July 22-23, 2023: The 21st Century Women’s Movement

[July 19-20 marks the 175^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of contexts. Leading up to this weekend post on our 21^st century movement!]

We all know the myriad challenges facing American women in 2023, but fortunately we have a phenomenal group of activists of all types helping fight them. Here are just a handful of them (add more in comments, please!):

1)      Terry O’Neill: The closest thing we have in the 21^st century to the women’s rights conventions of the 19^th is organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW). Any one of NOW’s recent leaders would be well worth highlighting in this slot, but I’m gonna go with O’Neill, the organization’s president from 2009 to 2017. Anybody who got their start in politics fighting against David Duke’s campaign for Louisiana Governor gets a gold start in my book, and O’Neill has also become a leading voice against transphobia, which it shouldn’t need saying is also a 21^st century women’s rights issue (but too often seems to).

2)      Judy Chicago: While this week’s series focused specifically on a social and political event, the women’s rights movement has always been driven as much by artists and cultural figures as by political ones. For more than half a century, one of America’s foremost feminist artists has been Judy Chicago, whose art installations in particular have traced many of the issues, debates, ideas, and identities at the movement’s heart across those decades. The upcoming New Museum retrospective promises to capture much of what has made Chicago such a key part of the women’s movement for so long.

3)      Roxane Gay: One of my favorite not-yet-written ideas for a column or post or whateveryagot would be to put Fanny Fern, one of our greatest journalists and writers, in direct conversation with the late 1840s & early 1850s women’s movement (of which she was an exact contemporary as she was first rising to striking prominence). When it comes to 21^st century journalists and writers, none are more talented nor more interconnected with the women’s movement than Roxane Gay—and that’s despite (or really more related to) her calling one of her first books Bad Feminist (2014). If historians and the world are around 150 years from now, they’ll be reading Gay alongside today’s movement just as much as I’d put Fern alongside her era’s.

4)      Jane Fonda: Most of the women involved in organizing the Seneca Falls convention continued to be active in the movement for decades after, a reminder that any one moment is part of a much longer continuum (for individuals and movements alike). If anything, advances in medical care and other factors have allowed folks not only to live longer on average than ever before (and certainly than in the mid-19^th century), but to remain hugely active as they do. And no one embodies that trend more than Jane Fonda, whose activism in her 80s—activism which has consistently been on behalf of women’s rights, although not limited to any one issue or angle to be sure—is as impressive as that of any 21^st century figure.

5)      Jacqueline Wernimont: Obviously I was gonna include a public scholarly voice and activist in this list, and I don’t know any who is doing more interesting and meaningful women’s rights public scholarly work (among many other subjects) than Wernimont. To cite just one particularly influential example, her co-edited (with Elizabeth Losh) book Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (2018) offers a vital model for how to link feminism, DH scholarship and work, theory and practice, and more, reminding us that scholars and researchers have our own role to play in every social and political movement, including the 21^st century women’s movement to be sure.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 21, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: The Historic Site’s Site

[July 19-20 marks the 175^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21^st century movement!]

On three of the many interesting things you can find on the Women’s Rights National Historical Park’s website.

1)      The Pictures: One of my favorite things about National Historical Park websites is the way they consistently use photo galleries to capture the kinds of artifacts and elements that might otherwise only be accessible to in-person visitors to the sites. Of the many such photos on that page, my favorites are those which present different angles and views of the statues in the Visitor Center lobby exhibit The First Wave, including for example this evocative close-up of the Frederick Douglass statue in that group. I’ve long argued that raising more statues to inclusive and inspiring historical figures is a key way to challenge our long history of problematic statues, and since I haven’t yet had a chance to get to Seneca Falls, I loved seeing some of these statues through the website’s galleries.

2)      The Research: Historic sites aren’t just representations of the past, of course; they are also repositories of the kinds of documents and evidence through which such representations have to be constructed. That evidence might seem like something that really requires an in-person visit to encounter, but the Seneca Falls site offers an alternative: the Research page, where they present hyperlinked versions of a number of the documents (both historical and scholarly/analytical) out of which they’ve developed their exhibits and interpretations. You could spend a whole day reading through all those pieces, and I know I’m a deeply nerdy AmericanStudier but that sounds like a pretty darn good day to me.

3)      The Map: Those first two are things at the historic site that can also be included on the website; but there are also things that websites can do and offer more easily than an in-person site. One of my favorites on the Seneca Falls National Historical Park’s website is this resource, located under the History & Culture: Stories tab. Many scholars, among them my Dad, are finding new and impressive ways to use digital maps to convey information about history, literature, and more; “The Erie Canal and the Network to Freedom” is a wonderful example of that trend, and something that really utilizes the digital humanities potentials of a historic site’s site.

Contemporary connections this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 20, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: Rochester

[July 19-20 marks the 175^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21^st century movement!]

On why the follow-up convention was so important, and two of its more groundbreaking details.

In that weeklong blog series hyperlinked in my intro above (and again here, ‘cause why not?), I highlighted the October 1850 Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, the first to bill itself as national and certainly an important step into a more widespread movement. But when it comes to follow-up conventions to Seneca Falls, I’m not sure there could be a more significant one than the August 2^nd, 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Rochester. Taking place just two weeks after and less than 50 miles away from Seneca Falls, the Rochester convention was explicitly defined as a “recovening” of the earlier one, and included for example a formal approval of the Declaration of Rights. And I think that interconnected but sequential nature of the two conventions was crucially important—as I wrote in this week’s first post, the Seneca Falls Convention came about quite informally and haphazardly, and so the follow-up in Rochester represented a vital reflection of the fact that this was indeed the start of a more formal series and movement.

As you’d expect, many of the same people who had organized and run the Seneca Falls Convention played similar roles in Rochester. But there was also a significant difference in leadership: the Rochester Convention elected the prominent local activist and abolitionist Abigail Bush as its presiding officer. Bush was the first woman to preside over a public meeting that featured men as well as women, and her election was thus hugely controversial, with vocal opposition from fellow leaders like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who “thought it a most hazardous experiment to have a woman President”). Bush later recognized both the toll and the stakes of her service, noting, “When I found that my labors were finished, my strength seemed to leave me and I cried like a baby. But that ended the feeling with women that they must have a man to preside at their meetings.” Indeed, I’d say that this detail alone makes the Rochester Convention as important as the Seneca Falls one, or at least again a vital complement that also took the women’s rights movement forward in key ways.

Moreover, the Rochester Convention didn’t simply approve or continue the business from Seneca Falls—it also featured new additions to the movement’s evolving and deepening debates and platforms. Particularly striking was the convention’s attention to working women, both through an overt call for equal pay for equal work and through the creation of a Women’s Protection Union in the city to investigate and address working women’s circumstances and concerns. Speaking for myself, it’s far too easy to see contemporary communities and movements like these women’s rights conventions and the efforts of the Lowell Mill Girls to organize and fight for their rights as entirely distinct—while of course they were separate and unique in various ways, these details and emphases from Rochester make clear that working women’s rights could become part of the broader women’s movement, a hugely significant layer that this follow-up convention added into the mix.

Last Seneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 19, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: Douglass and Suffrage

[July 19-20 marks the 175^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21^st century movement!]

On three ways in which Frederick Douglass contributed significantly to the fight for women’s suffrage:

1)      Conventions and Communities: As I wrote yesterday, Douglass was a key participant in the Seneca Falls Convention, not only through his attendance and support for the Declaration of Rights, but also (for example) in pushing other attendees to sign and support that document. Two years later, he was also a prominent attendee and participant at the first national Women’s Rights Convention, in Worcester, Massachusetts. For these conventions to truly launch both an overall national women’s rights movement and a specific fight for women’s suffrage, a number of things had to happen, but I would argue that two important steps were the presence of men alongside women and the interconnections with other social movements like abolitionism. Douglass was not the only presence to contribute to both of those trends, but he was in 1848 and 1850 and certainly remained for the rest of his life a vital voice for women’s rights and suffrage on all those levels.

2)      Amendments by Addition: It’s become a frustratingly familiar fact that the women’s rights and abolitionist (turned Black rights) movements split almost immediately after the Civil War, and a principal cause was the fight for the 15^th Amendment and Black male suffrage (which Seneca Falls organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton later characterized by writing, “Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey”). Frederick Douglass supported that fight and amendment, as well he should have—but he also was at that time and for the remaining decades of his life an ardent advocate of an additional amendment for women’s suffrage. To my mind that additive philosophy—seeing these amendments and fights not as a competition or even a hierarchy but as complementary and connected elements of a broader battle for rights, justice, and equality—was absolutely the right call, and it was one that Douglass continued to model despite the era’s divisions.

3)      Literally Lifelong Activisms: Right up until the very end of his long life Douglass remained a key voice in and for that fight. He did so most publicly through recollections of the Seneca Falls Convention, in an April 1888 speech he delivered to the International Council of Women in Washington, DC—the speech where he famously and importantly argued that “no man, however gifted with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and present the demands of women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority of woman herself.” But his activism continued until literally the last day of his life—on February 20^th, 1895 he took part in a strategy meeting for the women’s rights movement with Susan B. Anthony and others, and died at home that evening of a stroke. Don’t know that any detail could better capture a truly lifelong commitment to a cause than that!

Next Seneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 18, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: The Declaration

[July 19-20 marks the 175^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21^st century movement!]

On one obviously important choice in a historic document, and one subtler one.

I’m quite sure that the Seneca Falls Convention would have had a lasting impact no matter what, not least because (as I’ll write about later in the week) it immediately spawned other such gatherings both near and far. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who as I wrote yesterday was one of the convention’s initial originators and organizers, took an extra step to make sure its defining ideas and conversations would endure, drafting a “Declaration of Sentiments” (also known as the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments”) that would be endorsed and signed by 100 convention attendees (roughly a third of the group). As Frederick Douglass, who signed and also helped garner that widespread convention support for the Declaration (and about whom I’ll write in tomorrow’s post), wrote in his North Star newspaper a couple weeks after the convention’s close, this document would become “the grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights of women.”

Stanton’s most famous choice and strategy in the Declaration is implied in its title: she modeled her text quite closely on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. That’s especially true in her opening paragraphs, which include such overtly parallel but importantly revised lines as “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” But the “Sentiments” section, for another example, likewise closely parallels the list of “oppressions” with which the Declaration of Independence charges the King of England, in Stanton’s text describing what “he” has done to “her.” This choice of Stanton’s is one of the most impressive in that long list of American texts and voices that have reused  and yet revised the works and ideas of the Founding, and I would argue that it was particularly important as a way to link this 1848 Convention to the 1776 Continental Congress that produced the Declaration of Independence. I’ve written of Abigail Adams and other late 18^th century American women writers that they were truly Revolutionary, but it’s fair to say that they often operated individually; the 1848 Convention was an overtly communal effort and Stanton helped put it in direct conversation with the similarly communal framing of the American Revolution and Founding.

Yet if Stanton’s Declaration were simply a parallel to the original, I don’t know that it would have had that staying power that it did and has. It had to and did stand on its own as well, and the place it does that most powerfully is in the conclusion where she lays out “the great work before us…We shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.” I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a statement of principles that includes such an extended and comprehensive (and quite practical) plan for how to achieve those goals, and again the immediate and consistent existence of additional such Conventions (for example) suggests that the practicality did indeed help put the principles into practice. Inspired by the past but directly imagining and helping produce the future—sounds like a recipe for a great text to me!

Next Seneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 17, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: Quaker Communities

[July 19-20 marks the 175^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21^st century movement!]

On both a delightfully specific and an important broad layer to the Convention’s origins.

As I imagine is the case with many significant historical moments and events, the Seneca Falls Convention came about quite haphazardly. A large number of Quakers (members of the Religious Society of Friends, formally) had made New York’s Seneca County (and specifically the county capital of Waterloo) their home over the preceding half-century, including influential Quaker families (and abolitionists) like Thomas and Mary Ann M’Clintock and Richard and Jane Hunt. Perhaps no American Quaker was more famous in that era than Lucretia Coffin Mott, the abolitionist and activist who had gained a reputation as one of the nation’s most fiery and eloquent orators. Mott’s sister Martha Coffin Wright lived in nearby Auburn, New York, and in the summer of 1848 Mott and her husband James traveled to the area to visit with her sister and also to continue their activist work on a number of local levels: with the region’s sizeable community of formerly enslaved people; at the Auburn State Penitentiary where Mott lectured; and on the nearby Seneca Cattaraugus Reservation.

On Sunday, July 9^th, Mott attended a local Quaker worship and then joined a group of these women from the area—her sister Martha, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann M’Clintock, and her fellow activist (and the group’s only non-Quaker) Elizabeth Cady Stanton for tea at the Hunt home. The conversation apparently and unsurprisingly turned to the frustrating and unnecessary challenges that faced these women as women, both in their activist work and in every other arena of their lives in mid-century American society. They decided to take advantage of Mott’s visit and prominence and to host a women’s rights convention, creating on the spot an announcement that began “WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION—A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” and that ran in the Seneca County Courier beginning on July 11^th. Other regional and national periodicals like Frederick Douglass’ North Star picked up the advertisement as well, and despite the short notice the word spread and a fair number of attendees made it to Seneca Falls and its newly constructed Wesleyan Methodist Chapel for the July 19-20 Convention.

I really love how informal and intimate that origin point was, and again I think it has a lot to tell us about how history is very often made and shaped (too often by informal gatherings of the powerful and privileged, of course, whether in smoke-filled rooms or otherwise; but in this case something quite different and far more inclusive). But it’s also far from coincidental that this was a gathering of Quakers, held at a prominent Quaker family’s home after a Quaker worship service. Other than briefly in this post on one of my very favorite American writers and voices, John Woolman, I don’t think I’ve engaged nearly enough in this space with the oversized (given the community’s numbers) and inspiring role that Quakers have played in American activist and social movements and progress. That certainly included both the abolitionist and the early women’s rights movements, the combination of which truly defined conventions like Seneca Falls. I’m not sure any historical detail better captures that foundational presence and influence than an afternoon tea at which a group of determined Quaker women launched a national movement!

Next Seneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 14, 2023: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: All Summer Long

[Now that we’re really in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for some of our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertime favorites for a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]

On classic rock, pseudo-nostalgia, and the undeniable role of pop culture in our lives.

Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” (2008) features—repeats as the opening two lines of its chorus, no less—one of the worst “rhyming” couplets in recent years: “And we were trying different things/And we were smoking funny things.” So it’s fair to say that I shouldn’t necessarily subject the song’s lyrics, or any Kid Rock-penned words, to the most rigorous AmericanStudier analyses. But while “All Summer Long” doesn’t quite rise to Dylan-like lyrical complexity, the song does comprise a particularly striking example of what I would call the pseudo-nostalgia often found in the very concept of “classic rock”: in its title line, “Singing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ all summer long”; in its concurrent, repeated evocation of the vital role of “our favorite song” and “play[ing] some rock and roll” in creating its idyllic teenage memories; and even musically, in its samples of both the Skynyrd song and (randomly) Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”

So why does a song about, as the opening verse locates us, “1989” and “summertime in Northern Michigan” make such defining use of a 1974 song by a Jacksonville, Florida band while sampling a 1978 one by a Chicago singer/songwriter? To my mind, these classic rock references link Kid Rock’s song to one by his fellow Michigander (and oft-cited musical influence) Bob Seger, “Old Time Rock and Roll”; Seger’s song is perhaps the clearest single expression of classic rock pseudo-nostalgia, the attitude that music used to be great and has sadly fallen off, and thus that the best we can do in the present is play that old time rock and roll. I call this attitude pseudo-nostalgia in part because of the blatant irony and even hypocrisy involved in denigrating contemporary music and pop culture while contributing to them; and in part because it seems to me less interested in the past itself in any specific or meaningful ways, and far more in the seeming authenticity or coolness that such an attitude grants its holder in the present.

On the other hand, I can’t claim to know what songs or artists Kid Rock and his teenage girlfriend and friends played on the beaches of Northern Michigan in 1989—and in any case it would be hypocritical of me to critique their classic rock affinities, given how much classic songs and albums by artists like Skynyrd, Seger, Tom Petty, Pink Floyd, and, of course, Bruce Springsteen meant to my own youthful life and identity. Indeed, I would argue that my generation was the first for whom the popular culture of our parents’ generation was at least as meaningful and constitutive of our perspectives and identities as that of our own—a phenomenon that has only been amplified since, thanks in large part to the ways in which YouTube and the rest of the digital world have preserved so much of 20^th century pop culture into the early 21^st century. Our 21^st century summer playlists are indeed as likely to feature “Sweet Home Alabama” as “All Summer Long,” not just in a nostalgic way but also and more importantly as a vital part of our present culture and world. Works for me!

Crowd-sourced bbq tomorrow,

Ben

PS. So one more chance to bring some food to the bbq: thoughts on this song? Other summertime favorites you’d share?