The Declaration of Independence and Women’s Rights

The Declaration of Independence was intended as justification for rebellion against a British king who no longer protected and nurtured his colonial dependents and thus no longer deserved their loyalty and obedience. In this sense, the Declaration was bound to an eighteenth-century moment in time, yet Jefferson’s preamble asserting the unalienable rights of men transcends that moment, and it has influenced both men and women for nearly 250 years. The struggle of women for equality has extended the meaning of “all men” far beyond what Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries ever imagined. In this issue of History Now, our scholars offer a close look at the many ways the Declaration’s preamble has informed and inspired American women’s struggle for equality.

Eileen Ka-May Cheng begins our story with her essay, “American Women Historical Writers and the Declaration of Independence.” Cheng shows us that early historians like Mercy Otis Warren did not see in the Declaration a call for women’s legal and economic independence, nor did the early nineteenth-century reformer Emma Willard who focused narrowly on the value of educating women so that they could instill virtue and patriotism in their children. Yet Willard’s student, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw the link between the preamble’s assertion of equality and women’s right of inclusion, and she and her colleagues at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention made that link explicit. Their “Declaration of Sentiments,” a clarion call for women’s legal, educational, and economic rights, was designed as an echo of Jefferson’s original claim of equality for men. But, as Cheng points out, in their claim that there was a direct and exclusive path from Seneca Falls to women’s long struggle for suffrage, Stanton and her friends denied the role of other voices calling for broad reform. Cheng concludes that the “sacred status” of the Declaration of Independence was a double-edged sword that could be used to advance women’s equality or divert it.

In “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Founding Philosopher of American Women’s Rights,” Lori Ginzberg offers us insight into the complexity of the nineteenth-century movement for equality. Stanton grew up in a prosperous home; her father was a judge, a slaveholder, and landowner. As a conservative, he did not consider a married woman’s lack of autonomy or legal identity to be a problem. But his daughter, Ginzberg tells us, did. Her marriage to a proponent of abolition and her own involvement in that movement deepened her understanding of the damage done by inequality. Although Stanton was not the first and definitely not the only American woman committed to women’s rights, she was surely the woman most associated with the earliest organized movement for gender reform. Still, it was Stanton’s agenda for women’s access to education, legal rights, and a formal political voice that was embodied in the Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments,” which used the Declaration of Independence as its template. Stanton’s message was clear: As long as the pursuit of happiness was denied to women, the American Revolution’s business was unfinished. Yet Stanton’s radicalism had its limits; she failed to consider women’s experiences outside her own. Her elitism revealed itself in her indignation that women were obliged to bow to laws made “by negroes and foreigners”—in short, to men whose social class was not her own.

White women such as Stanton were not the only women wrestling with the links between the Declaration of Independence and their own social equality. In her essay, “‘Was Woman True?’ Sojourner Truth and the 1867 American Equal Rights Association Anniversary Meeting,” Margaret Washington reminds us that the message of the Declaration came through differently for Black women. Sojourner Truth had her own personal history of rebellion and independence. Born enslaved, she “took” her freedom by walking away from her master’s control. She became a Methodist preacher—and a powerful single voice for the equality of African Americans and women. She joined White women in their battle to prevent the specification of “male” as a limit to birthright citizenship. Speaking to a White audience after the Civil War, she called for the destruction of the last remnants of slavery and for Black women to receive the same rights as Black men. She did not romanticize the relationship between Black men and Black women; women suffered physical abuse at the hands of husbands and fathers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffrage leaders seemed sympathetic to Truth’s call for Black women’s equality, but sisterhood was often undercut by racism. Stanton viewed Black male suffrage as an insult to White women who, she believed, were superior and more deserving than “degraded” formerly enslaved men. Sojourner’s biracial solidarity could not overcome Stanton’s indignation that Black men had received the vote before it was granted to their “superiors”—White women. Although Stanton gave lip service to universal suffrage, race remained a stumbling block for decades to come.

Mary Walton examines the career of Alice Paul in her essay, “‘Men and Women Shall Have Equal Rights’: Alice Paul and the Suffrage Movement.” Paul’s radicalism carried the struggle for women’s rights far beyond what earlier reformers imagined. Born in 1885, the child of Quakers, she reaped the benefits of newer attitudes toward women’s education and a newer acceptance of women’s intellectual capacities. She graduated from Swarthmore, received a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and traveled abroad to live for a year in England. In 1908 she enrolled in the London School of Economics and joined the suffrage campaign led by the militant Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst, whose motto was “Deeds, Not Words,” pursued disruption as a strategy. Her followers—including Alice Paul—were frequently arrested for protests, jailed, and, when they staged hunger strikes, force-fed by the authorities. Paul brought the “Deeds, Not Words” strategy with her when she returned to America in 1910. Eager to see a federal suffrage amendment, Paul organized the first suffrage parade in Washington, DC, an event so theatrical that crowds flocked to see it. Thus when President-elect Woodrow Wilson arrived in the nation’s capital, there was no crowd to greet him. Although the parade was disrupted by drunk and angry men, Paul considered it a success and believed it had hastened action on a federal amendment. She proved wrong. For the next four years, President Wilson refused to support the amendment, insisting that suffrage was a state issue. Undaunted, Paul escalated her protests. On January 10, 1917, she and members of her new National Woman’s Party picketed the White House, holding aloft banners that asked Wilson how long women must wait for liberty. A mob formed, angry at what they considered unpatriotic behavior just as America entered World War I, and Paul and her colleagues were arrested and jailed. Paul reprised the Pankhurst response: a hunger strike that drove the authorities to force-feed the women. Yet time and circumstances were on Alice Paul’s side. The number of states granting woman suffrage had grown, and there was support for a federal amendment. Wilson at last agreed. But it would take two years for the amendment to be ratified. When the vote was won, Paul moved on to a new agenda: putting an end to legal discrimination. On July 21, 1923, she introduced the Equal Rights Amendment. She lived to see the ERA pass Congress, but when she died in 1977 it had not won over enough states for ratification. To this day, her goal has not been achieved.

Rebecca Adami widens the lens to bring us an international focus in her essay, “The United Nations Charter of 1945 and Women’s Rights.” In the aftermath of World War II, the international community created the United Nations. In the midst of the excitement surrounding its birth, little notice was taken of the role women delegates played in its creation. “We are a union of brothers” declared the presiding officer, and sadly, this was true of the American delegation which included only one female delegate, Virginia Gildersleeve, the president of the elite women’s college Barnard. Women representatives in other delegations were also few; only eight were present and only four of these—Gildersleeve and representatives from the Dominican Republic, China, and Brazil—signed the Charter. Less than one percent of the 3,500 people gathered for the event were women. When a number of female representatives proposed a resolution for the equal eligibility of women to participate in the UN, the US joined Cuba and the United Kingdom in declaring such a resolution unnecessary. It would be seen, it was argued, as “undue interference” in the domestic affairs of member nations. As Adami puts it, “Member states should, according to this view, have the right to deny half of their populations this possibility.” Despite US opposition, however, the resolution did pass. Later, however, when three Latin American women delegates proposed a Commission on the Status of Women, the US and the United Kingdom firmly opposed it. Thus the American record on women’s rights around the world proved disappointing as what we call the “modern era” began.

The original essays in this issue are supplemented by a wide range of educational resources from the Gilder Lehrman Institute, including past issues of History Now on aspects of women’s history, episodes of Book Breaks and Inside the Vault, and, as always, spotlighted primary sources from the Gilder Lehrman Collection. The special feature is a video presentation from the Institute’s archives by one of the issue’s contributors, Lori D. Ginzberg, on her book Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life.

This is our final issue before your much-deserved summer break. We look forward to returning with a new topic for your consideration in June. Until then, happy vacation!

Carol Berkin, Editor, History Now
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now
Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History