Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 157markets,” Sarah wrote indignantly, “to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the
name of Christians.” They were, she pointed out, completely at the mercy of “the
power which is necessarily vested in the master over his property.” For Sarah, as for
Angelina Grimke, then, female emancipation and the abolition of slavery were
intimately connected. And, in Sarah’s case, that was especially so, since she saw the
condition of the female slave as a paradigm, an extreme instance of the condition of
all women, the subjection they all shared as the “property” of white men.
The connection between abolitionism and feminism in the nineteenth century was
not, however, always seamless. In 1840 a World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in
England, and those present decided on the first day not to seat women delegates.
Outraged, William Lloyd Garrison joined female delegates in the gallery. And, in the
same year, the American Anti-Slavery Society split mainly because the followers of
Garrison insisted that women could not be excluded from full participation in the
work of abolition. Among those sitting with Garrison in the gallery at the World Anti-
Slavery Convention was Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902). She was similarly
angered by the treatment of female delegates and decided to organize a convention, as
soon as she returned to the United States, wholly devoted to the rights of women. This
was the Seneca Falls Convention – which did not, in fact, take place until eight years
later, when Stanton and her family moved to Seneca Falls, New York. About three
hundred people attended, and a hundred of them – two thirds of them women –
signed a “Declaration of Sentiments,” one of the seminal documents of the century
on the condition of women. Modeled, as was observed earlier, on the Declaration of
Independence, and beginning by insisting that “all men and women are created
equal,” it then went on to point out that “the history of mankind is a history of
repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in
direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” The document was
characteristic of its time, in its mix of republican and Christian sentiment: man, for
instance, was said to have “usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself ” by claiming it
as his right to arrange for woman “a sphere of action, when that belongs to her
conscience and to her God.” It made no concessions at all, however, to the notion of
separate spheres for men and women, or to the usual domestic pieties. And its
demands were simple and radical. Women, the Declaration insisted, should have
“immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens
of the United States.”
If Stanton, along with Margaret Fuller, was the philosopher of the feminist
movement in America during the nineteenth century, then Fanny Fern was one of
those who translated feminist principles into an enormously successful writing
career. Fanny Fern was the pen name of Sara Payson Willis (1811–1872). When her
first husband died, Willis was left nearly penniless and received only a little, grudging
support from her family. Under pressure from her father, she married again but her
second husband turned out to be both jealous and oppressive. She left him after two
years, and decided to make a living for her children and herself from writing. Her
older brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867), was a successful poet, journalist,
and editor, and she appealed to him for help in getting started. The appeal provedGGray_c02.indd 157ray_c 02 .indd 157 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM