THE MAKING OF RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION ★^589to racial and ethnic prejudices, arguing that native- born white women deserved
the vote more than non- whites and immigrants. “Patrick and Sambo and Hans
and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a
republic,” declared Stanton, had no right to be “making laws for [feminist leader]
Lucretia Mott.” But other abolitionist- feminists, like Abby Kelley and Lucy Stone,
insisted that despite their limitations, the Reconstruction amendments repre-
sented steps in the direction of truly universal suffrage and should be supported.
The result was a split in the movement and the creation in 1869 of two hostile
women’s rights organizations— the National Woman Suffrage Association, led
by Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, with Lucy Stone as
president. They would not reunite until 1890.
Thus, even as it rejected the racial definition of freedom that had emerged in
the first half of the nineteenth century, Reconstruction left the gender boundary
largely intact. When women tried to use the rewritten legal code and Constitu-
tion to claim equal rights, they found the courts unreceptive. Myra Bradwell
invoked the idea of free labor in challenging an Illinois statute limiting the
practice of law to men, but the Supreme Court in 1873 rebuffed her claim. Free
labor principles, the justices declared, did not apply to women, since “the law of
the Creator” had assigned them to “the domestic sphere.”
A Delegation of Advocates of Woman Suffrage Addressing the House Judiciary Com-
mittee, an engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 4, 1871. The
group includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated just to the right of the speaker, and
Susan B. Anthony, at the table on the extreme right.
What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction?