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Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Elizabeth B. Clark
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As early as 1848, in the first public meeting on woman's rights, feminists raised the touchy issues of women's marital subjugation and divorce. They complained that the laws of marriage and divorce were framed for the benefit of men and to entrap women within the oppressive institution of marriage. Another controversial claim made at Seneca Falls—that to the ballot—went on to become the great organizing principle for women's campaigns for legal and political reform. But despite the bold beginning, divorce remained a complex and divisive issue for feminists throughout the century. Although legislatures in most states in the mid-nineteenth century were systematically liberalizing divorce laws, they could not lift the social stigma attached to it. Fearful of being branded as anti-marriage or anti-family, or believing in the permanency of marriage, many feminists spoke of divorce reluctantly, and never used their formidable organizing skills to launch a full-scale assault on laws restricting the dissolution of marriage.

Type
Articles
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 25 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1990

References

Notes

1. Report of the Woman's Rights Convention Held at Seneca Falls, New York, July 19 and 20, 1848 (1848; reprint New York, 1969), 6Google Scholar.

2. O'Neill, William, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven, 1967)Google Scholar.

3. Stanton's writings on divorce are not collected in any one place. The major sources, which contain most of her ideas on the subject, are in Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Anthony, Susan B., and Gage, Matilda Joslyn, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (New York, 1881), 1: 716–22, 738–42, 860–61;Google Scholar“Address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the Divorce Bill before the Judiciary Committee of the New York Senate … Feb. 8, 1861” (Albany, 1861)Google Scholar; “Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Address at the Decade Meeting on Marriage and Divorce,” in A History of the National Woman's Rights Movement for Twenty Years, ed. Davis, Paulina Wright (New York, 1871)Google Scholar; and “Marriage and Divorce,” unpublished manuscript, Stanton Papers, Douglass College Library, Rutgers University. Ellen DuBois includes relevant selections from Stanton's work in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York, 1981)Google Scholar.

4. DuBois, Ellen has explicated the transformative nature of Stanton's rights theory, primarily in Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Woman's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978)Google Scholar; and Dubois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

5. The contest was advertised repeatedly in the Lily starting in January of 1853. The first entry appeared in the Lily ca. Sept. 1853 (date illegible); others in the issues for Jan.–March 1854 (vol. 6 nos. 1–3).

6. Lily 4, no. 10 (August 1852): 69.

7. The debates between Greeley, Andrews, and Henry James, Sr., appeared in the Tribune in 1852 and 1853. They were reissued with an introduction by Shively, Charles in Love, Marriage, and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual (Weston, Mass., 1975)Google Scholar. James's arguments are rather less lucid than Andrews's or Greeley's, and I have omitted them. Greeley's 1860 exchange with Robert Dale Owen was reprinted in the back of Greeley's autobiography Recollections of a Busy Life (1868; reprint, New York, 1970)Google Scholar as “Marriage and Divorce.”

8. Greeley, “Marriage and Divorce,” 606.

9. Stanton addressed Greeley specifically about the matter; see Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:738–42Google Scholar.

10. Greeley, “Marriage and Divorce,” 577.

11. Ibid., 584.

12. Ditzion, Sidney, Marriage, Morals, and Sex in America: A History of Ideas (New York, 1953)Google Scholar, especially chapter 3. See also Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. Robert Owen, the founder of the community at New Harmony, Indiana, lectured and published tracts in favor of cheap and easy divorce in the 1830s and 1840s. Fanny Wright's community, Nashoba, was notorious for its loose sexual practices and the liberal terms of its marital arrangements.

13. Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, The Sanctity of Marriage (Syracuse, 1852), 7–8Google Scholar.

14. Recent historical work has stressed the pragmatic nature of much of the midcentury reform of marital women's property laws and rules of custody, not as extensions of absolute rights but as piecemeal efforts by legislatures to protect women in carrying out what were in fact rapidly growing roles in household management and domestic finance. See, for example, Lebsock, Suzanne, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Chused, Richard, “Married Women's Property Law, 1800–1850,” Georgetown Law Journal 71 (1983): 1359–1425Google Scholar; and Grossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1985)Google Scholar.

15. Gordon, Linda, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, especially chap. 6, “Social Purity and Eugenics.”

16. Lily 2, no. 4 (April 1850): 31.

17. Ibid. 4, no. 7 (July 1852): 57–58.

18. Ibid., no. 10 (August 1852): 69.

19. Stanton and Blackwell engaged in a protracted debate on divorce at the national woman's rights meeting in 1860. See Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:716–735Google Scholar.

20. Letter of Nov. 24, 1856, Stanton Papers, Douglass College Library, Rutgers University.

21. Lily 4, no. 3 (March 1852): 22.

22. Ibid., no. 2 (Feb. 1852): 13.

23. The growth of women's political culture is discussed by Baker, Paula in “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June, 1984): 620–47Google Scholar. See also Ginzberg, Lori D., “ ‘Moral Suasion is Moral Balderdash’: Women, Politics, and Social Activism in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 73, no. 3 (December 1986): 601–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Revolution 1, no. 14 (April 9, 1868): 216–17Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., no. 16 (April 23, 1868): 244–45.

26. Stanton, letter to Isabella Beecher Hooker, April 12, 1871, Douglass College Library, Rutgers University. Stanton claimed great success for her marriage lectures on the circuit.

27. Hedged In is by E. S. Phelps; the other two are by Lillie Devereaux Blake, published in 1870 and 1874, respectively.

28. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, Oct. 29, 1870, p. 10.

29. “The Slave Women of America,” Revolution 6, no. 14 (October 6, 1870): 216Google Scholar.

30. Blake, Fettered for Life, 73, 128, 129, 264.

31. This is the first documented instance of the adage, “publish or perish.”

32. Blake, Fettered for Life, 351. Another of Blake's publications contains a similar story of the atrophied and wasted talents of a beautiful young girl, “now in an alien grave, dead by her own hand.” Blake, Lillie Deveraux, Woman's Place Today (1890), 64Google Scholar.

33. Revolution 1, no. 18 (May 7, 1868): 278–79Google Scholar.

34. Quoted in DuBois, Ellen, “The Limitations of Sisterhood: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Division in the American Suffrage Movement, 1875–1902,” in Women and the Structure of Society, ed. Harris, Barbara J. and McNamara, JoAnn K. (Durham, N.C., 1984), 166–67Google Scholar.

35. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, chap. 6. See also Smith, Daniel Scott, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” Feminist Studies 1, nos. 3/4 (1973): 40–57Google Scholar, reprinted in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Hartman, Mary S. and Banner, Lois W. (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; and Leach, William, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, especially chap. 4, “Sexual Ownership and the Rationalization of Sexual Desire.”

36. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 95–97. Despite their common belief in such a right, mainstream feminists disapproved of the free love movement. Stanton's views were complicated: She agreed with Victoria Woodhull's basic philosophy that women's sexual oppression must be ended before civil rights for women would be meaningful. The free love movement provided critical support for her insistence that the right of self-ownership was central, not peripheral, to the cause of women. On occasion she openly endorsed the philosophy: see DuBois, Ellen C., “On Labor and Free Love: Two Unpublished Speeches of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 257–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At the same time, she did not go nearly as far as the free lover Victoria Woodhull in urging the positive value of erotic pleasure governed only by the lover's immediate inclination; she herself maintained a strong belief in monogamy.

37. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, Sept. 10, 1870, p. 4.

38. Stanton, Theodore and Blatch, Harriot Stanton, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 1922), 2:82Google Scholar. See also Cowan, John, Science of a New Life (1874; reprint New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

39. DuBois, “On Labor and Free Love,” 265.

40. Norton, Sarah, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, Oct. 22, 1870, p. 7Google Scholar.

41. Revolution 2, no. 15 (October 15, 1868): 233Google Scholar.

42. DuBois, “On Labor and Free Love,” 266.

43. Revolution 5, no. 20 (May 19, 1870): 309Google Scholar. See also Stanton, and Blatch, , Elizabeth Cady Stanton 2:82Google Scholar.

44. On the place of contract in American legal and social life, see Hurst, J. Willard, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison, Wis., 1956)Google Scholar; Horwitz, Morton, The Transformation of American Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 160–210Google Scholar; Grossberg, , Governing the Hearth, 20, 23–24Google Scholar; and Stanley, Amy Dru, “Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation,” Journal of American History 75 no. 2 (September 1988): 471–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Revolution 3, no. 23 (June 10, 1869): 362Google Scholar. See also the resolutions offered at the 1860 National Woman's Rights Convention, reprinted in Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:716–17Google Scholar.

46. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:716Google Scholar.

47. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, “Address … on the Divorce Bill Before the Judiciary Committee,” 10. See also Revolution 2, no. 17 (October 29, 1868): 264Google Scholar.

48. Davis, , History of the National Woman's Rights Movement, 68Google Scholar; Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:718Google Scholar; Revolution 2, no. 16 (October 22, 1868): 249–50Google Scholar.

49. Davis, , History of the National Woman's Rights Movement, 68Google Scholar.

50. Revolution 1, no. 24 (June 18, 1868): 381Google Scholar.

51. Ibid. 5, no. 6 (February 10, 1870): 94.

52. Stanton, in an article entitled “Free Trade,” denied that since Train dissociated himself from the Revolution it had gone over to “Greeley and the Protectionists.” “Commerce is ever the pioneer of civilization and Christianity, and every barrier in the way of exports and imports blocks the wheels of progress and retards the moral and intellectual development of all the races of man.” Ibid. 3, no. 15 (April 15, 1869): 233.

53. Revolution, part 1, vol. 3, no. 18 (May 8, 1869): 275Google Scholar; Ibid., part 2, vol. 3, no. 20 (May 20, 1869): 310; Ibid., part 3, vol. 3, no. 25 (June 24, 1869): 386; Ibid., part 4, vol. 4, no. 1 (July 8, 1869): 3.

54. For example, Revolution 1, no. 15 (April 16, 1868): 229Google Scholar. Stanton's own attitude toward domesticity was ambivalent. The mother of a large family, she styled herself a great matriarch and roamed public conveyances giving young mothers unsolicited advice from the idiosyncratic and advanced maternal theories of which she was so proud. As her family grew, though, she acknowledged a growing weariness at household tasks that confined her, and it was in part resentment at the physical demands of women's lives which fueled her own quest for autonomy. See in general Griffith, Elisabeth, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

55. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:716–17Google Scholar.

56. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, Nov. 5, 1870, p. 6.

57. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:717Google Scholar.

58. Ibid., 860.

59. Greeley, “Marriage and Divorce,” 585.

60. Ibid., 577.

61. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:717–18Google Scholar.

62. Davis, , History of the National Woman's Rights Movement, 64–65Google Scholar.

63. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 2:18–19Google Scholar.

64. Revolution 5, no. 9 (March 3, 1870): 136Google Scholar.

65. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:723Google Scholar.

66. Ibid., 726.

67. Ibid., 724.

68. Ibid.

69. See Leach, , True Love, 10–11Google Scholar.

70. Croly, Jane, For Better of Worse: A Book for Some Men and All Women (Boston, 1875), 4Google Scholar.

71. Ibid., 221.

72. In this sense, Stanton's family design looked very much like the privatized family Christopher Lasch describes in Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

73. DuBois suggests this in “On Labor and Free Love.”

74. Revolution 5, no. 10 (March 10, 1870): 147Google Scholar.

75. Letter from Stanton to Susan B. Anthony, Nov. 24, 1856, Stanton papers, Douglass College Library, Rutgers University.

76. Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of Stanton's strongest allies, restated this position at the NWSA convention in 1876, saying “without control of one's person, the opportunities of the world, which are the only means of development, cannot be used.” Quoted in Leach, , True Love, 81Google Scholar.

77. Stanton, , Anthony, , Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 2:19Google Scholar. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, foe of divorce, parodied these connection as “free rum, free Sundays, free suffrage, and free divorce.” Woman's Journal, Nov. 26, 1870, p. 372.

78. Stanton, “Free Love,” 268.

79. Horace Greeley, “Love, Marriage, and Divorce,” in Shively, Love, Marriage, and Divorce, 36. Greeley's main concern was the protection of the working classes rather than the emancipation of the spirit: perceiving free trade as the enemy of the workingman, Greeley opposed it.

80. Ibid., 43.

81. Ibid., 9.

82. Greeley, “Love, Marriage, and the Condition of Woman,” in Shively, Love, Marriage, and Divorce.

83. Greeley, “Love, Marriage, and Divorce,” 22.

84. Ibid., 78. Smithfield is the site in London where religious martyrs were burned at the stake.

85. See Leach on Stanton in True Love.

86. See Alice Rossi, The Feminist Papers.

87. DuBois, , Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 10Google Scholar.

88. Revolution 5, no. 10 (March 10, 1870): 152Google Scholar.

89. Ibid.

90. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 2:169Google Scholar.

91. Revolution 2, no. 11 (September 17, 1868): 169Google Scholar.

92. Stanton, , Anthony, , and Gage, , History of Woman Suffrage 1:716–22Google Scholar.

93. Woman's Journal, Sept. 12, 1874, p. 194.

94. Ibid., June 4, 1870, p. 173.

95. Greeley, “Love, Marriage, and Divorce,” 18–19.

96. Revolution 5, no. 10 (March 10, 1870): 147Google Scholar; see also Cowan, Science of a New Life.

97. Revolution 2, no. 17 (October 29, 1868): 265Google Scholar.

98. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, Sept. 3, 1870, p. 7.

99. Revolution 6, no. 1 (July 7, 1870): 2Google Scholar.

100. Revolution 3, no. 2 (January 14, 1869): 25Google Scholar.