Stanton/Anthony vs. Howe/Higginson: The (Not So) Polite Struggle For Narrative Control of The Woman Suffrage Movement
Gary Williams, University of Idaho
Pacific Northwest American Studies Association Conference
April 1999
In my 20 minutes I want to invite your attention to two issues--first, tensions among the people working to secure the vote for women in the 1870s and 1880s, and second, the writing of the biography of Margaret Fuller in the 19th century. I hope to persuade you that these issues are linked.
I became interested in these issues while working on an earlier period in Julia Ward Howe’s life [plug for book here, and gratitude to PNASA]. Howe, you are probably aware, wrote the first biography of Margaret Fuller to appear after the 1852 Memorial constructed by Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Channing. Howe’s book was published in 1883 and is heavily dependent on the Memorial. A year later, Thomas Wentworth Higginson published what contemporary scholars view as a better biography--less derivative, more trustworthy regarding the facts of Fuller’s life, more intellectually interesting. Higginson’s claim to authority on the basis of personal knowledge certainly outdid Howe’s. Howe had known Fuller, but not well. She had attended one of the Conversations and had received the benefit of Fuller’s scrutiny of several early poems, but Fuller had left Boston by the time Howe settled there in 1844, and the two never met or corresponded again, as far as I’ve been able to determine. Higginson, on the other hand, had grown up with Fuller’s younger siblings, and as he was writing about her had access to "‘five bulky manuscript volumes recorded by her brother Arthur after her death, as well as her letters to Emerson, Channing, the Marquis Ossoli, and a number of others, and several of her own and Bronson Alcott’s diaries" (Wells 264)--none of which Howe probably used.
My interest, though, is less in the relative quality of the two works than in the fact of their double-barreled appearance in the early 1880s. I’ll return to them a little further on. First, let me briefly summarize the early history of organizational efforts on behalf of woman suffrage. From 1869 on, two groups labored toward this end: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others. These two groups differed in the scope and radicalness of their aims. The AWSA (Stone-Howe-Higginson faction) welcomed the membership of men and focused solely on voting rights. The NWSA (Stanton-Anthony faction) was overwhelmingly women and concerned itself with economic and sexual issues as well as voting rights. The leaders of each faction extended superficial cordiality to one another, but documents both public and private indicate a sharp sense of rancor between them. A good overview of the multifaceted acrimony is chapter 8 of Israel Kugler’s From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Woman’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era (1987). Both groups devoted major efforts to the recording of work and progress toward the common goal of suffrage, and my interest is in the aspect of the tension generated by the question of which group’s version of the early days of the movement would prevail in the public imagination as the more accurate and comprehensive narrative.
It’s generally held that the massive compendium edited by Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, is the definitive record of early feminist work. The first two volumes of this work appeared in the early 1880s; they represent the NWSA’s effort to gather information from all parts of the country while the pioneers of the movement were still present to narrate their memories. Yet the preface to the first volume, as it celebrates the generosity of those who contributed, also includes evidence of factional discord. Some, we are told, declined to provide materials, arguing that any history of the effort written before the goal was achieved--and written, moreover, by only some of those working toward the goal--was bound to be partial and partisan. Although the editors, early-day spin masters, magnanimously view this sort of demurral as "evidence of the growing self-assertion and individualism of women" (1.7), it’s clear there was annoyance on both sides.
Stanton and Anthony’s decision to compile History of Woman Suffrage was in part a response to the fact that the NWSA had failed in efforts to publish a periodical devoted to women’s rights issues. Their periodical, called The Revolution, began publication in January 1868 and died 2½ years later, $10,000 in debt. Circulation suffered as a result of Stanton’s sharp tongue. The AWSA, meanwhile, effectively cornered the periodical market with the Woman’s Journal, begun in 1870 and published weekly until the 1920s; Howe and Higginson were contributing editors throughout the 1870s and 80s. Stanton in particular resented the success of the Woman’s Journal. As The Revolution entered its final months, she took to sniping at the rival publication:
T.W. Higginson, in the Woman’s Journal agrees that like Paganini, women should play on one string; that from New Year’s Morn to Christmas Eve they should sing suffrage songs, and nothing more; no solos on ‘side issues’ especially on marriage, divorce, or other social oppressions. (24 March 1870)
Stanton seems to have resolved on writing the History for want of any other means of preserving her organization’s ideas in print. The History reprints many of The Revolution’s articles verbatim.
The first volume was written over a six-month period and covers activities through 1860. Stanton wrote it all except for three chapters contributed by Matilda Gage; Anthony was research assistant and amanuensis. Another sign of factionalism surfaced as a result of Stanton’s distribution plan. When it appeared in May 1881, she asked wealthy friends to buy copies for college libraries. Not all of them wanted it: Vassar, for example, returned its copy (Griffith 179). The Woman’s Journal ignored the volume for over a year; its review, written by Higginson, appeared 23 September 1882 and was prefaced by these cautionary remarks:
In looking over a book giving a portion of the history of the woman suffrage agitation, I was struck anew with the difficulty of writing history, or even of reading it correctly. The same occurrence looks so differently to different people, and it is so easy for a practised writer--and sometimes without intending it--to give a wholly one-sided view of the facts, that we can easily understand how discussions may rage centuries after about historic facts that seemed perfectly clear to those who had a hand in them. What is still more important is the immense amount of omission that takes place in any narrative proceeding especially upon the wise desire to let bygones rest. . . . The progress of every great moral movement has been attended, if the truth were known, by a great many unworthy and discreditable incidents, and in rejoicing over the result, we must beware how we canonize all the performers as saints.
Higginson’s remarks are temperate, not especially inflammatory. But the Stan/An faction was clearly affronted. The annoyance, mostly submerged in Volume 1, surfaces unambiguously in the second volume, which includes the period in which the split between the two groups occurred (fall of 1869). Stanton, who did most of the writing here as well, narrates the schism tersely:
During the Autumn of this year there was a secession from our ranks, and the preliminary steps were taken for another organization. Aside from the divisions growing out of a difference of opinion on the amendments, there were some personal hostilities among the leaders of the movement that culminated in two Societies, which were generally spoken of as the New York and Boston wings of the Woman Suffrage reform. The former, as already stated, called the "National Woman Suffrage Association," with Elizabeth Cady Stanton for President, organized in May; the latter called "The American Woman Suffrage Association," with Henry Ward Beecher for President, organized the following November. Most of those who inaugurated the reform remained in the National Association [long list of names here]. . . and continued to work harmoniously together. (2.406)
Thereafter (this is about halfway through a 952-page book), the story is solely of the work of the NWSA and its leaders--until the very last chapter.
This chapter’s genesis is narrated in Elisabeth Griffith’s biography of Stanton. Stanton’s daughter Harriot arrived at her mother’s house in February 1882 and announced her intention to take her mother to Europe that summer. To speed the book’s completion, Harriot agreed to help by reading proofs and doing research, but then discovered that her mother intended to omit any account of the AWSA and was adamantly against including engravings of Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. A battle ensued; Stanton finally agreed to include a chapter if Harriot wrote it.
But then, Lucy Stone refused to cooperate. In response to a request for information, Stone sent a three-sentence biography and signed her note, "Yours with ceaseless regret that any ‘wing’ of suffragists should attempt to write the history of the other"(Griffith 180). Harriot thus relied on information she could glean from the pages of the Woman’s Journal. Her 106-page contribution to the volume is credited only in a footnote.
I gave you earlier a very brief account of the differences between the factions, but it needs saying that a part of the reason for schism--perhaps the reason that outweighed all others--was Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s unvarnished sexism and xenophobia. Here’s a representative piece of a speech from January 1869:
The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding the material and moral work alike, discord, disorder, disease, and death. . . . If American women find it hard to bear the oppressions of their own Saxon fathers, the best orders of manhood, what may they not be called to endure when all the lower orders of foreigners now crowding their shores legislate for them and their daughters. Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who don’t know the difference between a monarchy and a republic; who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s Spelling-book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E. Dickinson. (HWS 2.351, 353)
Stanton’s rhetoric was driven by her conviction, expressed in a letter to Anthony, that "cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform" (quoted in Griffith, 141). True or not, it’s clear that her style, perhaps more than any differences of opinion about issues, irked the defectors--a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the New York Times in its account of the split. The AWSA was described as "a new organization which includes among its officers and members the soberer and more cultivated friends of the movement and it owes its existence to their desire to get rid of the extravagances and follies that have marked the course of the Association in this city and of its organ, The Revolution. Loud talking, gun firing, torchlight processions and brass bands will not do the work" (2 December 1869).
The Woman’s Journal review of volume 2 of the History was written by Lucy Stone, again after a substantial delay following publication. Granting that the book contains "a vast amount of valuable material" and "important and leading facts," Stone nonetheless declared that "[n]o one reading this book would get an accurate or adequate idea of the real history of the woman suffrage movement in this country from the autumn of 1867 to 1871 and '72, its most critical and trying time" and expressed chagrin that "[a] book reviewer who had no intimate knowledge of the facts in the case, and who felt no responsibility for them, would be justified in giving large credit to the book as one of uncommon interest" (WJ 10 March 1883).
My time is almost gone, but in the couple of minutes remaining, let me sketch the case for viewing the production of Margaret Fuller biographies in the early 1880s as part of the narrative deployment by AWSA sympathizers in the battle for posterity’s ear. Fuller, of course, had no role in the struggle for the vote for women except an exemplary one: all later American feminists looked back to her as, in Charles Capper’s words, "the central precedent and model" for activism. Yet early issues of the Woman’s Journal seem to stake a preemptive claim on the Fuller memory, using it as sanction for the journal’s existence; and within six months of the founding of the AWSA, several of its leaders (including Howe and Higginson) staged a gala commemorative 60th birthday party for Fuller in the New England Women’s Club parlors (a site that served also as the editorial office for the Woman’s Journal).
A few years before this celebration, according to Joan von Mehren, Fuller’s family had tried to commission a biography; Caroline Healey Dall was to have written it. The project failed when Fuller’s brother Richard was unable to retrieve Margaret’s letters to James Nathan. More or less in place of a biography, Horace Greeley undertook to publish a 6-volume edition of Fuller’s writings; this appeared in 1869. During the 1870s, interest in Fuller faded, except as the subject of lectures by Bronson Alcott and Ednah Dow Cheney.
Howe’s work on Fuller, written and published in 1883, offers only a vague and unsubstantiated justification for its existence: Through "growing interest felt in Margaret and her work . . . a demand seems to have arisen for a later word about her." In fact, Howe makes clear that she has no thought of superseding the 1852 Memoir; she only intends to "borrow [from it] the inspiration for a new study and presentment" because "in the turning and perseverance of this planet, present soon becomes past, and that which has been best said asks to be said again"(Howe 1-2)--hardly a pressing rationale. She may have been solicited to write it on the basis of two lectures she published in 1881 by Roberts Brothers (also the biography’s publisher), in which she reveres Fuller as a saint of women’s freedom. Money may have been an object: Howe wrote worriedly to her brother Sam in January 1883, a month or two before she began the biography, that the interest from a small inheritance was her primary source of income; the revenue generated recently by her occasional reviews and lectures was insignificant.
An argument can also be made that the Fuller biography is repayment of a personal debt--that its greatest interest is as AUTObiography. In her narration of two periods in Fuller’s life, Howe’s personal circumstances equipped her especially well to understand and interpret the value of Fuller’s experience. She appreciated Fuller because Fuller had managed to accept gracefully the deferral of her intellectual development when family duty called her. Knowing this about her female mentor had helped Howe at earlier moments bear a similar trial. And second, Fuller seems to have been for Howe the model of a woman who in the end managed successfully to conflate her romantic and domestic interests. Howe understood that Fuller’s attraction to Ossoli, a man utterly unlike her, was both deep and reciprocal. The biography emphasizes Ossoli’s devoted constant attendance on Fuller, a phenomenon that clearly evoked envy from a woman whose husband during their 33 years together had left her alone most of the time and who therefore felt driven to form strong emotional alliances with men other than Mr. Howe.
But whatever other explanations there may be for its existence, its role in the narrative guerilla warfare between the NWSA and the AWSA is made clear by several polite but subtly barbed passages that seem to echo the tensions I’ve described. [handout] And the joint impact of two biographies written by leaders of the AWSA, appearing as if in response to the History of Woman Suffrage, dramatically spotlights the surprising fact that in nearly two thousand pages of materials gathered by Stanton and Anthony, Margaret Fuller’s name is mentioned almost not at all.