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 a week, until "a line of vegetable 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 errs 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 wagon load 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." pages 3-4

     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." page 4

"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." p 8

     "For example, the fifteenth amendment, which excluded women from suffrage, had initially been proposed by the suffragist lecturer, Anna Dickinson. When the initial vision of universal rights began to appear hopeless, radicals like Charles Redmond, who had initially 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 . Remond was joined by Abbey Kelly Foster, whose presence as the only woman on the Business Committee had split 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 male's rights must be accepted, if it was 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." p 9

     "This article, probably the first plea for woman's rights to be published in the United States, was written by Paine six months after he returned from England, where he had been part of the circle abound Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the brilliant and pioneering Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was published in 1792. Wollstonecraft's feminist husband, William Godwin, also influenced the first important American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, in his first work, Alcuin: A Dialogue. In this, the first book published in the United States devoted to woman's rights, Brown's female heroine says: If I look abroad, I may see reason to congratulate myself on being born in this age and country. Women, that are no where totally exempt from servitude, no where admitted to their true rank in society, may yet be subject to different degrees or kinds of servitude. Perhaps there is no country in the world where the yoke is lighter than here. But this persuasion, though in one view, it may afford us consolation, ought not to blind us to our true condition, or weaken our efforts to remove the evils that still oppress us. It is manifest, that we are hardly and unjustly treated." p 35-36

     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." page 38

     A single woman might be economically independent, owning property and earning her living; upon uttering the marriage vows, she lost control of her property and her earnings. She also gave away all rights to children she would bear. They became the "property" of the father who could give them away or grant custody to someone other than the mother, in the event of his death. With the words, "I do," a woman literally gave away her legal identity.

     Carrie S. Burnham, an attorney who had unsuccessfully brought a voting rights case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, studied common law and found: By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the legal existence of the woman is "merged in that of her husband." He is her "baron," or "lord," bound to supply her with shelter, food, clothing and medicine and is entitled to her earnings -- the use and custody of her person which he may seize wherever he may find it.

     The woman lost her name, her right to control her own body, and to live where she chose. A married woman could not make any contracts, sue or be sued; she was dead in the law. Burnham summarized: The husband being bound to provide for his wife the necessities of life, and being responsible for "her morals" and the good order of the household, may choose and govern the domicile, choose her associated, separate her from her relatives, restrain her religious and personal freedom, compel her to cohabit with him, correct her faults by mild means and if necessary chastise her with the same moderation as [if] she was his apprentice or child.

      The Supreme Court of Mississippi acknowledged a husband's right to beat his wife in 1824, and other states followed suit. A North Carolina court ruled in 1864 that the State should not interfere in cases of domestic chastisement unless "permanent injury or excessive violence" was involved, preferring to "leave the parties to themselves as the best mode of inducing them to make the matter up and live together as a man and wife should."

      Matthew Hale, Chief Justice in England, had issued a legal pronouncement in 1736 which condoned rape: But the husband cannot be guilty of a ape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath give up herself in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract. Matthew Hale's major claim to fame was the number of convictions he coerced from juries while presiding over 'witch' trials. His legal sanction of marital rape went unchallenged and became the basis for the rape laws of most states, which defined rape as "the forcible penetration of the body of a woman, not the wife of the perpetrator."

      Even these limited rape laws were not passed to protect the safety of the woman, Burnham claimed, but to provide punishment for injuries sustained by the man close to her: Woman's character is exposed to the vilest slanders of "malignity and falsehood," and her chastity protected on account of the injury sustained by the father, husband, or master from loss of her services, or wrongful entry of his house, rather than the injury done to her as an individual.

      Many were the stories of irresponsible husbands drinking away their earnings, as well as their wives', while the mother and children starved, powerless to act. In New York, a girl of thirteen was "bound out [as an apprentice] by her father for the vilest purposes," and the court decided that he had acted within his legal rights. While abuses this extreme might not be the norm, feminists pointed out, the law allowed them.

      Women who found themselves married to an abusive husband were trapped, legally as well as economically, because divorce laws were extremely rigid. Once again, conditions had regressed from earlier times. Colonial New England allowed more rounds for divorce than New York State possessed in the 1960s. There was no organized underground railroad to help married women escape, such as existed for African Americans, 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 American revolution, women were at the same time robbed of the ballot -- the legal means of securing their rights.

      The Revolutionary father selectively chose what portions of the common law to use in molding women's legal position. While adopting the most repressive aspects of Blackstone, they ignored the long voting history of women under English common law, which was cited by both Judge Waite and Carrie Barnham: both sexes are of full age at twenty-one, entitled to civil rights, and if unmarried and possessed of freehold, they are equally entitled to the exercise of political rights." (pp. 38-41, 1998 edition)

      As the Centennial celebration approached, the women drove home the point time and again: the women of 1876 suffered all the political injustices fought against by the men of 1776. In fact, the women of 1876 were worse off, the argued, because their forefathers at the time of the Revolution had enjoyed local self-government, and their town meetings had sowed the seeds of liberty, while the women one hundred years later were denied a share in government at the town, state, and national levels.

      In 1876, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to her old friend Lucretia Mott on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the first woman's rights convention which they had organized in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848:

      Could we have foreseen, when we called that convention, the ridicule, persecution, and misrepresentation that the demand for woman's political, religious and social equality would involve: the long, weary years of waiting and hoping without success; I fear we should not have had the courage and conscience to begin such a protracted struggle, nor the faith and hope to continue the work. Fortunately for all reforms, the leaders, not seeing the obstacles which block the way, start with the hope of a speedy success.

      Our demands at the first seemed so rational that I thought the mere statement of woman's wrongs would bring immediate redress. I thought an appeal to the reason and conscience of men against the unjust and unequal laws for women that disgraced our statute books, must settle the question. But I soon found, while no attempt was made to answer our arguments, that an opposition, bitter, malignant, and persevering, rooted in custom and prejudice, grew stronger with every new demand made, with every new privilege granted.

      . . . . I do not feel like rejoicing over any privileges already granted to my sex, until all our rights are conceded and secured and the principle of equality recognized and proclaimed, for every step that brings us to a more equal plane with man but makes us more keenly feel the loss of those rights we are still denied. . . ." pp. 42-43 (1998 edition)

      The Woman's Pavilion stood directly across from the United States government building, in front of which two enormous cannon pointed across at the small building which housed women's achievements. to many women, this seemed a fitting statement of the government's position toward their rights." p. 51 (1998 edition)

      The women had declared themselves in rebellion against the government of the United States. pp. 54-55 (1998 edition)

      "The 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 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, social 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 Right to merge church and state and create a political test for public office which would exclude all but Christians. " page 122 - 123

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