— these were the daughters of the Grimke sisters, birthed
through their miraculous labor.
It is often said that all those who advocated women’s rights
were abolitionists, but that not all abolitionists advocated
women’s rights. The bitter truth is that most male abolitionists
opposed women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, a former black
slave who strongly supported women’s rights, described this
opposition in 1848, right after the Seneca Falls Convention:
A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far
more complacency by many of what are called the
women. It is, in their estimation, to be guilty of evil thoughts, to
think that woman is entitled to equal rights with man. Many who
have at last made the discovery that the negroes have some rights
as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be
convinced that women are entitled to any.. . . [A] number of
persons of this description actually abandoned the anti-slavery
cause, lest by giving their influence in that direction they might
possibly be giving countenance to the dangerous heresy that
woman, in respect to her rights, stands on an equal footing with
man. In the judgment of such persons, the American slave system, with all its concomitant horrors, is less to be deplored than this
In the abolition movement as in most movements for social
change, then and now, women were the committed; women
did the work that had to be done; women were the backbone
and muscle that supported the whole body. But when women
made claims for their own rights, they were dismissed contemptuously, ridiculed, or told that their own struggle was self-indulgent, secondary to the real struggle. As Elizabeth Cady
Stanton wrote in her reminiscences:
During the six years [of the Civil War, when women] held their
own claims in abeyance to those of the slaves. . . and labored to
inspire the people with enthusiasm for [emancipation] they were
highly honored as “wise, loyal, and clearsighted. ” But when the
slaves were emancipated, and these women asked that they
should be recognized in the reconstruction as citizens of the Republic, equal before the law, all these transcendent virtues vanished like dew before the morning sun. And thus it ever is: so long as woman labors to second man’s endeavors and exalt his
sex above her own her virtues pass unquestioned; but when she
dares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives,
manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects
for ridicule and detraction. 17
Women had, as Stanton pointed out, “stood with the negro,
thus far, on equal ground as ostracized classes, outside the
political paradise”; 18 but most male abolitionists, and the
Republican party which came to represent them, had no
commitment to the civil rights of women, let alone to the
radical social transformation demanded by feminists. These
