The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [58]
The lovely Angelina Grimké felt as if she would faint, when she accepted what was meant as a joke and appeared to speak before the Massachusetts legislature on the anti-slavery petitions, the first woman ever to appear before a legislative body. A pastoral letter denounced her unwomanly behavior:
We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury…. The power of woman is her dependence, flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection…. But when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer…her character becomes unnatural. If the vine, whose strength and beauty is to lean on the trellis-work and half conceal its cluster, thinks to assume the independence and overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit, but fall in shame and dishonor in the dust.10
More than restlessness and frustration made her refuse to be “shamed into silence,” and made New England housewives walk two, four, six, and eight miles on winter evenings to hear her.
The emotional identification of American women with the battle to free the slaves may or may not testify to the unconscious foment of their own rebellion. But it is an undeniable fact that, in organizing, petitioning, and speaking out to free the slaves, American women learned how to free themselves. In the South, where slavery kept women at home, and where they did not get a taste of education or pioneering work or the schooling battles of society, the old image of femininity reigned intact, and there were few feminists. In the North, women who took part in the Underground Railroad, or otherwise worked to free the slaves, never were the same again. Feminism also went west with the wagon trains, where the frontier made women almost equal from the beginning. (Wyoming was the first state to give women the vote.) Individually, the feminists seem to have had no more nor less reason than all women of their time to envy or hate man. But what they did have was self-respect, courage, strength. Whether they loved or hated man, escaped or suffered humiliation from men in their own lives, they identified with women. Women who accepted the conditions which degraded them felt contempt for themselves and all women. The feminists who fought those conditions freed themselves of that contempt and had less reason to envy man.
The call to that first Woman’s Rights Convention came about because an educated woman, who had already participated in shaping society as an abolitionist, came face to face with the realities of a housewife’s drudgery and isolation in a small town. Like the college graduate with six children in the suburb of today, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, moved by her husband to the small town of Seneca Falls, was restless in a life of baking, cooking, sewing, washing and caring for each baby. Her husband, an abolitionist leader, was often away on business. She wrote:
I now understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with in the isolated household and the impossibility of woman’s best development if in contact the chief part of her life with servants and children…. The general discontent I felt with woman’s portion…and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women, impressed me with the strong feeling that some active measures should be taken…. I could not see what to do or where to begin—my only thought was a public meeting for