1996 essay on Lydia Maria Child's fight for human rights

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Copyright 1996 The Times-Picayune Publishing Co.  
The Times-Picayune

January 14, 1996 Sunday, THIRD

SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. A8

LENGTH: 1322 words

HEADLINE: ROOTS OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS PUSH EXAMINED;
ABOLITIONISTS, NOVELISTS LED CONVERSATION ON EQUALITY

BYLINE: By DELIA M. RIOS Newhouse News Service

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:
   "My dear Miss Sedgwick," began Lydia Maria Child's adoring letter to her
mentor, the novelist Catharine Sedgwick.

"It is one perpetual wish," Child wrote in 1827, "to think, and write, and
be like you."

Within seven years, Child's tone would change to critical, even
disillusioned. The student outgrew the teacher, and attracted her own
devotees through her uncompromising stance against slavery. The harsh words
of an 1834 letter to Sedgwick - who supported a more moderate move to end
slavery by colonizing slaves in Africa and the West Indies - reveal just how
great their philosophical divide had become.

"I now abhor it (colonization) more than slavery," Child wrote Sedgwick, "in
as much as I dislike hypocrisy more than crime."

Then came a second, parallel schism.

Child, like a growing number of female abolitionists, came to view American
women as also enslaved - by laws that made them, in effect, their husbands'
property and denied them equality before the law.

*** Broader discussion ***

This intellectual struggle was more than the musings of two influential
writers. The correspondence between Child and Sedgwick was part of a broader
conversation begun among an elite group of women in the 18th century, which
crystallized in the 19th century among women in the anti-slavery movement.
From these women emerged the beginnings of the modern women's rights
movement, and it is a history that still speaks to Americans as we continue
struggling with rights and equality and what they mean for both women and
African-Americans.

While the Founding Fathers were busy fighting the Revolution and then
crafting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, American women were initiating a political conversation of their
own. Out of this conversation grew the women's rights movement of the 19th
century, the 1920 constitutional amendment granting women the vote, and a
political dialogue that has continued throughout the 20th century as women
continue struggling with the definition of legal, social and political
equality.

*** Different perspectives ***

But, as the conflict between Child and Sedgwick shows, the women who
instigated this social upheaval were not united in thought or purpose. Their
dialogue was more complex and intriguing than that, as is clearly documented
in a new exhibit at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in
downtown Washington that revives the voices of those tumultuous times.

Taking a cue from the exhibit's title - "Talking Radicalism in a Greenhouse:
Women Writers and Women's Rights" - portraits and artifacts are displayed
among forest green gallery walls draped in purple, white and pink garlands.
The environment of the 18th and 19th centuries allowed political thought to
flower among women, and there was nothing delicate about the ideas these
women espoused.

Abigail Adams' famous letter of 1776 to her husband, John - then in
Philadelphia with the Continental Congress - is a case in point. The letter
is arguably one of the more historically significant, as well as beloved,
documents in the exhibit. The ink is faded, but the confident hand of the
writer - who would become wife to one president and mother to another - is
clear. Her oft-quoted admonition to her husband was prophetic:

"If perticuliar (sic) care and attention is not paid to the Laidies (sic),
we are determined to foment a Rebelion (sic) . . ."

The rebellion did not come until the next century. But when it did, it far
exceeded Abigail Adams' hopes for legal rights within marriage. And it would
be twofold, spurred on by another issue that the Founding Fathers chose not
to address either: slavery.

Abolitionist Angelina Emily Grimke, in an 1838 letter to Catharine Beecher -
elder sister of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" author Harriet Beecher Stowe and a
proponent of women's "subordinate station" below men - put it this way:

"The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the
discussion of other rights, and the ultimate result will most certainly be
the breaking of every yoke . . . an emancipation far more glorious than any
the world has ever yet seen . . ."

Female abolitionists - white and black - not only became a formidable force
against slavery, but they also acquired a political sophistication that led
many of them to question their limited legal and political rights as women.

"Women learned to argue employing the same intellectual and moral tools and
rhetoric as men," the exhibit notes explain, "and to push through the
restrictions of 'proper' feminine discourse. They began to write on the same
level with men and to speak their minds in public to mixed audiences of men
and women, black and white.

"They were, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson said about Child, 'always talking
radicalism in a greenhouse.' "

*** Black women join in ***

Black women who had been enslaved lent their voices to this conversation,
challenging white women to acknowledge the double standard of white and
black womanhood. Among these women were Phillis Wheatley of the 18th century
and Harriet Ann Jacobs of the 19th. Wheatley was the first published
African-American poet, of either sex. Jacobs' wrenching account of slave
life, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," was published at the outbreak
of the Civil War in 1861 and exposed the sexual abuses endured by female
slaves, abuses that outraged white women.

About the same time that Abigail Adams was lamenting the "tyranny of
husbands," Wheatley was writing classically styled poetry about black
slavery:

"I, young in Life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat . . .

And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway?"

To convey the dynamics of the generations-long conversation that has evoked
such fervent exchanges, the DAR exhibit's artifacts - particularly the
letters and books written by some of the more prominent and prolific of the
women - are arranged in glass cases with their pages open to face
corresponding items on opposite walls.

The effect, especially with the added drama of the women's portraits, is as
if they are making their arguments still. And, in a sense, they are.

Catherine Tuggle of the DAR museum explains:

"There are a lot of discordant voices about women's roles. We wanted to show
people that there are a lot of the same concerns and arguments about women
going on today as then.

"There are the same voices, the same threads that go through - How equal can
women be? . . . How far do you stretch equality?"

*** Cross-cutting lines ***

While female abolitionists often became persuaded that women also needed
equal rights, that was not always true. Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble, an
English actress divorced from an American slave owner, documented slavery's
horrors in her 1863 book, "Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation."
Despite her own unconventional life as an actress and author, she was not an
advocate for women's rights.

Even where there were lines of agreement, there were rifts. Harriet Beecher
Stowe, for example, is remembered for her anti-slavery book "Uncle Tom's
Cabin." But she spurned Harriet Jacobs' request for help with her book about
slave life after Jacobs declined Stowe's request to use the story in her own
book.

Despite the divisions, the conversation - by the end of the Civil War and
after the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves - was clearly focusing
on women's rights.

"Although many of the writers in this exhibit worked tirelessly for the
rights of women, including the right to vote," according to the exhibit,
"none lived to see the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920."

But these women from the 18th and 19th centuries had set the stage.

In an 1867 letter to Lydia Maria Child, suffragist Susan B. Anthony
proclaimed:

"We must, and will, succeed."

GRAPHIC: Harriet Jacobs wrote her influential book, "Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl" after winning her freedom in 1852. Her account of sexual
abuse of female slaves enraged white women and prompted female abolitionist
Lydia Maria Child to call on women to prevent the return of slaves to the
'loathsome den of corruption and cruelty.' NNS PHOTO

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: January 18, 1996