“The influence of woman is not limited to the domestic circle. Society is her empire.” Jonathan Stearns, 1837

Women’s power and influence in American society have never been synonymous with their legal or political privileges, as the epigram from Jonathan Stearns’ sermon illustrates. This volume of primary documents attempts to provide a survey of the ways in which the foundational political principle of equality between persons has been discussed and debated in relation to women over the course of American history. While I have attempted to incorporate documents that highlight the diversity of areas in which equality has been a point of contention between men and women (ranging from marital relations to laboring conditions to voting rights), the collection is necessarily selective: documents related to women from the colonial period are absent (saved for a future volume in Ashbrook’s Core Document Collections focusing on that time period), as are documents related to women in the military, for example (some of which appear in our World War II volume). While there are some documents in the collection by men, the majority were authored by women, an editorial decision meant to allow the women of America’s past to speak for themselves, rather than filtering the arguments surrounding women’s rights, whether in the public or private spheres, through male voices. The documents selected for inclusion in this volume begin with a poem by Phyllis Wheatley, written while she was yet a child bound in slavery in Boston, that presumes her equal moral and spiritual worth—despite her gender or lack of freedom. It is fitting that the collection opens with a document that draws together the issues of race and gender, for the intersection of these two themes has been an enduring complication in the pursuit of equal rights by both African Americans and women, as several additional documents in the volume illustrate (see Declaration of Sentiments and Muller v. Oregon). My aim in the volume is to illuminate the ways in which women acted out of an assumed equality with men despite often being denied legally equal status. For example, in the case of the Edenton Ladies’ Agreement, a society of patriot women denied official political standing nevertheless took it upon themselves to engage in a political protest (a nonimportation pact). British newspapers cited this agreement as evidence of the virtue of American women, since they had organized themselves on behalf of the greater good. In a similar display of civic agency, during the war, women in the Philadelphia area contributed to a fundraising campaign to provide new uniforms to the soldiers of the Continental Army. In the antebellum period, thousands of women sent petition after petition to protest the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans and the institution of slavery. Later in the nineteenth century, women became leading advocates of other social reforms, ranging from improving labor conditions to the treatment of the mentally ill to the social problems of urban living in the modern city. These women did not let the lack of a formal role in the political process as voters or potential elected officials deter them from participating in political and civic life. Some used this robust public activity as an argument against women’s suffrage: as voters, the argument went, women would be subject to the same self-interest and potential corruption as men; as nonvoters, their participation in the nation’s civic life was free from such vice. Nevertheless, discussions over the meaning of equality between the sexes were ongoing: in what sense were men and women “equal” if their very anatomies declared them to be different? Did equality under such conditions actually demand recognition of women’s needs for special protections? At the very least, it seemed to many women that equality in the public sphere depended upon equality in the private sphere. Marriage was viewed as both a private “contract” between individuals and a fundamental social institution (and therefore, of public interest). Husbands were regarded as household “heads” and women as so completely under their influence that a woman could not (according to some jurists) be culpable for a crime she committed in the presence of her husband. Some men used this legal fiction to manipulate and even abuse their wives. Divorces were accessible (if the woman could demonstrate that she had been abused or neglected), but in most jurisdictions, only through the judicial process (because of its special status, it was argued that marriage could not be dissolved simply by the consent of the two parties but required special permission from the state), and therefore both expensive and subject to the arbitrary whims of particular judges. Young children were often granted to the mother in custody settlements (due to her presumed greater ability to nurture them), but this was a matter of “possession” and not “title”—that is, the father could legally reclaim them at any time. Unsurprisingly, questions related to women’s roles in the family, marriage equality, and reproductive freedom figure prominently in this volume as well (see Marriage Protest, Consistent Democracy, “Filial Relations,” “Voluntary Motherhood,” The Feminine Mystique, Roe v. Wade, and “Equal Rights’ for Women: Wrong Then, Wrong Now.”). Many writers in this volume viewed any differences that might exist between the sexes as either immaterial or advantageous. Women who met the same property-holding conditions as men were able to vote in New Jersey from 1776 until 1807, for example—evidence that for at least some of the Founders, the political equality of “all men” meant all human persons. Frequently we see the argument that women ought to be considered fully equal participants in their life with men because their differences provided an essentially complementary perspective to that of their male counterparts. Other writers argued that differences between men and women were merely constructed by-products of social and political disadvantage. The question of suffrage and whether or not women’s other civil rights require constitutional protections beyond those given to other classes of citizens appears early and remains late. Although the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing woman suffrage was ratified in 1920, the question of an Equal Rights Amendment remains unresolved one hundred years later. I am grateful to the Ashbrook Center for the opportunity to work on this collection, and to my many talented colleagues there and the students in our graduate program who helped to shape its contents. Special thanks are due to Sarah Beth Kitch, Melissa Matthes, Cara Rogers, Natalie Taylor, and David and Ellen Tucker for helping me hash through the questions of what to include and why. Any remaining omissions or idiosyncrasies are entirely my own responsibility, but I will gladly share whatever credit the collection may warrant with those who have been so essential to its development. 

Sarah A. Morgan Smith

Fellow

Ashbrook Center