Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [654]
What did not please them, or nearly any males, was the next proposition women advanced: that all people capable of owning property should be allowed to vote. In 1848 a bare majority of the delegates at Seneca Falls had agreed to include Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s call for the suffrage in their Declaration of Sentiments. Over the next decade, as it became ever clearer that moral suasion had failed to transform men or society and that electoral politics were becoming the crucial instruments for resolving national and local issues, more and more feminists began demanding access to the ballot. Such claims were greeted with tremendous hostility, and nowhere more so than in New York City.
Since 1850, inspired by the Seneca Falls meeting, feminists had begun holding annual Women’s Rights Conventions. The first three met upstate or outside New York altogether, but in 1853, attracted by the opening of the Crystal Palace and the simultaneous gatherings of the Anti-Slavery Society and the World’s Temperance Convention (whose clergyman organizers excluded women), organized feminism ventured into the metropolis for the first time.
On September 6 three thousand delegates from eleven states as well as England and Germany packed into the Broadway Tabernacle on Worth Street. Female speakers shared the platform with male abolitionist luminaries in town for their own meeting. Together they advocated women’s right to enter public life, to engage in any profession, to wear what they chose (Lucy Stone donned “bloomers”), and to vote. Men, they declared, must be forced to abandon their privileges by an aroused public sentiment.
But “public” sentiment—if one was to judge by the crowds that jammed their way into the galleries—was cholerically against them. The audience interrupted each speaker with shouts, hisses, stomping, cheering, rude remarks, and free-for-all fights. Sojourner Truth, back in town for the event, handled the rowdies pretty well: “We’ll have our rights,” she warned. “You may hiss as much as you like, but it is comin’.” Soon, however, cacophony reigned again, and amidst a yelling, laughing uproar, the meeting was forced to adjourn.
Greeley and Bryant condemned the crowds, but the Times, the Herald, and the Courier applauded them. James Watson Webb of the Courier jeered at the “antiquated and very homely females” who “made themselves ridiculous by parading the streets in company with hen-pecked husbands, attenuated vegetarians, intemperate Abolitionists and sucking clergymen, who are afraid to say ‘no’ to a strong-minded woman for fear of infringing upon her rights.” Even men as sympathetic as Whitman found feminism unnerving. “What a queer medley of women’s rights meetings at present!” he wrote in 1858 in the Daily Times. “Women in breeches and men in petticoats—white, black, and cream-colored—atheists and free-lovers, vegetarians and Heaven knows what—all mixed together, ‘thick and slav,’ until the mixture gets a little too strong, we should think, even for metropolitan stomachs.”
Many women also remained unconvinced or in active opposition. Some traditionalists simply denounced women’s rights as contrary to divine law, but others argued that deep-rooted social inequalities made it extremely difficult to survive without a man. Where male antifeminists balked at sharing their prerogatives, females feared losing the few they had. “Women never aim so suicidal a blow against their own interest,” wrote one women’s magazine, “as when they try to do away with or revolt against. .. [the] doctrine of their inferiority,” for in so doing, they “absolve the lords of creation from that protection which they are so willing to afford.”
Working-class women were not so much opposed as indifferent to the feminist project. Upper- and middle-class calls for feminine solidarity meant little to tenement mothers and factory girls, especially given the condescension and religious bullying many feminists displayed in the autonomous women’s institutions they established, and for the moment these sets of sisters