Cait and Brenda hit on the conundrum in the overlap of woman's rights and abolitionism.
If you have white women in the North beginning to see marriage as an unequal relationship just as slavery is an unequal relationship, why do abolitionists persist (before and after the Civil War) on having freed people marry?
One historian (Kristen Hoganson) wrote an article about this, showing that while white women wanted equal marriages for themselves, they had different expectations for black men and women after slavery.
Questions:
When the woman's rights movement and antislavery movement collided on issues of marriage, how did this play out?
Both Stanley and Cott note how activists of both groups (sometimes the same people) addressed marriage in regards to different issues (control over one's sexuality, the right to contract, the ability to consent, self-ownership, how to "civilize" freed people, etc.). What were the arguments of woman's rights activists? What were the arguments of antislavery supporters? Did they contradict each other?
What was the white southern view of marriage, slavery, and contract? What happened to this perspective after the Civil War?
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Both the abolitionist and women's rights activists arguments come down to their own definition of what a contract is. To the abolitionist, freedom meant the ability to make a conscious decision to contract out one's labor, or to simply make a legally binding contract. In this regard urging freed men and women to marry was a logical first step in setting up a legacy of entering into contracts. Both Cott and Stanley touch on the introduction of marital norms to emancipated slaves by the American Tract Society. If we examine the broader use of marriage as a normalizing political contract then it shows that there was another intent to having freed slaves marry; that if the basic form of society is a "standard" form of marriage, the integration of people into society would start with the formation of these marriages.
On the other side were the women's rights activists. To them, slavery meant that a person had complete control over every part of their life and body. Under the current laws, women had no control over several parts of their lives, such as wages earned by themselves and to a large extent, the use of their bodies. Grimke argued that there were no inherent need for differences in treatment based on biological sex. She echoed the sentiment of most women's rights activists. Gender differences should not mean legal differences. Even in the later part of the 19th century, when the government started to recoginize the need for welfare assistance, the role of the assistance was to replace the male breadwinner, not to support women and children.
I thought it was interesting when reading the Cott that she mentioned the "free societies", such as the Oneida. The groups transcended economic norms, almost being a complete contractual society based on republicanism, yet, they still received backlash. Does this seem contradictory to anyone else? What place does a contract have if society would allow everyone to contract themselves out completely for the betterment of society?
Its an interesting question. The fact that the rhetoric of freedom that had been associated with contract later had to be rescinded by law makers when it came to the contract of marrige speaks to a confusion amongst leaders. Abolitionsist did not seem to invest themselelves in the virtue of the contract. If free contract had been extended to women and freedmen alike than I think that there was a fear of the undermining of republican values. The fact that the language of contract and marrige is being pushed at all by feminists implies that we are already seeing a breakdown of the ideal of republican civic responsibility within the scope of gender.
I would however disagree with you on the point of Grimke. I really think that she was a foward thinking woman far ahead of her time. The issue of obliterating the "seprate spheres" is not something that most feminist are willing to adress until well into the 19th C. Women won the right to vote based on the notion that women would vote as a block of women and therefore represtenting the spheres of morality and charity. They argued they wanted the vote to help spread social welfare (something they took up as a womens responsibility). Grimke is downright radical for implying this so early. Welfare was started to replace the male bread winner in situation in which virtuous women were hindered by circumstance, however these programs have thiere origins in the Charitable organization of Upper class womens scocieties, not in patriarchal and mysogynist law making. Women petioned federal government to aid families in need which more or less ends the effors of "states rights" advocates.
As far as the integration of freedman, abolitionist and the like seem almost hypocrytical. The problem is that they pushed for marrige, but always with the expectation that black women would continue to work for wages as "thier kind were naturally fit to do." Marrige was an effort to control sexual relations amongst freed slaves but niether law makers nor abolitionists were prepared to create assimilated norms for freedwomen. Even in the language of abolition women were a tool to sexually charge the debate, because they were striped of female virtue. It is almost as if no one was prepared or thought about the status of the free women post-emancipation.
So how did black women adress thier status in the antebellum era, and what was the reaction?
Claire - the Oneida Commune was so controversial because its members practiced "complex marriage." This was a plan devised by John Humphrey Noyes (whose wife died, or perhaps just became feeble, because of too many pregnancies). Complex marriage's guidelines were that young men (seen to be more sexually active than young women) would have sex with post-menopausal women - to prevent pregnancies. Fertile women would be assigned sexual partners by Noyes based on the couples he thought would produce good children. There was no monogamy.
So - that's why most Americans weren't into the Oneida scene.
Bailey - good question at the end. Amy Dru Stanley tries to answer it with the limited sources that are available - guessing what Sojourner Truth might have talked about with freedwomen. Like women everywhere, there were probably different ideas depending upon circumstances. I would tentatively suggest that freedwomen were less bound up in rigid theories of contract and more concerned with the immediate experiences of their own marriages and of their friends and family. If freedwomen experienced satisfying enough conditions in their own marriage and new of similarly happy couples, they probably liked the institution. If not, they didn't. Those who had the fortune to listen and talk to Truth and Harper and other feminists touring the South might have changed their perspectives.
And I totally agree that Angelina Grimke is a radical. She's a firebrand, way ahead of her time, and also very different from her immediate successors - the woman's rights activists of the 1850s. Her letters with her fiance and then husband, Theodore Weld, are a great resource. If someone wants to write on one particular marriage - those would be a good paper topic.
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