Further, women led the way in the care of sick and wounded soldiers. Regarding the creation of the Sanitary Commission, a hospital system for the care of sick and wounded soldiers during the Civil War, Wagner writes, ". . . when the machinery was perfected and in good working order, a man took it over and Dr. [Elizabeth] Blackwell was forced to resign her position as official head of the Sanitary Commission. The same thing happened with the Freedman's Bureau, a settlement and relief program which provided food, housing, and jobs to former slaves. Pioneered by Josephine Griffing, the Freedman's Bureau was later placed in the War Department with a military man as the head, leaving Griffing with only a token position as Assistant Commissioner. The militarization of the program bogged it down in red tape and destroyed the personalized and immediate attention to the needs of the freed slaves which Griffing felt she had established.

          Women saw what needed to be done and they did it. When scurvy threatened Grant's army in 1863, Mary Livermore's branch of the Sanitary Commission sent a thousand barrels of fresh produce each week, until 'a line of vegetables connected Chicago and Vicksburg.' Virginia Minor of St. Louis drove her carriage throughout the countryside soliciting fruit from sympathetic residents, and personally canned a whole wagonload of donated cherries. Mother Bickerdyke, the famous Union nurse, couldn't get fresh milk and eggs for the patients at her Memphis hospital, so she traveled to her Illinois home, and brought 200 cows and 1,000 hens back with her. The ladies of the Fayetteville New York Volunteer Relief Association sent a two horse wagonload of 'good things for the use of our sick soldiers, consisting of three barrels of pickles, one barrel of onions, three hundred pounds of dried fruit, one box of jellies and wines, a lot of apples and butter, one large box of clothing, lint, etc.' "²

          The Civil War changed women's lives in many, sometimes subtle, ways. According to Wagner, women's work for the war effort ". . . required different clothing from the heavy long skirts and tight corseting dictated by fashion. Harriet Tubman wrote north asking for a bloomer costume (a loose-fitting tunic over Turkish trousers) which the dress reform movement had adopted in the 1850's. Mary Walker donned a military surgeon's uniform. On both sides of the battle line, women took part in combat by disguising themselves as men; more than 400 women dressed in male attire fought in the Union army. The lesson they learned carried over into peace time, when women workers sometimes disguised themselves as men in order to receive men's wages, twice the paltry sum paid to women for the same work. But dressing like a man was against the law. Refusing to give up comfortable male attire she'd adopted during the war, Dr. Mary Walker was arrested on the street in Washington, D.C. - for wearing pants.

          Northern women also took major roles in the politics of the war. A brilliant young lecturer, Anna Dickinson, campaigned extensively in the hotly contested election of 1862 and decisively contributed to the Republican victory, which was essential to the war's continuation." ³

          Wagner recognizes men's contributions to the fight for women's rights, too. After the war, there was a split in the abolitionist/suffrage ranks over the issues of woman's suffrage and the 15th Amendment (the one that gave Negro men the suffrage). Wagner states, "Some feminists and abolitionists joined together to form the Equal Rights Society, demanding full citizenship for everyone. Lucretia Mott was President, and Fredrick Douglass and Robert Purvis were among the Vice Presidents. . . .

          For example, the fifteenth amendment, which excluded women from suffrage, had initially been proposed by the suffragist lecturer, Anna Dickinson. When the first vision of universal rights began to appear hopeless, radicals like Charles Redmond, who had at first opposed the amendments, reluctantly came to believe that it was too much to ask that the difficulties of the women's rights question be incorporated into those necessarily belonging to the question of Negro suffrage. Redmond was joined by Abbey Kelly Foster, whose presence as the only woman on the Business Committee had divided the American Anti-Slavery Society over the issue of woman's rights in 1840. Foster was now arguing that woman's rights should come second. Her husband Stephen, however, disagreed, using this logic: We must demand that the national right of suffrage shall be conceded to the black man, and therefore to the black woman, and therefore, since we abjure distinctions on ground of color, to the white woman.

          Fredrick Douglass eventually joined those who painfully came to the conclusion that black males' rights must be accepted, if it meant that or nothing. He pleaded with women to support the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, with the promise that he would work tirelessly for woman's rights once they were in place. He kept his promise until his death." ⁴

          Reminding us that any ruling class uses the same techniques over and over again to oppress the lower classes, Wagner writes, "[T]his period needs to be studied and restudied by students of social change. It is a classic example of the world-historic pattern of women's aid being enlisted to fight a revolution, followed by a vigorous program of returning women to their previous role once the revolution is won. Those who wanted to perpetuate inequality effectively used the "divide and conquer" method of maintaining the status quo by giving black men rights at the expense of all women, the same method that is used today in attempts to undermine Affirmative Action." ⁵

          After the woman's suffrage movement split into the conservative American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the radical National Woman's Suffrage Association (NWSA), Lucy Stone was one of the leaders of the conservative AWSA, while Elizaberh Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage were leaders of the NWSA. According to Wagner, "Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry B. Blackwell, have generally been credited by historians as being leaders of the portion of the movement which advocated the "Negro's hour," presumably the non-racist faction. Ironically, it was Henry Blackwell in 1866 who created the monstrous "Southern Strategy," a cynical tactic which used racism as a tool for gaining woman suffrage. Blackwell appealed to the white men of the South, arguing that suffrage for black men was inevitable and there was nothing they could do to stop it. What you can do is to neutralize it by demanding that woman suffrage also be enacted, Blackwell suggested, for: Your four millions of Southern white women will counterbalance your four millions of Negro men and women, and thus the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged. As the woman's movement became more conservative around the turn of the century, this strategy was adopted as a tactic by the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. It is this legacy of organizational racism which the women's movement must acknowledge." ⁶

          Challenging our preconceived notions of American and women's history, Wagner reminds us that "[t]he belief runs deep that the history of women in the United States is an undeviating line of steady progress toward greater freedom. In truth, the American woman's story is one of tremendous losses of liberty, regained and extended only through great struggle, and maintained only through continual vigilance." ⁷ Women, and men who love women, have struggled throughout the generations to make women's lives better. Alcuin: a Dialogue by Charles Brockden Brown is the first book published in the United Stated devoted to woman's rights ⁸

          Yet, Wagner notes that by the mid-nineteenth century, "[o]nce again, conditions [for women] had regressed from earlier times. Colonial New England allowed more grounds for divorce than New York State possessed in the 1960's. There was no organized underground railroad to help married women escape, such as existed for blacks, and many were the stories of runaway wives being tracked-down and brought home to their husbands by the local sheriff. Their legal oppression deepening after the Revolution, women were at the same time robbed of the ballot - the legal means of securing their rights." ⁹ Ironically, "[S]tates began removing property restrictions and extending the franchise to all white men at the same time they began denying it to women and black men. The seeds of discontent were sown in the disparity between the nation's avowed beliefs in equal freedom, and the actual practice, which was exclusionary.

          Political conditions for women worsened with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which used the word "male" three times in connection with citizenship, raising the obvious question of whether or not women were even considered citizens. The political position of women, in fact, was worse after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment than it had ever been before in the history of the country." ¹⁰

          True to its abolitionist roots, the woman's suffrage movement was one of the leaders in the movement for equality for all Americans. ". . . in 1877, the National Woman Suffrage Association appointed their first male officers. Charles Purvis, a black physician whose mother, father, and sister were long-time supporters and members of the NWSA, was placed on the six-person Resolutions Committee along with Lucretia Mott's son-in-law, Edward M. Davis, another dedicated woman's rights advocate. John Hutchinson, a member of the Hutchinson family of singers who had been entertaining at woman's rights conventions for years, (including the 1876 Centennial gathering) was one of seven people appointed to the Business Committee." ¹¹

          During the years of the centennials marking the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the end of the Revolutionary War, and the ratification of the Constitution, woman's rights activists were busy protesting woman's exclusion from the public sphere. Even the October 28, 1886 dedication of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France to the people of America, was a cause for protest. "The Statue of Liberty is a gigantic lie, a travesty, and a mockery charged nineteenth-century radical feminists. It is the greatest sarcasm of the nineteenth century to represent liberty as a woman, while not one single woman throughout the length and breadth of the Land is as yet in possession of political Liberty. The Statue was the ultimate metaphor of the pedestal of powerlessness on which all American women were placed. " ¹²

          But the long battles for women's rights left many women frustrated with their powerlessness and cynical about the political process. Regarding the day marking the Centennial of the signing of the Constitution, Wagner writes, "[t]he day marked a transition for the radical suffragists. It was the last of the Centennial activities, and their half-hearted protest indicated the extent to which they had lost faith in the democratic experiment of the United States. The robber barons, growing monopolies, and government corruption demonstrated that the ballot was just another commodity, to be bought and sold in the marketplace. The experience of freed slaves in the South showed how little protection suffrage actually brought against the powers of class and race. Presumably the same would be true of sex as well.

          Many of the women moved on to other issues. For Gage and Stanton, that meant confronting the church, "the bulwark of woman's slavery." Some women, and men, joined the struggle for a woman's right to control her own body and went to prison under the Comstock laws, including Moses Hartman, who was imprisoned three times for speaking out against marital rape.

          Anthony, increasingly convinced that suffrage under any conditions was the only issue, began courting the conservative women, especially the "organized army of Mother-love," the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. These women wanted the vote in order to put God in the Constitution, prayer in the public schools, and liquor out of the realm of choice. One radical feminist worried, I am a woman suffragist through and through, because I believe in human rights, in human liberty. The orthodox party are woman suffragists, because they want to get the power to suppress both. Her fears were well grounded; within two years Anthony masterminded a merger between the radical National Woman Suffrage Association and the conservative American Woman Suffrage Association, an act which virtually annihilated the radical, socially transforming influence of the movement. Henry B. Blackwell's Southern Strategy held sway, and the organized suffrage movement pandered to the racism and xenophobia of white men. Give women the right to vote, they argued, because white women outnumber blacks and immigrants and will maintain white, native-born supremacy.

          The God-in-the-Constitution proposal was a determined move by the Religious Right to merge church and state and create a political test for public office which would exclude all but Christians. " ¹³

          But women fought on nonetheless. Matilda Joslyn Gage ended the last editorial she would write in her suffrage paper with these words: "To those who fancy we are near the end of the battle or that the reformer's path is strewn with roses, we may say them nay. The thick of the fight has just begun; the hottest part of the warfare is yet to come, and those who enter it must be willing to give up father, mother, and comforts for its sake. Neither shall we who carry on the fight, reap the great reward. We are battling for the good of those who shall come after us; they, not ourselves, shall enter into the harvest." ¹⁴

You may order Time of Protest for $15.00 (includes shipping and handling). Send order and check to:

Sky Carrier Press
PO Box 2135
Aberdeen, SD 57402
or phone 605-486-4310

FOOTNOTES

1. Sally Roesch Wagner, A Time of Protest, Suffragists Challenge the Republic: 1870-1877 1988, Sky Carrier Press pp. 2-3