|
|
|
The Incorporation of American Feminism: Suffragists and the Postbellum Lyceum
Lisa Tetrault
| |
|
Introduction | |
| At the close of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, then in her eighties and taking stock of her years as an activist, shared an important maxim with her reader: "'a reformer, to be conscientious, must be free from bread-winning.'" When suffragists had reorganized after the disruptions and upheavals of the Civil War, they confronted a new world—one in which business reigned supreme. The war had ushered in industrial capitalism, spurring exponential growth that left Americans bewildered by its ever-expanding scale and rapid intensification. Wealth disparities widened to the greatest extent in U.S. history, and cities burst at the seams, crowded with unskilled rural and immigrant laborers who came in search of work in the factories and industries that dominated the northern landscape. Government corruption became pandemic, with legislators accepting bribes from industrialists and handing over public lands to railroad corporations. And new business forms, particularly the large corporation, along with an ethos of individual
accumulation at any cost, increasingly ruled the day. Alan Trachtenburg has argued that this encompassing process, which he terms "the incorporation of America," transformed not only the conditions of people's lives, but their very patterns of thought and expression.1 Yet Stanton maintained that suffragists, because they were free from breadwinning, had remained free from money's corrupting influence during the second half of the nineteenth century, even as it engulfed the world around them. |
1
|
|
That assertion, however, that some line of mutual exclusivity existed between reform motives and economic earning—a line that historians also have too easily accepted—has distorted our understanding of American feminism after the American Civil War and has hidden an important chapter in the history of women and business. Stanton's distinction was purely ideological, rooted in a separate spheres ideology in which the "true" woman did not work for money, but it did not accurately reflect realities on the ground. As Stanton knew well, it was a particular feature of the post–Civil War decades that suffragists actively pursued incomes—earning money, sometimes a lot of it, on the postwar lecture circuit. The handsome financial rewards available there drew more and more women into its orbit, where they developed entrepreneurial skills, competed for appearances, and maximized profits, with significant impact on the influence, shape, and substance of the postwar women's rights movement.2 |
2
|
|
Women had pursued paid lecturing before the war, but the antebellum lecture circuit differed from the postwar circuit in ways that affected women's relationship to it. Although some of the changes had started before the war, after the surrender at Appomattox the lecture circuit expanded dramatically and became thoroughly commercialized. As that transformation took place, so did another: the widespread acceptance of women on the platform. The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, and Maria Stewart had begun lecturing to mixed-sex audiences in the 1830s, but they were met with staunch opposition both for violating the Pauline dictates that women should remain silent and for stepping out of their assigned sphere, the home, and into men's sphere, the public.3 That opposition gradually lessened over the antebellum decades, but compared with conditions in the postwar decades, opportunities for lecturing women remained limited. The rapid growth of the lecture circuit after the war, together with a reorientation in public opinion, dramatically expanded opportunities for women. At the same time, the thorough commercialization of postwar lecturing reoriented suffragists' expectations: lecture opportunities were now paid, and they paid much better than had antebellum lecturing engagements. "Ridicule and scorn," Susan B. Anthony marveled, had been replaced with "profit and emolument."4 |
. . . |
There are about 17289 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
