From Abolition to Women’s Rights: An Essay on Paternalism and Exclusion

The Tremont Temple in Boston, site of meetings and speeches by abolitionists, suffragists and temperance activists (image from the Boston Directory, 1851).

A National Park Service essay argues that the paternalism, exclusion and objectification of African Americans found among white abolitionists reappeared in the early white women’s rights movement. It was written by a Cultural Resources Diversity Internship Program intern at Women’s Rights National Historical Park, as part of the series A Great Inheritance: Examining the Relationship between Abolition and the Women’s Rights Movement. The essay says it is a disservice to remember the abolitionist movement for its triumphs and none of its problems, and naive to credit abolition’s influence on the women’s rights movement without the negative. It says it does not claim the women’s movement’s failings existed solely because of abolition, but wants to reflect on how deep the roots of racism and exclusion ran even in radical movements, and that it deals specifically with the white branches of both movements without meaning to ignore or erase the equally important involvement of African Americans.

Exclusion in the abolition movement

In the 1830s white abolitionists began to encourage African American men to join their societies and endorsed removing caste restrictions against Black people. In practice, the essay says, that proved hard. The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) admitted Black men, but it was unusual for them to take part in its decisions or hold office, and no Black person was allowed to address its annual meeting until 1839.

Female anti-slavery societies excluded too. The Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Society (LNYCASS), organized in 1835, aimed to seat on its board of managers one anti-slavery Protestant woman from every church in the city. It was dedicated to the cause and even gave aid to free Black people, yet it remained an exclusively white organization. Its rules and reports were not explicitly racially exclusionary, but its membership fee was set so high as to keep out African American and working-class women. Angelina Grimké, Lydia Maria Child and Anne Warren Weston of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society criticized its prejudice, yet it still claimed sisterhood with enslaved women. Shirley J. Yee notes that it drew a clear line between the slave and the free Black person, and between social equality with Black people and a social obligation to the victims of slavery.

The “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” image, from Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery (Collections of the Library of Congress).

Exclusion in the women’s rights movement

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn attributes the separation of Black and white women’s groups to their different concerns and to Black women’s earlier experiences of white prejudice in women’s groups. The essay’s example of an attempt to exclude Black women is the reception of Sojourner Truth at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, where white women begged the chairman, Frances D. Gage, to keep Truth from speaking, fearing that the press would tie their cause to abolition. A note on the page adds that Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at that convention.

The essay argues that the white women’s rights movement also used African American women as symbols rather than as people, sharing their stories as they suited white feminists’ goals. The Revolution, a suffragist newspaper run by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony from 1868 to 1870, is most often quoted and condemned for its racist rhetoric, and Jan MacDaneld argues that its writings used the image of Black women to legitimize white women’s fight for the vote. When a letter to the editor criticized the paper’s lack of support for the 15th Amendment, Stanton defended it, arguing in part that enfranchising Black men alone would leave Black women’s bondage under southern laws more helpless than before. The essay reads this as Stanton arranging the image of the African American woman to suit her argument: it casts African American men as violent and African American women as victims who need the vote to be safe from them.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (courtesy of the Library of Congress).

The essay adds that the movement came to define its concerns as those of white, educated women. bell hooks notes that Black and white women’s groups pursued fairly similar reforms, but Black women also had to face problems foreign to white women’s experience, such as the social conception of all Black women as immoral and sexually deviant. The essay adds that the antebellum white women’s rights movement did not speak to Black women’s needs, and some of its leaders even ignored poorer white women. Yee says the issues addressed at the first women’s rights convention, at Seneca Falls, held little relevance for most Black women’s lives.

Conflict over the exclusion of women from the vote in the amendment divided women’s and African American suffrage supporters. Suffragists who opposed the amendment for that reason, such as Stanton and Anthony, attacked African American men as unfit to vote. At the 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, held at Steinway Hall in New York City, Frederick Douglass and Stanton clashed over the 15th Amendment.

Steinway Hall, 14th Street, New York City, about 1923 (no longer standing), where the 1869 American Equal Rights Association meeting took place (Library of Congress).

Douglass defended Black men’s suffrage by describing the violence and exclusion Black Americans faced, and said women would feel an urgency for the ballot equal to Black men’s when they faced the same. Asked whether this held for Black women, he replied that it did, not because she is a woman but because she is Black. The essay concludes that Stanton, Anthony and other white feminists were unable or unwilling to acknowledge the difference between the lives of white women and of African Americans.

Frederick Douglass in 1883.

Symbols, not people

The essay says abolitionists used the image of the slave as a symbol. The supplicant slave emblem, a kneeling man or woman in chains with hands raised in prayer, appeared on paper products, coins, cameos, medals, crockery and goods sewn for antislavery fairs, and in poetry, novels and stories that more often than not showed white abolitionists seeing African Americans as symbols of oppression and degradation rather than as people. Nell Painter writes that free Black people in the antislavery movement had to remind their colleagues of their own situation, because the slave’s cause seemed so much more romantic and attractive, and the essay adds that Northern abolitionists often felt horror at slavery as an institution but discomfort when face to face with Black people. In other words, it says, many abolitionists wanted emancipation but cared less about equality for free African Americans.

Parent and child

The essay sums up the relationship between abolition and the women’s rights movement as that of parent and child, with many aspects of the women’s rights movement sourced from abolition. Its conclusion is that the failings of the white abolition movement, which were seeing African Americans as symbols rather than people, failing to address the issues free African Americans faced, and excluding them, reemerged in the early white women’s rights movement.

Sources

• National Park Service, A Great Inheritance: Reflected Shortcomings in Abolition and the Women's Rights Movement, by a Cultural Resources Diversity Internship Program intern at Women's Rights National Historical Park, part of the series A Great Inheritance: Examining the Relationship between Abolition and the Women's Rights Movement; rewritten in hubnx's own words.