Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [781]
The campaign for women’s suffrage drew this satirical response from Currier & Ives, known variously as The Age of Brass or The Triumph of Women’s Rights. (© Museum of the City of New York)
The women fared no better at the federal level. When former abolitionists set out to guarantee the vote for black males by passing the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, Stanton and Anthony supported them but insisted that suffrage for women be included in the demand. Rebuffed by hitherto staunch supporters like Wendell Phillips, who announced that “this hour belongs to the negro,” Stanton and Anthony countered that Phillips’s definition of “negro” left out half the African-American race and that by smuggling the word “male” into the Constitution, the proposed new amendment was actually taking a step backward. Their protests proved unavailing, and many abolitionist women (mostly in Boston) supported Phillips’s argument that burdening black suffrage with women’s rights would sink it.
Balked by Republicans, Stanton and Anthony turned to Democrats, in the process embracing racist justifications for their cause. Arguing that white men should accept women as allies against the supposed perils of black supremacy, they joined forces with the flamboyant millionaire George Francis Train and campaigned for enfranchising Beauty, Virtue, and Intelligence to counter freedmen’s Muscle, Color, and Ignorance. Many of their colleagues felt shamed by this appeal, but Stanton and Anthony argued that the Republican Party was a sinking ship, and “rats—that is female rats ought to know enough to leave.” Yet when they appealed for support at the national Democratic Party convention in 1868, Stanton was literally laughed out of Tammany Hall.
Renewing their search for allies, Stanton and Anthony discovered their true constituency: middle-class women like themselves, particularly those living in New York City. Using funds provided by their rich ally George Francis Train, they launched a feminist journal, the Revolution, from offices in the Woman’s Bureau, a large town house near Gramercy Park established by Elizabeth B. Phelps as a meeting center for New York women. With Anthony managing and Stanton editing, they brought out the first issue in January 1868, its masthead proclaiming, “Men Their Rights and Nothing More—Women Their Rights and Nothing Less.” Train, a militant Fenian, departed soon after for Ireland, leaving Stanton and Anthony the sole directors of the paper.
The Revolution, promising that “not only the ballot, but bread and babies will be discussed,” embraced a whole panoply of gender-related issues. The editors resurrected the radical feminist heritage by publishing the work of Frances Wright and Mary Wollstonecraft. They boldly tackled the divorce issue, which Stanton had first raised, to great consternation, at the Tenth Woman’s Rights Convention in 1860, and again urged that marriage be treated not as a sacred pact but as a civil contract, easily dissolvable in the event of desertion, drunkenness, insanity, cruelty, adultery, and even simple incompatibility.
Setting the divorce issue in a still larger framework, the editors argued that women needed to become independent so they could marry and remain married out of choice, not economic necessity. This in turn required equal rights under law, the vote, coeducation in schools and colleges, and fundamental changes in society’s attitudes about men, women, and the nature of their relationships. To this end, the editors took up subjects usually considered anathema in respectable publications, including sex education, infanticide, rape, wife beating, and prostitution. In 1867 the duo had protested when the Metropolitan Board of Health, picking up on Dr. Sanger’s antebellum proposal, recommended