First-Wave Feminism
"First-wave feminism" refers to a period of feminist activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States. It focused on remedying legal inequalities, and especially on gaining women's suffrage.
Prominent leaders of the first-wave feminist movement in the United States include Lucretia Coffin Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, "Mother" Jones, and Susan B. Anthony. Anthony and other activists, such as Victoria Woodhull and Matilda Joslyn Gage, made attempts to cast votes prior to their legal entitlement to do so and faced charges as a result.
Gage, of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), embodied the radicalism of much second-wave feminism. Some activists belonged to conservative Christian groups (for example, Frances Willard belonged to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union). The majority of first-wave feminists were more moderate and conservative than radical or revolutionary. The members of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), for example, were willing to work within the political system, and they chose to unite with sympathetic men in power to promote the cause of suffrage.
The limited membership of the NWSA was narrowly focused on gaining a federal amendment for women's suffrage, whereas the AWSA, with 10 times as many members, worked to gain suffrage on a state-by-state level as a necessary precursor to federal suffrage. The NWSA had broad goals, hoping to achieve a more equal social role for women, but the AWSA was aware of the divisive nature of many of those goals and instead chose to focus solely on suffrage. The NWSA was known for having more publicly aggressive tactics (such as picketing and hunger strikes), whereas the AWSA used more traditional strategies such as lobbying, delivering speeches, applying political pressure, and gathering signatures for petitions.
The first wave of feminists, in contrast to the second wave, focused very little on the subjects of abortion, birth control, and overall reproductive rights of women. Though she never married, Susan B. Anthony published her views about marriage, holding that a woman should be allowed to refuse sex with her husband. The American woman had no legal recourse at that time against rape by her husband.
In 1860, New York passed a revised Married Women's Property Act that gave women shared ownership of their children, allowing them to have a say in their children's wills and wages, and granting them the right to inherit property. Further advances and setbacks were experienced in New York and other states, but feminists were able to use each new win as motivation for applying more leverage on unyielding legislative bodies. The end of the first wave is often linked with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1920), which granted women the right to vote. This was the major victory of the movement, which also had achieved reforms in higher education, the workplace and professions, and health care.
Many white women excluded black women from their organizations and denied them the right to participate in events because they feared that the racist attitudes of Southern voters would impede their support of the women's movement.
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (born Isabella ["Bell"] Baumfree; ca. 1797–November 26, 1883) was an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
She gave herself the name "Sojourner Truth" in 1843. Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title "Ain't I a Woman?", which was a bastardization of the original speech, rewritten by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect. Sojourner Truth, in fact, was from New York and had grown up speaking Dutch as her first language. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army. After the war, Truth tried to secure land grants from the federal government for former enslaved people, a project she pursued for seven years without success. While in Washington, D.C., she had a meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant in the White House. In 1872, she returned to Battle Creek and tried to vote in the presidential election, but was turned away at the polling place.
Truth spoke about abolition, women's rights, and prison reform, and preached against capital punishment to the Michigan legislature. Not everyone welcomed her lectures, but she had many friends and staunch support among many influential people at the time, including Amy Post, Parker Pillsbury, Frances Gage, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Laura Smith Haviland, Lucretia Mott, Ellen G. White, and Susan B. Anthony.
Sojourner Truth
Truth's carte de visite, a small photograph, which she sold to raise money.
"Mother" Jones
Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was an American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She helped coordinate major strikes and cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World.
After her husband and four children all died of yellow fever and her workshop was destroyed in a fire in 1871, she began working as an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers (UMW) union. She was a very effective speaker, punctuating her speeches with stories, audience participation, humor, and dramatic stunts. From 1897 onward, she was known as "Mother" Jones, and in 1902, she was called, "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners.
She joined the nascent labor movement and the Knights of Labor (a predecessor to the Industrial Workers of the World), an organization that was later dissolved after members were accused of anarchism after the Haymarket Affair. "Mother" Jones became largely affiliated with the UMW. With the UMW, she frequently led strikers in picketing and encouraged the striking workers to stay on strike when the management brought in strike-breakers and militias.
"Mother" Jones was ideologically separated from many of the other female activists in the days prior to the Nineteenth Amendment due to her aversion to female suffrage. She emphasized that, "You don't need the vote to raise hell!" Her opposition to women taking an active role in politics was based on her belief that the neglect of motherhood was a primary cause of juvenile delinquency.