Text size:

Op-ed: For women, a lesson in unity from Seneca Falls

BY JANE F. LANE | Jane F. Lane, a writer who lives in Smithtown, is an incoming second-year masters student at the Stony Brook University School of Social Welfare.

July 18, 2008

This weekend, those of us who are united in the struggle for justice and opportunity for women will celebrate a happy anniversary: the Seneca Falls convention and the inauguration of the women's rights movement in America.

Feminists who became alarmingly fractious during Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's tumultuous campaign can reflect on the spirit of shared determination of two history-altering days, July 19 and 20, 1848, and the remarkable accomplishments of the painful ensuing struggle.

Believers who have worked and fought hard for our rights still feel bruised by the collapse of Clinton's campaign. Many women are outraged by what they perceive as the sexist exclusion of a superior female contender. The ominous murmurings among Clinton supporters of defecting from the Democratic Party - even boycotting the entire election - reveal a genuine schism among women.

A CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll released earlier this month reported that about one-third of those who voted for Clinton in the primaries said they would skip the vote in November, rather than come out for Sen. Barack Obama. That's up 22 percent from a similar poll in June.

But separating along lines of resentment and disappointment is political folly, as well as ignorant of the tradition of the women's rights movement, going back to Seneca Falls, N.Y., 160 years ago. From its beginnings, the movement was a coalition of ardent abolitionists - notably Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, and sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke - who evolved their anti-slavery efforts to include justice for women.

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a commanding presence at the convention, linked enfranchisement for slaves to suffrage for women. Born into slavery, he could not accept emancipation for himself in the face of women's "degradation" by the injustice of disenfranchisement. Later, he described himself as ennobled by his declaration.

But then, as now, women were stymied. Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, explicitly defining citizens as male. Then the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised black men in 1870. Women believed they had been kicked aside. As now, animosity simmered.

After the Seneca Falls convention, more than 70 contentious years passed before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920.

Women have an important opportunity this November to revitalize their movement for justice and welfare for all. As Douglass felt nobler for having demanded rights for women as well as men, we can declare a grander goal of sex, race and class equality.

All women need to face the painful congruence of sexism and racism: Of the 2 million Americans in jail, half are black, although African-Americans constitute only 13 percent of the general population. One-tenth of all black men aged 20 to 35 are in jail. Seventy percent of black babies are born to single mothers. Great-grandmothers are bringing up little kids. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 22 percent of white children do not live with a man in the household; by contrast 31 percent of Hispanic children and 56 percent of black children, have no fathers.

A report released last month, commissioned by the New York Women's Foundation and conducted by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, found that women in New York State earned 78.4 percent of what men earned. The median annual earnings for African-American women in New York were $33,800; white women earned $39,700.

We can support the leadership of an African-American man and demand of him a commitment to universal rights in the finest, loftiest tradition of the women's movement. Whether a 70-year wait for the vote was the price for bitter dissension and divisiveness is a question for feminist historians. Whether women's rights activists in the 1860s, or the 1960s and '70s, for that matter, were precocious students of polarizing identity politics is a question for feminist political analysts.

We also should remember who our friends truly are: Barack Obama or his opponent, who voted to terminate the federally funded family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings, who virulently opposes abortion rights and who referred to his own wife with the coarsest of epithets in front of reporters.

"I don't want to deny the role of race and gender in our society," Obama declared after the South Carolina primary, when the campaigns raised the matter. "They're there, and they're powerful. But I don't think it's productive." The women at Seneca Falls honored the oppressed universally, and we have the chance to do that again today.