What was the difference between the womens right movement and the abolitionist movement and what were their similarities?

While individuals expressed their dissatisfaction with the social role of women during the early years of the United States, a more widespread effort in support of women’s rights began to emerge in the 1830s. Women and men joined the antislavery movement in order to free enslaved Africans. While men led antislavery organizations and lectured, women were not allowed to hold these positions. When women defied these rules and spoke out against slavery in public, they were mocked.

For example, in 1829 British-born reformer Frances Wright toured the United States and lectured against slavery. The same year, an artist published this cartoon making fun of Wright. The cartoon depicts Wright standing near a table and giving a lecture, but she has the head of a goose. The title says Wright “deserves to be hissed.” According to this artist and many others, women should not speak in public, and the public should not care what she has to say.

Frances Wright was one of many women—including sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké (who were from a slave-owning Southern family) and Lucretia Mott—who lectured against slavery. Even as women became more active in the cause, many of their fellow antislavery activists continued to disapprove of these female speakers. In 1840, for instance, the World Anti-Slavery Convention refused to seat female delegates.

In contrast, in the late 1830s, abolitionists (who called for an immediate end to slavery rather than a gradual one) began to advocate for women’s rights as well. Women gained experience as leaders, organizers, writers, and lecturers as part of this radical wing of the movement. The discrimination they continued to face eventually prompted them to band together to promote a new, separate women’s rights movement.

By Allison Lange, Ph.D.
Fall 2015

“Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” 1837.

Women’s suffrage in America grew out of the movement to end slavery. Many of the people who spearheaded the women’s rights movement were abolitionists. Although women in the early United States weren’t allowed to vote, many of them found ways to be involved in reform causes. They worked for change by influencing lawmakers through petitions, and persuasion.

Many women considered slavery an inhumane and sinful practice and worked to abolish it. Thousands of women wrote articles for abolitionist newspapers, signed anti-slavery petitions, and shared anti-slavery literature. Still, women often found that traditional assumptions and attitudes about women limited the scope of their participation in the movement.

Eight years later, Mott, Stanton, and others gathered at Seneca Falls, New York for the first-ever U.S. women’s rights convention. They discussed Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, which detailed the injustice of women’s subordination to men. The Declaration pointed out that married women were legal non-entities with no rights to property or to their children. Other laws and customs prevented them from pursuing education and many means of employment, and barred them from voting for lawmakers whose decisions affected every aspect of their lives. The Declaration affirmed that women were men’s natural equals and resolved that they should seek the right to vote as the tool to improve their legal status. Convention attendees hotly debated this resolution because it was so controversial, but they eventually ratified it.

Prominent women reformers, 1870. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Women who worked to end slavery gained both the skills and the motivation to lead a movement for women’s rights. In their reform efforts, they gained a platform for public speaking and opportunities to develop the organizational skills needed to launch a movement. They also began to see some similarities between their legal subordination and that of enslaved people. As abolitionist women encountered barriers and faced opposition to their public involvement on behalf of enslaved workers, many of them found a voice–and a reason–to speak up in their own behalf.

The anti-slavery and women’s rights movements would later split over the issue of the 15th Amendment, which enfranchised black men after the Civil War. For more information, check out Ta-Nahesi Coates’s 2011 Atlantic article, “The Great Schism.”

   The American Woman's Rights movement grew out of abolitionism in direct but complex ways. The movement's early leaders began their fight for social justice with the cause of the slaves, and learned from Anti-Slavery Societies how to organize, publicize and articulate a political protest. It wasn't long, however, before they also learned that many of the men who were opposed to slavery were also opposed to women playing active roles or taking speaking parts in abolitionist movement. The attempt to silence women at Anti-Slavery Conventions in the United States and England led directly to Elizabeth Cady Stanton's and Lucretia Mott's decision to hold the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y, in June 1848. One of the articles of belief proclaimed at that and subsequent conventions was that women were in some sense slaves too.
   The texts below are taken from The History of Woman Suffrage, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Gage: Vol. I: 1835-1860 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881). In a passage from this book included in the ARTICLES section of the archive, Uncle Tom's Cabin is cited as one reason for the early strength of the Woman's Movement in Ohio, but Stowe always rejected its central demand for the vote. And while Uncle Tom's Cabin is very much about women and slaves, its relation to the premises and project of the Woman's Movement in America is by no means clear.

In 1870, the passage of the 15th Amendment guaranteed the rights of African American men to vote. It also greatly contributed to a division between the Abolitionist and Suffragist groups. 

In the lead up to the drafting and ratification of the amendment, women had argued with abolitionists that both groups push for having the amendment include women, so that all freed slaves and all women would receive voting rights at the same time. Abolitionists wanted to seize the right for black men to vote as quickly as possible, and viewed suffrage as something that could be achieved more easily with this right secured.

The failure of the suffragist movement to convince the abolitionist movement to back this effort caused a rift between the movements, some conflict due to insults and a sparking of racial tensions, which led to the two groups focusing more on their own individual causes. Continue reading from the National Park Service