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Appendix 5. A Parallel to the Negro Problem 1075
legal rights over their property or the guardianship of their children, were denied
adequate educational facilities, and were excluded from business and the professions.*
The same was very much true of the rest of the country and of the rest of the world.
But there was an especially close relation in the South between the subordination of
women and that of Negroes. This is perhaps best expressed in a comment attributed
to Dolly Madison, that the Southern wife was ^‘the chief slave of the harem.^’*^
From the very beginning, the fight in America for the liberation of the Negro slaves
was, therefore, closely coordinated with the fight for women’s emancipation. It is inter-
esting to note that the Southern states, in the early beginning of the political emancipa-
tion of women during the first decades of the nineteenth century, had led in the grant-
ing of legal rights to women. This was the time when the South was still the stronghold
of liberal thinking in the period leading up to and following the Revolution. During
the same period the South was also the region where Abolitionist societies flourished,
while the North was uninterested in the Negro problem. Thereafter the two move-
ments developed in close interrelation and were both gradually driven out of the South.
The women suffragists received their political education from the Abolitionist move-
ment. Women like Angelina Grimke, Sarah Grimke, and Abby Kelly began their
public careers by speaking for Negro emancipation and only gradually came to fight for
women’s rights. The three great sufi’ragists of the nineteenth century—Lucretia Mott,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony—first attracted attention as ardent
campaigners for the emancipation of the Negro and the prohibition of liquor. The
women’s movement got much of its public support by reason of its affiliation with the
Abolitionist movement: the leading male advocates of woman suffrage before the Civil
War were such Abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell
Phillips, Horace Greeley and Frederick Douglass. The women had nearly achieved their
aims, when the Civil War induced them to suppress all tendencies distracting the federal
government from the prosecution of the War, They were apparently fully convinced
that victory would bring the suffrage to them as well as to the Negroes.®
The Union’s victory, however, brought disappointment to the women suffragists. The
arguments “the Negro’s hour” and “a political necessity” met and swept aside all their
arguments for leaving the word “male” out of the 1 4.th Amendment and putting “sex”
alongside “race” and “color” in the 1 5th Amendment.** Even their Abolitionist friends
‘Virginius Dabney, Liberalism in the South (193a), p. 361.
**
Cited in Harriet Martineau, Society in America (1842, first edition 1837), Vol. II, p. 8x.
‘Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics (1923),
pp. 32 ff.
’’The relevant sections of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are (under-
lining ours) :
14th Amendment
Section a. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to
their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding
Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of Electors
for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the
rxecutive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is
denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and
citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged^ except for participation in rebellion,
or other crime, the basis of reprcMQ.tj^tjQjgt, tj??.rein shall be reduced in the proj^ortion^
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