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Myth Boxes
The Passive Woman in American Politics
In this chapter, we have noted that women now play an increasingly important role in the American political system. Many people believe that, aside from the suffrage movement at the turn of the century, such participation by women is new and began with feminist activism in the 1970s. This view, however, is not historically accurate.
The effort to expand women's rights dates back to Abigail Adams, who urged the framers of the Constitution to pay particular care to women's rights. In the 1780s and 1790s, Judith Sargent Murray, the first notable American feminist theorist, fought for the equal education of girls and boys, challenging the traditional beliefs of the time that girls "knew quite enough if they could make a skirt and a pudding." By the 1830s, women were active in many social (and often political) functions, including the American Female Moral Reform Society, which crusaded against prostitution "but also assisted poor women and orphans and entered the political sphere."
By the 1840s, the women's suffrage movement was gaining momentum. In that decade, linking up with the abolitionist crusade to end slavery, women actively sought equal rights for people regardless of race or sex. Sarah Grimke published her essays on the equality of the sexes in William Lloyd Garrison's publication Liberator, and the Women's Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. The late 1800s saw a spate of feminist books, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics (1898), which criticized the obsolete view of women as passive and innocent and called for the end of the male monopoly on economic opportunity.
During the same period women began forming clubs, and these had a considerable impact, for their members became active in public affairs. The clubs were consolidated in 1890 into the General Federation of Women's Clubs, which claimed almost 1 million members by 1910. The goals of these early female reformers included systematic factory inspections, the regulation of children's and women's labor and working conditions, housing reform, and pure food and drug laws. By 1909, Alva Belmont, a wealthy patron of the early labor movement, could write that "women the world over need protection and it is only through the united efforts of women that they will get it."
When World War I broke out in August 1914, many women mobilized to keep the United States neutral, hoping that it could negotiate peace in Europe. The first woman elected to the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin, voted against entering the war, and Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt founded the Women's Peace party. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was ratified. Shortly afterward Catt founded the League of Women Voters, which has been working to educate citizens ever since. The league sponsors political debates that have become an integral part of the campaign process in many elections.
Women have faced many roadblocks in their attempt to obtain the right to full participation in the American political system, but such obstacles have not prevented a high level of feminist activism throughout the nation's history.
Source: Based on material from Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
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