Lately, there's been a lot of talk about what it means to be a feminist. More specifically, American women are trying to find new and better ways to strike a balance between careers and motherhood at a time when more women are wondering whether the glass ceilings that kept their mothers in the kitchen and out of the boardroom are actually broken or just cracked. As the debate rages in venues ranging from television talk shows to the halls of academia, the question remains: Are women any closer to gender equality now than they were a hundred years ago?
In her latest biographical study, Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists, Goucher College historian Jean H. Baker reveals that women have grappled with this same question for well over a century. Baker, best known as the biographer of James Buchanan and Mary Todd Lincoln, has written an engaging and accessible book about five American feminists: Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard Scott, and Alice Paul. In addition to telling their stories through close reading of their letters, diaries, and speeches, Baker manages to weave their stories together, giving us a suffragists' family tree, of sorts.
Baker presents us with a side of the suffragists that other biographies downplay: the nitty-gritty of their personal lives. These stories and anecdotes humanize the women by showing us that behind those tightly pulled coiffures and corsets stood women who believed that gender equality would allow women to become better mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, and wives. Baker's description of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell's courtship depicts Stone as the perfect example of a woman who wants to be desired for her intellect more than her figure. Stone, a charismatic abolitionist lecturer, met Blackwell when she gave an antislavery lecture at his hardware store in Cincinnati. By then, Stone had already worked to pay her own tuition at Oberlin, the progressive liberal arts college that allowed both women and black men to matriculate. In 1850, Blackwell appealed to Stone's passion for abolitionist causes by rescuing an 8-year-old fugitive slave girl traveling through Ohio who was being forcibly returned to her master in Kentucky. Lucy was immediately impressed, and their courtship led to a wedding ceremony in 1855 that could easily have been the subject of an announcement in a recent New York Times Sunday Styles section. Determined to subvert the traditional marriage conventions that forced women to become their husbands' property, the couple removed the word “obey” from their vows, and Henry renounced his claim to legal authority over his wife.
Although they were intelligent, educated, and highly motivated women, all of the suffragists bore the scars of nineteenth-century womanhood. Female sexuality was not a topic of open discussion, so all of the women struggled to develop a healthy understanding of it. Anthony and Willard preferred lesbian relationships. Stanton, despite the fact that she had seven children, took advantage of the few available methods of birth control. But she still longed “to be free from housekeeping and children so as to have time to read, think, and write.” Eventually, child rearing replaced suffrage as Stanton's top priority, a choice that her close friend Anthony never forgave. Finally, Paul, the only suffragist who lived to see the passage of the nineteenth amendment, preferred to expend her emotional energy on her doctoral research on women's rights and her relentless attempt to convince President Woodrow Wilson to support constitutional rights for women.
One of the book's most interesting threads is the relationship between the abolition and suffrage movements. The theme of abolition brings continuity to the book, but the story takes a nasty turn when Baker describes how the suffragists decided that feminism and racism were no longer compatible social justice causes. Stone and Anthony in particular derived their feminist passion from their families' abolitionist activities. As Baker notes, “All of these women, except Paul, were schooled in the antislavery campaigns of the 1840s where they first discovered each other along with a compelling example of their nation's oppressions.” The suffragists could agree that slavery was an abomination, but in its absence, economic forces and de facto racism ensured that black women would receive a raw deal from abolitionists and feminists. When Ida B. Wells, the fiery journalist and crusader against racism and sexism, asked Paul to participate in her anti-lynching campaign, Paul declined because, as Baker notes, Paul's idea of gender equality “never had room for the divisive issue of race,” a chilling portent of the movement's direction in the twentieth century.
In fact, the suffrage movement's tragic flaw was its inherent racism, which Baker could have explored in more detail. Anthony's condemnation of black male enfranchisement through the passage of the fifteenth amendment was construed as racist by some of her colleagues, notably Stone, and led Stone to distance herself from Anthony by founding the American Women Suffrage Association. In theory, the suffragists wanted to extend voting rights to all American women, but in practice, black women were systematically excluded. Rather than join forces with black women from the South of the Reconstruction, Baker writes, Willard segregated them, creating the Department of Colored Temperance within her Women's Christian Temperance Union.
The split between black and white feminisms remains, and Baker's failure to include a black suffragist in her book is telling. Even though her book provides more depth to America's most well-known suffragists than some others, it is time that scholars acknowledge the movement's breadth by showing us the places where feminism did cross racial lines. Wells, for example, founded three women's suffrage clubs before becoming a founding member of the NAACP. And what about Mary Church Terrell, an Oberlin-educated black suffragist? Baker gives Terrell no play even though she, like Anthony, addressed the International Council of Women in Berlin in 1904, describing how black women were struggling to overcome the double burdens of race and gender discrimination in America. The examination of the personal lives of either of these women would have made Baker's book a more comprehensive study of the suffrage movement.
Feminism has achieved many of its goals since Stone, Anthony, Stanton, Willard, and Paul last picketed the White House, but women must continue to lift as they climb. Gender equality will not be achieved until women are no longer forced to choose between homemaking and policymaking, until race and class biases no longer conspire to allow some women to gain career and social mobility while others hover on the margins of American society perhaps, cleaning houses or working as nannies just to scrape by. Baker's unique approach to documenting the suffragists' personal lives opens the door for other scholars to fill in the gaps in feminism's social history by exploring the ordinary aspects of other extraordinary American women.
LaNitra Walker is a doctoral candidate in art history at Duke University.
