed their support for women; Frederick Douglass, friend of the Women's Rights Movement, believed “the right of woman to vote is as sacred in my judgment as that of a man.”(10)
One of the most restrictive institutions within society for a woman in the 1800s was the principle of marriage. As soon as a woman married a man, she lost any property or personal wealth in her possession; “the property cession both symbolized and operationalized a husband's independence and his wife's (economic) dependence and consequent civic disability”. (11) Through seizing all of a woman’s economic assets and giving them to her husband, she becomes even further dependent on her husband for economic support. Even if a woman was working for her own wages, she was required, by law, to turn them over to her husband.
Additional issues with marriage were that at the beginning of the 19th century women were not allowed to initiate a divorce, and forced to live in abusive households. Luckily, as the Women’s Rights Movement and First Wave gained strength, women began to file for more divorces and preach the concept of free love. With the divorce rate rising (12), and women men because they love and are attracted to them, rather then being forced to, women began to gain more control of the conventions of marriage.
However, one major setback that drew from marriage was the Supreme Court decision on the 1875 case Minor v. Happersett. When Virginia Minor, a married Missouri woman, tried to register to vote on the grounds that Missouri’s state Constitution violates the 14th Amendment by only allowing men to vote. The Supreme Court ruled that, even though women were informal citizens of the United States and that the 14th amendment grants citizens the right to vote, states do not have to allow women the right to vote because they are a "special category of nonvoting citizens."(13) The Court established this decision on the basis that since women lost their property rights in marriage, rights to owning property “were less than equivalent to citizenship”(14), virtually stripping women of their citizenship. The decision of Minor v. Happersett was a setback for the women pushing for suffrage, as it gave them another obstacle to have to overcome.
Works Cited
Hagar Kotef, "'On Abstractness: First Wave Liberal Feminism and the Construction of the Abstract Woman," Feminist Studies 35, no. 3 (2009): http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A215244329.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments," 1848, EJ2161000037, U.S. History in Context, Gale.
Ibid.
Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, "Private Women/Public Acts: Petticoat Government and the Performance of Resistance," TDR (1988-)46, no. 1 (2002), http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146948.
Robert E. Riegel, "Women's Clothes and Women's Rights," American Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1963), https://doi.org/10.2307/2711370.
Mullenix, "Private Women/Public Acts"
Riegel, “Women’s Clothes”
Ibid.
Kotef, "On Abstractness"
Brenda Wineapple, "Ladies Last: After the Civil War, Both Women and Black Men Struggled to Win the Vote. Why the Men Succeeded," The American Scholar 82, no. 3 (2013), http://www.jstor.org/stable/43870612.
Nancy F. Cott, "Marriage and Women's Citizenship in the United States, 1830-1934," The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998), https://doi.org/10.2307/2649963.
"100 Years of Marriage and Divorce Statistics," Center for Disease Control, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_21/sr21_024.pdf.
Cott, “Marriage and Women’s”
Ibid.
Photos
1. Seneca Falls photo: "Declaration of Sentiments". U.S. History in Context
2. Bloomer Campaign photo: "Bloomer Engraving". Google Images
3. Social Activism photo: "Frederick Douglass and two First Wave Feminists". Google Images
4. Marriage photo: "Virginia Minor". Google Images