FEMINIST THOUGHT

Twentieth-Century Action: Equal Rights 23
Co-chaired by Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the association
had as its announced purpose the unification of the black (men’s) and
woman suffrage struggles. There is considerable evidence, however, that
Stanton and some of her co-workers actually “perceived the organization as a
means to ensure that Black men would not receive the franchise unless and
until white women were also its recipients.” 55 Unmoved by Douglass’s and
Truth’s observation that on account of their extreme vulnerability, black men
needed the vote even more than women did, Anthony and Stanton were
among those who successfully argued for the dissolution of the Equal Rights
Association for fear that the association might indeed endorse the passage of
the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised black men but not women.
Upon the dissolution of the Equal Rights Association, Anthony and Stanton
established the National Woman Suffrage Association. At approximately the
same time, Lucy Stone, who had some serious philosophical disagreements with
Stanton and especially Anthony about the role of organized religion in women’s
oppression, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. Henceforward,
the U.S. women’s rights movement would be split in two.
In the main, the National Woman Suffrage Association forwarded a revolutionary
feminist agenda for women, whereas the American Woman Suffrage Association
pushed a reformist feminist agenda. Most American women gravitated
toward the more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association. By the time
these two associations merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman
Suffrage Association, the wide-ranging, vociferous women’s rights movement of
the early nineteenth century had been transformed into the single-issue, relatively
tame woman’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth century. From
1890 until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, the National
American Woman Suffrage Association confined almost all of its activities to
gaining the vote for women. Victorious after fifty-two years of concerted struggle,
many of the exhausted suffragists chose to believe that simply by gaining the
vote, women had indeed become men’s equals. 56
Twentieth-Century Action:
Equal Rights
For nearly forty years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, feminists
went about their work relatively quietly in the United States. Then,
around 1960, a rebellious generation of feminists loudly proclaimed as fact
what the suffragists Stanton and Anthony had always suspected: In order to
be fully liberated, women need economic opportunities and sexual freedoms
as well as civil liberties. Like their grandmothers, some of these young