Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [406]
Using the class-conscious European feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft, with which the gentry had flirted in the 1790s, to denounce the cult of domesticity the bourgeoisie had more recently adopted, Wright shockingly demanded sexual equality for women. Sexual passion was among “the noblest of the human passions,” yet “ignorant laws, ignorant prejudices, ignorant codes of morals,” Wright argued, “condemn one portion of the female sex to vicious excess, another to as vicious restraint, and all to defenseless helplessness and slavery, and generally the whole of the male sex to debasing licentiousness, if not to loathsome brutality.” A marriage, she said, should last only as long as a couple’s emotional attachment. Addressing herself to plebeian males as well as gentlemen, she cried: “Fathers and husbands! Do you not see how, in the mental bondage of your wives and fair companions, ye yourselves are bound?”
Wright also weighed in on the debate over the educational system. As did the Public School Society (PSS), she favored inculcating republican virtue in pupils. She also agreed that schools had to counteract the time children spent on the streets “learning rudeness, impertinent language, vulgar manners, and vicious habits.” But Wright wanted schooling to produce egalitarian-minded citizens who would struggle against economic and social injustice. Such education was impossible in New York so long as the wealthy sent their children to private schools while the rest attended charity institutions run by the PSS.
The PSS gentry, Wright charged, condescendingly called working-class parents who kept their children at home ignorant, intemperate, and improvident. They refused to recognize that poor families could not dispense with their children’s earnings, especially with artisans’ wages being pummeled downward, nor could they even afford to clothe the youngsters decently enough to send to school. America had to live up to the promise of its revolution by providing full and equal education to all—including the poor, and slaves, and women. This required more than free day schools. Rather the state should provide free boarding schools to which all citizens would go and be treated equally, wearing the same plain clothing, eating the same food, receiving the same instruction. In the “State Guardianship Plan of Education” formulated by her comrade Robert Dale Owen, the state would assume educational responsibility for children starting at age two.
As Wright laid out these ideas, the crowds and the applause grew. At each lecture working-class freethinkers crushed into Masonic Hall to hear and hail the “female Tom Paine.” Paine’s ideas had undergone quite a revival since his death in Greenwich Village back in 1809 and its disturbing aftermath, when Paine’s body had been carried back to New Rochelle and no Christian graveyard would bury him. He had finally been laid to rest on his farm under a walnut tree, where he had remained until 1819, when William Cobbett got permission to dig him up and take his remains to a place where they would be more honored.
Cobbett, a radical English journalist, had fled to New York City in 1817 when the British government, responding to riots in depressed industrial and agricultural regions, suspended habeas corpus and drastically curbed the press. Facing incarceration, Cobbett chose exile, and for the next two years issued his paper from a basement in Wall Street. When he sailed back home, he took Paine’s bones with him, hoping to get English democrats to build a mausoleum for them. The project never came to pass, and Paine’s remains eventually went missing. His ideas, however, helped fuel a renaissance of deism and anticlericalism