Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists by Sally Roesch Wagner Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sally Roesch Wagner
grew older, Stanton and Gage recognized that superficial changes in their culture and government would not bring freedom. Mirrored by surrounding nations with an ancient history of mutuality, the cutthroat world of competition in which they lived appeared flawed. “The hope of the future seems to be largely in cooperation,” Gage mused. 19 Stanton concurred in the speech she delivered at her eightieth birthday party:
My message today to our coadjutors is that we have a higher duty than the demand for suffrage. We must now, at the end of fifty years of faithful service, broaden our platform and consider the next step in progress ... cooperation, a new principle in industrial economics. We see that the right of suffrage avails nothing for the masses in competition with the wealthy classes, and, worse still, with each other. 20
They knew a cooperative society was possible; they had seen it.
From Subordination to Cooperation
Punished simply for being female, both religiously and legally, without rights (or even a recognized existence), the EuroAmerican wife and mother was the virtual slave of her husband. Not all men were tyrants but the law, as Lucretia Mott said, gave all men the right of tyranny. Most paid positions were closed to women and the few available ones paid no more than half the wages men received for the same work. None of this was natural or divinely inspired, said the advocates of woman’s rights. They personally knew of nations where women’s work stood equally valued with that of men.
Underpinnings of Western women’s oppression were to be found in the Bible, Stanton and Gage believed. Genesis 3:16 consigned women to subordination to men because of the sin of Eve:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
In her Woman’s Bible, Stanton interpreted this passage and its effect on women:
The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty ... so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible. 1
[Men] “cling to the idea of the family unit,” Stanton maintained, “because on that is based the absolute power of the father over the property, children, and the civil and political rights of wives.” 2 She echoed words she had written decades earlier, when she penned the “Declaration of Sentiments” in 1848 for the first woman’s rights convention in the world’s history at Seneca Falls:
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. 3
Property Rights
EuroAmerican women lost all rights to their property when they married. Native women, men, and children all had control of their own personal property, an authority which was respected by all. Alice Fletcher talked about the property rights among the Indian women in the numerous tribes and nations she had observed, touching a sensitive nerve as she recounted this personal experience with the Omaha:
At the present time all property is personal; the man owns his own ponies and other belongings which he has personally acquired; the woman owns her horses, dogs, and all the lodge equipments, children own their own articles, and parents do not control the possessions of their children. There is
My message today to our coadjutors is that we have a higher duty than the demand for suffrage. We must now, at the end of fifty years of faithful service, broaden our platform and consider the next step in progress ... cooperation, a new principle in industrial economics. We see that the right of suffrage avails nothing for the masses in competition with the wealthy classes, and, worse still, with each other. 20
They knew a cooperative society was possible; they had seen it.
From Subordination to Cooperation
Punished simply for being female, both religiously and legally, without rights (or even a recognized existence), the EuroAmerican wife and mother was the virtual slave of her husband. Not all men were tyrants but the law, as Lucretia Mott said, gave all men the right of tyranny. Most paid positions were closed to women and the few available ones paid no more than half the wages men received for the same work. None of this was natural or divinely inspired, said the advocates of woman’s rights. They personally knew of nations where women’s work stood equally valued with that of men.
Underpinnings of Western women’s oppression were to be found in the Bible, Stanton and Gage believed. Genesis 3:16 consigned women to subordination to men because of the sin of Eve:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
In her Woman’s Bible, Stanton interpreted this passage and its effect on women:
The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty ... so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible. 1
[Men] “cling to the idea of the family unit,” Stanton maintained, “because on that is based the absolute power of the father over the property, children, and the civil and political rights of wives.” 2 She echoed words she had written decades earlier, when she penned the “Declaration of Sentiments” in 1848 for the first woman’s rights convention in the world’s history at Seneca Falls:
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. 3
Property Rights
EuroAmerican women lost all rights to their property when they married. Native women, men, and children all had control of their own personal property, an authority which was respected by all. Alice Fletcher talked about the property rights among the Indian women in the numerous tribes and nations she had observed, touching a sensitive nerve as she recounted this personal experience with the Omaha:
At the present time all property is personal; the man owns his own ponies and other belongings which he has personally acquired; the woman owns her horses, dogs, and all the lodge equipments, children own their own articles, and parents do not control the possessions of their children. There is
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