Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 3: The Industrial Revolution Opens the Door to Woman’s Suffrage in Pre-Civil War-Era America
By Abby Tuomala, Blue Ridge Chapter,
National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR)
Until the 1830s, America was primarily an agrarian society. Cities were becoming hubs of thriving commerce—as the steam engine, spinning jenny, and cotton gin were beginning to revolutionize and transform the world. But culturally and politically, it is safe to say that, most Americans before the “First Industrial Revolution”[i] of the early 1800s held to centuries-long views of the family and of civic duties. As discussed in the previous blog, the views of colonial Americans were deeply rooted in the beliefs of their European homelands.
With the advent of unimaginable industrial innovations, the Western world was forever changed. The family (which had been the central economic unit of society for millennia) became fractured as men left the farm to find prosperity in the factory. Their families followed, and women and children soon provided a cheap labor force. With the utopian possibilities of a better life through human ingenuity, came the harsh realities of smokestacks, sweat shops, crowded cities, and—importantly, for the suffrage movement—abuses of women and children in the workplace in the name of progress. Disparities in educational opportunities also came into focus in this new paradigm of urbanization. In tandem with this, the enslavement of men, women and children became more and more abhorrent in many hearts and minds.
It is not difficult to trace women’s activism—and even their ascendance as moral arbiters in society—to the exodus of their husbands and fathers from close-knit rural communities and churches to the city. Women became the moral conscience of society.
During these tumultuous times the early women’s movement emerged in the United States. A close reading of the stories of women’s rights forerunners shows that the right to vote was not an end in itself, but rather, a means to secure needed improvements in society. The women’s vote was necessary to make these improvements happen. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the focus was clearly on abolishing the enslavement of human beings.
In 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were barred from attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London. This prompted them to hold a Women’s Convention in the United States.[ii]
Table on which Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was one of the foremost women’s-rights activists and philosophers of the 19th century. Born on November 12, 1815 to a prominent family in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady was surrounded by reform movements of all kinds. Soon after her marriage to abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, the pair traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where they were turned away: female delegates, they were told, were unwelcome.
This injustice convinced Stanton that women needed to pursue equality for themselves before they could seek it for others. In the summer of 1848, she—along with the abolitionist and temperance activist Lucretia Mott[iii] and a handful of other reformers—organized the first women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Some 240 men and women gathered to discuss what Stanton and Mott called ‘the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.’ One hundred of the delegates—68 women and 32 men—signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that women were citizens equal to men with ‘an inalienable right to the elective franchise.’ The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage.”[iv]
Interestingly, the suffrage issue was only one of eleven resolutions memorialized at Seneca Falls. In fact, the suffrage issue was the most contentious—and narrowly passed! Susan B. Anthony was not present at the Seneca Convention, but would later play a major role in the women’s rights movement.
In the History of Woman’s Suffrage, vol. 1, Elizabeth Cady Stanton reported that the resolutions were all adopted unanimously, except the resolution on women voting [Resolution 9], which was more contentious. On the first day, Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke strongly for including the right to vote among the rights called for. Frederick Douglass spoke on the second day of the convention in support of women’s suffrage, which is often credited with swinging the final vote to endorse that resolution.[v]
The Eleven Resolutions of the Seneca Falls Convention (1848):
Whereas, the great precept of nature is conceded to be, “that man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness,” Blackstone, in his Commentaries, remarks, that this law of Nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid, derive all their force, and all their validity, and all their authority, mediately and immediately, from this original; Therefore,
Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and of no validity; for this is “superior in obligation to any other.”
Resolved, That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.
Resolved, That woman is man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.
Resolved, That the women of this country ought to be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation, by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance, by asserting that they have all the rights they want.
Resolved, That inasmuch as man, while claiming for himself intellectual superiority, does accord to woman moral superiority, it is pre-eminently his duty to encourage her to speak, and teach, as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies.
Resolved, That the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior, that is required of woman in the social state, should also be required of man, and the same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman.
Resolved, That the objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience, comes with a very ill grace from those who encourage, by their attendance, her appearance on the stage, in the concert, or in the feats of the circus.
Resolved, That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Resolved, That the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities.
Resolved, therefore, That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause, by every righteous means; and especially in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion, it is self-evidently her right to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in public, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used, and in any assemblies proper to be held; and this being a self-evident truth, growing out of the divinely implanted principles of human nature, any custom or authority adverse to it, whether modern or wearing the hoary sanction of antiquity, is to be regarded as self-evident falsehood, and at war with the interests of mankind.[vi]
Next time on our blog: Post-Civil War efforts by the suffrage movement to ensure the same rights for women as were being enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for freed male slaves.
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[i] See https://www.britannica.com/event/Industrial-Revolution.
[ii] From: National Women’s History Museum, https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/timeline/womans-suffrage-timeline.
[iii] Lucretia Mott was a 19th-century feminist activist [1793-1880], abolitionist, social reformer and pacifist who helped launch the women’s rights movement. Raised on the Quaker tenet that all people are equals, Mott spent her entire life fighting for social and political reform on behalf of women, blacks and other marginalized groups. As an ardent abolitionist, she helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. She also co-wrote the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 for the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, which ignited the fight for women’s suffrage. Mott also helped found co-educational Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1864. https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/lucretia-mott.
[iv] https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/women-who-fought-for-the-vote-1.
[v] https://www.thoughtco.com/seneca-falls-resolutions-3530486.
[vi] https://www.thoughtco.com/seneca-falls-resolutions-3530486.