Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor at The New Yorker and author of the new book The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights, and Thavolia Glymph, Duke University historian and author of the book The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, discuss the early days of the abolition movement and the fight for women’s rights, the complicated relationship between the two movements, and heroes like Harriet Tubman who served as leaders of both. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
This program is made possible through the generous support of the McNulty Foundation in partnership with the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women's Leadership at Villanova University, and is presented as part of the Center’s Women and the Constitution initiative.
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This episode was produced by Jackie McDermott, Tanaya Tauber, John Guerra, and Lana Ulrich. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler.
PARTICIPANTS
Dorothy Wickenden is the executive editor of The New Yorker and moderates the magazine’s weekly podcast, The Political Scene. She is the author of two books: Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, and most recently, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden has also served the managing editor and eventually the executive editor of The New Republic and as the national-affairs editor at Newsweek.
Thavolia Glymph is a historian and professor of history and law at Duke University. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, which received the Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize, and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, a finalist for the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Dorothy Wickenden, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights
- Dorothy Wickenden, Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West
- Dorothy Wickenden, The New Yorker, “The Pre-Civil War Fight Against White Supremacy”
- Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation
- Thavolia Glymph, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, "'Invisible Disabilities’: Black Women in War and in Freedom”
- Thavolia Glymph, “A Woman’s War: Southern Women in the Civil War,” in The Confederate Experience Reader: Selected Documents and Essays
- Martha Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
- Susan B. Anthony et. al, Seneca Falls Declaration of Resolutions and Sentiments (1848)
- Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Man and A Vindication of the Rights of Women
- Frederick Douglass, Speech on Women's Suffrage (1888)
- John Lewis, The New York Times, "Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation"
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jackie McDermott: [00:00:00] Welcome to Live at the National Constitution Center. I'm Jackie McDermott, the show's producer. Last week, Dorothy Wickenden, author of the new book, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights, and Thavolia Glymph, author of The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom and Nation, joined Jeffrey Rosen. They discussed the fights for abolition and for women's rights, and the relationship between the two movements. Here's Jeff to get the conversation started.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:00:32] Dorothy, I want to begin with you to congratulate you the New York Times just posted today its review of your new book The Agitators, which it rightly called a masterpiece.
And you tell so vividly the story of three women who have not been attended to before you discovered their friendship, Martha Wright. Francis Seward and Harriet Tubman. Tell us why you chose to write about these three women and who they were.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:01:08] Thank you, Jeff, what a, what a great introduction and what a roster of coming events. I can't wait to tune in.
So my three protagonists Francis Seward, got married at the age of 19, she was an aristocratic young woman born and grown up, grew up in the town of Auburn, New York. And she came to women's rights and abolition through experiences that she had herself. And she had to kind of break away from the very traditional upbringing she had had, which she did with the help of these two women who became incredibly influential in her life.
So the second, Martha Coffin Wright, happened to live around the corner. Auburn was a very conservative industrial town peopled by lawyers and bankers and entrepreneurs, and they immediately discovered that they were the two outliers in town. Martha was a Quaker by birth and very much by sensibility.
She was just absolutely antislavery. And her older sister, who was 14 years older, was Lucretia Mott, who was a world renowned human rights advocate-- and reviled. I might add. She was a younger -- so Martha, so much younger, Martha was very much influenced by her older sister who was quite formidable, but Martha herself was a rebel from birth.
I, that was just, she just didn't like the strictures that were put upon women in the 19th century. They were supposed to keep to their separate sphere, which meant the kitchen, basically, where they cooked, cleaned, and they took care of their children and took care of their husbands. And she thought that was ridiculous.
And again, influenced by her older sister Lucretia. So in 1849, everyone has heard of Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman liberated herself from slavery on the Eastern shore of Maryland. She walked alone out of slavery to Philadelphia, a distance of about a hundred miles. And she got there. She found herself a place to live and the quickly-- and a job-- and quickly got to know all of the abolitionists in town, one of whom was Lucretia Mott.
And she became very close to Lucretia Mott, and eventually Lucretia introduced her to Martha and Martha introduced her to Francis. And that was the beginning of this collaboration and what became a really intimate friendship among the three for the rest of their lives.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:03:46] Thank you so much for that riveting account of their meeting and their friendship. And I can't wait to ask you more about each of them.
Thavolia Glymph your book is pathbreaking because it emphasizes the fissures among white and black women including those in the North and the South. Tell us about those divisions of race and class, which others have focused on with less precision and specificity, and broadly help us understand was the improbable friendship that Dorothy Wickenden described so memorably unusual in uniting these white women with Harriet Tubman or were there similar friendships throughout the war?
Thavolia Glymph: [00:04:36] Well, first of all, thank you for having me. And thank you, Dorothy, for this extraordinary book. I learned a lot. And, and so what I would, I would say, Jeff, in response is that -- so, one of the things that I was interested in is thinking about women across the, you know, boundaries of race and class, and thinking about Northern white women who became abolitionists, particularly those who went south during the Civil War.
And so what really kind of caught my attention with Dorothy's book is that she doesn't -- Dorothy does not neglect the fissures. She doesn't neglect the dissonance. We see it in her book when there is a fierce debate about who should get the right to vote first. Right? Whether or not women should get it at the same time as black men and so forth. We see it in her sort of reminding us of how racist Stanton could be.
Right? And reminding us of how black women abolitionist really fought hard and, and, and began fighting hard for abolition. And organizing prior to white women organizing. And so one of the things I appreciated about Dorothy's book among many, many that we will be able to talk about is that she takes us on this journey, and this journey is not all unfamiliar, but the way in which she does it makes it seem new and compelling.
Because we have these three women, two white women and one black woman, the black woman we know know a good deal about, but we haven't really thought of her in this context and in terms of her relationship with white women abolitionist in this particular way. And so I found that really compelling and I found that the, the entire book was-- it's like breathtaking, because even when, as I said, even when the material is not new to me, the way in which it is put together makes it new and fresh and compelling. And a lot of it was new. I didn't know about Frances, as much as I learned about Francis, which is really fascinating and Francis Wright. So yeah, so that would be my response to that. Jeff.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:07:05] Wonderful. Well, exploring both what was unique and what was unusual about the friendship will be something that I'm so eager to explore more.
Dorothy, there's so many places to start, but one thing that struck me of course, is that Martha Coffin Wright is related to Lucretia Mott. The Grimke sisters are related as well. To what degree-- I want to know where the passion for abolition and women's rights came from. So starting with Martha and Lucretia was it in the family? Was it from their reading? What was it about particular family that produced these extraordinary words?
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:07:42] About the Wright family, Martha Coffin Wright? Well, she came from a long line of Quakers, and Quakers, as you know especially Hicksite Quakers, which is the more radical branch, were extremely anti-slavery. They were among the first in America to free their, they did own slaves and they were among the first to recognize, they thought it was a sin as all abolitionists did.
And they were leaders in that cause. And so this-- Martha grew up surrounded by brothers and sisters and a very strong mother who were, who believed that women were absolutely men's equal. There was just no, no question about it. And of course in Quaker meeting, women were allowed to speak, which they weren't otherwise allowed to do at large.
So she grew up among, you know, in this very radical family. And they moved to Philadelphia when she was just still a little girl, but the circles they traveling were very small because they were not welcomed among the, you know, what would be called polite society, because, because they socialized with black Americans and that was just considered completely unacceptable.
So this was, this was who Martha was. And she happened to have this extremely forceful and sardonic personality. And so when she allowed herself, finally, it took her a while to find her voice. But when she did initially, she just, she does let her aggravations out in her letters to Lucretia. She just hated being a stay at home housewife.
She hated taking care of-- she had six children, taking care of them, you know, all day, every day. And then having to answer to her husband's demands at the end of the day. And she worked until 11 or midnight. Her husband had long since gone to bed. So all of this was brewing in her. And then in 1848, Lucretia Mott was in upstate New York and they were invited to, as guests, a small gathering of friends in nearby Waterloo.
And there it was 1848 July and it was five women and young Elizabeth Cady Stanton was there. And these women started talking about how much they hated their lives and how unjust the the laws that, that privileged white men had created for Americans, how unjust, they were and they, they talked about doing something about it.
They, Lucretia Mott had been an activist in anti-slavery circles for a very long time at that point, but there had never been a national women's rights convention. So they organized the Seneca Falls convention, which took place 10 days later. And one of the first people they invited was Frederick Douglass, who had started his newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester. And he himself was only 10 years out of slavery, but was already a world renowned and reviled abolitionist. So at that convention, Martha became close -- immediately befriended Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass. And that was the beginning of her kind of entry into radical politics.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:10:57] Wow. How important to signify that year, 1848, as a turning point, and, and the importance of Seneca Falls. So Thavolia, you begin your book by quoting from a group of Maryland women in 1861 who were addressing Winifred Scott, and calling on white men to remember women's natural rights and hear their agonizing cries for "the protection God has entrusted to man on our behalf."
They're invoking the language of natural rights and the Declaration of Independence, of course, to defend the slave holding system and their own privilege as white women. And I guess my question to you is-- Seneca Falls invoked the Declaration on behalf of women's equal rights, all men and women are created equal; to what degree was ideology an important unifying factor in defining women's approach to abolition or, and to what degree-- and the Declaration in particular-- and to what degree was that just trumped by racial and class class divisions?
Thavolia Glymph: [00:12:00] When you say ideology, you mean which ideology?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:12:04] I guess I meant just generally, yeah, the natural rights philosophy, the Declaration, which, you know, is evoked by both sides to either defend slavery or to, to oppose it.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:12:14] Well, I think that the women in Baltimore who I began the book with are invoking a privilege that only white women have. When they speak of natural rights, they are invoking this idea that women should be protected, that white women are nurturers, that they their homes should be protected and defended.
And the women in Dorothy's book are speaking of a different world. They're trying to bring in a different world where women recognize that home is not this space where everything is beautiful and lovely, that women are not content to just let their men go out into the world.
There was this part in the book that really struck me --I can't remember, Dorothy, you can remind me where one of the women is writing to maybe her sister or someone. She said, you know, Maybe men should think about coming home and taking care of women. Instead of we have this notion that when men come home, women should be ready to feed them and bathe them and take care of them.
And you know, it just reminded me again, that at the same time that you had probably the vast majority of American women opposing women in the public and women, abolitionist and women trying to get the right to vote. There was this small army of women, like Francis Wright, who, you know, made a way forward who were saying, no, we deserve to be educated.
We deserve to have the right to own property, we deserve to even have the right to vote. And so this small army of women that Dorothy is providing for us, and others have, too, are really speaking to a different ideology and a different narrative. But they are like abolitionist in general, they constitute a minority of the American population and even of Northern Americans.
Most Northern women are not abolitionists. Most Northern women are not feminist. Most Northern women are not out there trying to get the vote as a, some of them. I mean, she reminds us of some of the really horrible language that was used to defeat, to try to defeat these women who were fighting for abolition and also fighting for women's rights.
So I think that, you know, I juxtapose those women in Baltimore who are calling on men to remember the battles in the past. And to remember that the men who are fighting against each other now are really, should not be enemies. And, you know, I juxtapose them to, you know, a group of women, black women in Baltimore on the street corner who are saying, we cannot wait until March 4th, 1861, when Lincoln is inaugurated, things will change.
And so these are the women like Harriet Tubman who are desperate for change and who are going to fight for change. And so those are the two sort of conflicting ideologies that are sort of going on. And most men side with the women who want things to remain the same. At least they say they do.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:15:35] Thank you for that. It is an amazing juxtaposition with those black women looking forward to Lincoln's inauguration day and synchronistically today, just today, the state of Maryland decided to repeal its state song, which referred to Abraham Lincoln as a despot and Union soldiers as Northern scum.
It's astonishing that, that mentality prevailed until just today. Dorothy tell us more about Francis Seward married to the New York Senator governor and future secretary of state. What was the source of her commitment to women's suffrage and abolition, and how did it change over the course of the war?
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:16:16] Yeah. So it began quite early, especially given the upbringing she had had, and her sister, her, her older sister lived in Auburn as well. And she met, they both married young and Francis would often go over to their house and, and visit with them. It, she was there one evening and she wrote to her husband, William H Seward, that she said, Henry, she called him Henry, as such a scene as I've been witness to, you simply could not believe. And it turned out that her sister Lizette's husband was beating her up regularly. And she, he threatened, he-- Francis that day was reading a book in an armchair. And he, he seized the book from her hand and he threw it across the room and he ordered her out of the house.
And Lizette was weeping. She, she he had grabbed their child. It was just a horrific scene. And so Francis was extremely well-educated, especially for a woman of that age. She had read Mary Wollstonecraft. She had read John Stuart Mill. She knew, she knew about all of this in the abstract. And she knew that that women were appallingly treated often by men, but to witness her own sister be helpless before-- she called him "the brute she married"-- was, was just revelatory to her.
So that was her awakening to women's rights. And then four years later, she and her husband, her health wasn't very good. And the doctor recommended that they take a long summer trip together, which they did and they decided to go South. And Francis had always been opposed to slavery, but on their trip in Virginia, which was the biggest slaveholding state, there she had, there were two experiences, one where they stopped at a, at a farm. And an elderly woman was working at some farm machine and Francis went over to speak to her and she turned out to be blind and Francis in her usual polite way, asked her about her family and her children.
And she said, my, my husband and my children were all sold and I've never seen them since. And Francis said, well, how do you, how do you put up with such sorrow? And she said, the woman said, well, we, this is just what God has, has, has given us. We have to accept it. So that was just one scene. There was another, and she came home from that trip.
And they went and they went to Washington, where slavery was legal and where slaves were -- the enslaved people were bought and sold on the National Mall and she came home and she, she had been transformed into-- she was already going down that road, but she was now a radical abolitionist.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:18:55] Extraordinary the importance of that encounter with domestic violence. And also her deep reading of Mary Wollstonecraft, and so striking as her daughter is preserving her correspondence at the end of her life after she's died, you note, she refers to Francis's penetrating readings of Jefferson, Dickens, Martineau, and many other public intellectuals they've known over the years. And Henry says she loved knowledge because it disclosed the treasures of truth.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:19:21] Yes. I love that line.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:19:22] It was really moving. And I'd love to-- and it must've been very moving to read those letters as well with the account of those authors.
Thavolia, your book has been called pathbreaking for perhaps any more than any work in recent memory, writes Misty Harper. You thoughtfully analyzed how the Confederate project allowed poor white women access to vaunted white womanhood. You reveal that poor white women often resented the Confederacy as an institution that called on impoverished white people to sacrifice the most for the failing war effort and you chronicle vicious, classism, elite white women growing and digging into the poor corn women, demanding welfare for the Confederacy and the, also the paternalism that distorted some of the white women abolitionists who were had a rather protective attitude toward enslaved people. So tell us about those jarring, but important classist tensions.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:20:17] Sure. Thank you. So I think we historians have written quite a bit about class conflict. Right? And in the South, during the Civil War about the yeoman farmers and the poor white farmers and the poor white women who, you know struck for bread because they were hungry and whose husbands were gone, and they were, you know, their families were starving.
And I wanted to move that conversation beyond just thinking about these women as you know, going to the market in Richmond and demanding bread, but I wanted to think of them really in a more human and humane way about their everyday lives and how difficult it was for them for now, they see so clearly that poor white people in the South are even more looked down upon than they thought they were.
They are dealing with brutal hatred of rich white people during the war and in turn, they poor white people demonstrate their contempt for slave holders. And I wanted to put that, you know, really out there in a different kind of way to show that they're just not sitting back thinking, okay, we're going to support this a project to build a new, modern slave nation and not resist it because we really don't have an interest in this project, a political interest or a financial interest.
And so that was my goal there. And when I read Dorothy's book it reminded me, you know, Dorothy talks about and Francis in particular, who came from a well-to-do a family who had servants, right, Dorothy? And so, you know, I, I thought about like, who were these women in her household and what was her relationship to these women in her household who cooked for her and cleaned for her and made other women jealous of her, who didn't have these things.
And so in my book, I try to think about what a difference it made if you were a woman abolitionist and you did have servants, you could travel because you have someone to take care of the kids, or to cook and clean for you. And how it made abolition kind of a class project. So how many poor white, Northern women are abolitionist was kind of in the back of my mind when I was doing this work, my own work.
And it was in the back of my mind too as I read Dorothy's book, which made it sort of brought it to the forefront again, that to do this kind of work, whether you're black or white abolitionists you had to have, or you needed, resources, Harriet Tubman is an exception. Right. I mean, she's an exception in all kinds of ways.
She doesn't really care about money. She just has this she's just compelled to do the work she knows has to be done. She lives from day to day often. But that money and her abolitionists friends do help her out to get a home in, in Auburn and so forth. But most abolitionists women are not Harriet Tubmans, right?
Except the only ones that I would say are Harriet Tubmans would be that the, the enslaved women who are abolitionist, but to not to be called abolitionist. And they don't have resources, they have no one to take care of their dishes or their clothing. But they're abolitionists. But in terms of women who are not enslaved, it took some resources to do this kind of work, which is not to denigrate that it took resources.
But to admit the fact that it did.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:24:10] And if I could, Jeff, just add one thing to that because that's so, so interesting and true. And you mentioned it is absolutely right that, that Francis grew up. It, you know, she was very spoiled girl and she felt guilty about that. She really did. And, and her father had all had hired the, the original servants in the house. And two of them were a married couple. They had once been enslaved and they now worked for the, for, for Judge Miller first and then for the Sewards. And Francis had a very close relationship to this woman who was also named Harriet. And they were active. This couple was very active on the Underground Railroad in Auburn.
So that was how Francis would hear these stories and learn about how the Underground Railroad worked. And so Harriet Tubman was probably the most immediate provided the immediate impetus to open her, her old basement kitchen to fugitive slaves, but she had former slaves working in her household and she never, she didn't-- she had no interest in dressing well, she'd hated attending her husband's fancy parties in Washington. And so there was a, it was kind of a liberal guilt complex at work there. And she really, this really motivated her to do something beyond her own selfish, you know, to see to something beyond her own selfish needs.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:25:35] Yeah. You know, I found her Francis, really interesting because as you say she was born into this wealth, and she hated -- from reading your book, she hated the parties in Washington, she hated the women who fussed over their appearance. She hated the attention that women thought they needed from men.
She hated that they weren't paying more attention to their intellect. So, and she did have the couple that you mentioned who had been hired by her father. And then she hired them later living with her and they, I, you know, this black couple that worked for her were themselves agents right on the Underground Railroad.
So there's this really powerful story just in that little tidbit of this white woman abolitionist who employs this couple who are also abolitionists, and they are working the Underground Railroad. And so you get to see and that part of the book and as well as elsewhere the kind of integration that's taken place that the way.
But Jeff pointed this out at the beginning, which is that none of these women are operating in a vacuum, right? And so it takes-- to work the Underground Railroad and to be an abolitionist takes courage, first of all then political awareness and it, and it takes it knowing that you can rely on and trust people, you know. And Tubman as you and others have pointed out, you know, found out how important that could be, you know, that you really, really did have to trust people.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:27:15] Yes. And it was the Underground Railroad, which operated with, you know, incredible success, very few betrayals for almost 50 years, really depended as you say, on this absolute trust. It was this very even though they were spread out across the country, including into the deep South, of members of the Underground Railroad, where they depended on all of these contacts along the way, and it was, it was this wonderful kind of experiment in democracy where it was actually a real democracy, because you had white men and black men, enslaved people and free blacks. And upper-class women like, like Francis Seward and middle-class women like Martha Coffin Wright. And somehow it all, it all worked.
There was no, there was no real hierarchy there. Everyone had to work together and believe in each other to, to make it succeed. And it, it really did. And Tubman had a very keen sense of whom she could trust. And this was developed, you know, from the top, from, from birth for-- of necessity. And she could see immediately that Lucretia Mott and, and Martha and, and Francis were people who shared her fundamental beliefs about human freedom.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:28:27] You know, if I could just say one other thing, Jeff, that I think is really important about this book, Dorothy's book, is that we encounter these women in women's spaces, right? But, you know, centered around kitchen tables and, and we encounter them in relationship to big questions, big political questions that are agitating the country. You know, one of the more interesting moments in the book is when you talk about the Compromise of 1850 and I don't remember the exact words that you use, but you talk about how that really galvanized Harriet Tubman, for example, to begin to make her trips back to Maryland to get her husband who refused to come, and her other family members.
And so, and not only does Harriet come in there, but you sort of open the book up to the wider world, right? The, the politics of it all. So these women appear not simply to be working on their little projects, but they're part of a larger project to stop the expansion of slavery to defeat this notion that the United States should be an empire of slavery to help women see the ways in which they have been discriminated against and to see how paths that they can get out of the situation, you know, even though most are not willing to take that road at that particular moment.
So I, I really appreciated the big picture always tying into the kitchen table. And, and not everyone can do this well and not lose-- the reader doesn't lose sight of the small family pains, right? The loss of a child, the we, we can, we can actually see Tubman walking 300 miles. We can see how hard it was to not be able to save a child who had tuberculosis. And so those, those intimate moments, family moments join with the, the moments where women are coming together in larger groups.
And that joins with the bigger political story. And I appreciated that. And one of the things I wanted, if I could, Jeff, to have you talk a little bit about is you take us from the first women's convention to the 11th. I think the 11th was in 1866. And so over that period of time, how do you see women, white women like changing, making progress?
You know, how do the issues that they're addressing in what 18-- what's the first one, 1830?
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:31:51] Well, yeah, 1833 was the American anti-slavery society when women weren't allowed to join. And then women were just beginning to form their own anti-slavery societies. And when many of which were integrated by race.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:32:05] Well, I think I'm thinking of the one in 1837, the, the, the, the national, yeah, the women's national anti convention too. So I'm sort of 1837 to 1866, right? Three decades. How, how do you see them sort of changing in terms of what they wanted and how they're going about trying to get it?
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:32:28] Well they're so they're-- a great deal happened in those years, of course, including the Civil War.
So it's hard to summarize, but one thing, when you, you mentioned that meeting in 1866, that I'd love to focus on because I think it shows, it shows how much Martha has changed and how far the women's rights movement has become. So during the Civil War, women suspended their activities on behalf of women and went all, all in for abolition, including launching a massive campaign, the biggest petition campaign ever on either side of the Atlantic to pass the 13th Amendment.
And Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martha Coffin Wright, and Susan B, Anthony were at the forefront of that movement. But in 1866, so you mentioned that the convention, the 11th convention in 1866, so the war is over and with the women women's rights advocates decided, okay, we can now have a convention again. And they do, in New York.
And Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony and Martha all hope it's going to be an occasion to bring everyone together, abolitionists, black women, white women, black and white men, and make, again, sort of think about human rights broadly speaking.
But at that point it was the, the 14th Amendment was beginning to be discussed in Congress. The tensions that had always been present in, in the -- among abolitionists, and certainly within the women's rights movement, suddenly became clearer. So. Ellen Watkins Harper, who was a 41-year-old black poet activist, women's, women's rights activist, abolitionist, spoke after Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And Stanton was, you know, this was going to be her great moment.
In fact, to me, the stellar speech at that convention was by this amazing black woman who said, You white women speak of rights. I want to tell you about wrongs. And she gave this stunning speech. As it happened, harriet Tubman had just returned from the war and she-- on the train from, from Philadelphia to New York, the conductor came into the passenger car and told her to get out. She had to get into the, she had to move back to the smoking car. And Tubman-- this is a hundred years before the Montgomery bus boycott-- and Harriet Tubman said, I will not do that. I had served, she served in the Civil War for three years.
She said, I served my country. This is where I belong. I've got my ticket and that's it. And she grabbed the seat and she wouldn't, she wouldn't let go. So the conductor had to call two other men too. She was incredibly strong, even though she was tiny to wrench her out of her seat, broke her wrist, threw her into the smoking car.
Ellen Watkins Harper knew about this incident and she talked about it at this convention. And she said, that is a disgrace for our country. And she said the same thing just happened to me on the train and we will not stand for this. So it was-- suddenly she'd completely stolen the show, you know, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was you know, sort of put in the background and this incredibly forceful black woman was saying, you know what? We have something to say here too.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:35:49] Yeah. I mean, I think this story is really important. Tubman, you know, this woman who has given so much to a country not being able to ride the cars that white women ride and of course this was the story that so many black women were telling before the war and during the war and after the war.
And, and certainly was the kind of experience that inspired black men who became politicians under reconstruction to push for changes and public accommodations to make them equal for all people. So, yeah, that's a great story. I mean, I love Francis Harper and, and it reminded me too, I was just thinking, yeah, she was speaking of the wonderful work recent work of Martha Jones, you know, vanguard who's also reminding us that, you know, these black women were. Yeah, really out there in the vanguard pushing for change and the way they were treated in the public spaces and in private spaces.
So your book and telling that story again, is it's a great reminder of how poorly Tubman was treated and, and how despite her accomplishments and how other black women stood up for her like Harper. And said, no, we, you know, we, we have something to say here. Our experience is quite different from white women's experience.
And so I don't know how you did all this, to bring so many stories together. I mean, I'd love stories to tell stories, but it takes a special knack to, to bring them together in a coherent way when they're coming from so many different places. So. Thank you.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:37:29] A lot of trial and error and many years.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:37:32] I keep hearing you in conversation with each other as riveting and I, it would be wonderful if you'd continue, but I'm so glad that Thavolia focused us on that 1866 convention, because as you've both been describing, that was really the beginning of the fissures in the movement among African-American men and white women, and between African-American women and white women, and also among those groups.
So, Dorothy, why don't you tell the story of those fissures where the Stanton and Anthony come together with the American Equal Rights Association, claiming that the rights of black people and women at the same civil and political status, but then the whole thing really fractured. What, why did that happen and what happened?
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:38:17] It was really a terrible moment. And it, it brought out the absolute worst in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. And it was it happened soon after that convention. So that, that, that convention, which they hoped would bring everyone together in fact was the beginning of this schism.
And Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had felt very strongly that during the war, when they had suspended their conventions, that they were, they were fighting with everything they had on this massive petition campaign, which was very successful to get the 13th Amendment passed with the understanding that, that when the war was over all of their abolitionists friends-- they all worked quite closely together up until that point-- that they would do the same for women.
And they somehow were unable to accept the fact that after the war, there were black men and black women who had been technically freed from slavery were not actually free from slavery, and black men in the South, desperately -- were being lynched.
They desperately needed the vote. Desperately. And as Ellen Harper said as much as, as much as white women need this, black women and black men need it more. So that was the, the kernel of this big debate. And they simply, so as the 14th Amendment was being debated, they kept their there, they focused on getting women, women-- suffrage for women.
And it, when that didn't happen and then the 15th Amendment was underway, they objected to the 15th Amendment because it would, it did not include the, in the 14th Amendment had added the word male to the Constitution for the first time, which was an outrage. And then for the 15th Amendment, they said, well, if it's not going to include the right for women to vote, then we oppose it.
And I think it was, it was Stanton who said, "I object, I object, I object." And worse than that, they became all-out racists. So they, they accepted funding from this crazy man who was like an early Donald Trump to start their own newspaper. And it became this racist rag. And they just, they kept saying over and over again, that that white women deserve the vote more than black men.
And this was really caused Frederick Douglas who had been their close ally for all those years, he, he really let them have it on that. And so they, they broke apart, started their own women's organization, and Lucy Stone started another one because she wanted to advocate for the 15th Amendment.
And it took many years when it was beyond the scope of my book. I only deal with that in the epilogue, but it took many, many years for those groups to come together again. And in the very end in 1888, when Stanton and Anthony were starting to get another woman's organization, an international group, they invited Douglass to speak and he just gave this incredible tribute to these women who had been so, so dreadful. And he said, you know, what we did in achieving a emancipation was, was, you know, to be commanded. But what it took for women to achieve their rights was, was even more remarkable.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:41:39] That was an incredible speech. And it was,--forgive me, I'm so eager for your reaction, Thavolia-- but it was, I think it was one of the last speeches of Douglass's life and that tribute was in his obituary and that, that tribute--so striking what he's saying. It was even braver for women to stand up for their rights.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:41:54] I know, I still can't quite get over it, and it just shows his just how he was able to rise above this kind of internal pettiness. And by the way, so was Tubman. It was really remarkable to see that unlike Martha who was completely tormented, caught between her friend, Frederick Douglass and her support for what he stood for, she did not agree with Stanton and Anthony and, and, but her, her very close friendships with those two women. So the fact that that Douglass was able to put that aside and that Harriet Tubman was able to put aside that extraordinary nastiness and, and work go, and speak before, you know, Anthony and Stanton's group was just remarkable.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:42:40] Thavolia was this fissure as they say overdetermined, I mean, your entire book is about the fissures, the class and race fissures among women and men and so forth. So were you surprised as they say, or, or in other words, what did this have to do with the personalities of Cady Stanton? Or would it have happened even if there had been less racist, white women in charge at that time?
Thavolia Glymph: [00:43:01] Well, I think a lot of it had to do with Cady Stanton. I mean, from all we know she was like really racist to the bone. You know, she didn't think that black men or Asian men she talked about them too, were as qualified to vote, or qualified at all to vote as she was, or women like her. And perhaps if the movement had a different leader, it might've had a different kind of result or impact at that moment.
And when you were talking about Douglass, you know, Douglass has so much integrity, so he can go back to them and say, you know, I am still for women getting the right to vote after he has said pretty point blank to Stanton and you Dorothy this is a famous quote from Douglass where in response to her, I mean, in response to Stanton and Anthony's starting this paper,The Revolution. Douglass said, "When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the streets of New York and New Orleans, when they are drived from their homes and hung upon lampposts, when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement, when they are the objects of insult and outrage at every turn, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own."
So that's, I think in 69 about, and he can come back because for him, the question of whether or not women deserve the vote has not changed. What he got really upset about was Stanton pretending as if the problems that she faced or white women faced were of the same magnitude, the same order, as the problems that enslaved people faced, or even freed black people.
So I, you know, again, you know, he's, he comes through here in this book again, as this man who, who was for human rights, period. Right. And so we can't say enough about Douglass. Well, David Blythe has said a lot about him, so we have him to thank, but yeah, so I, I really, again, you know, appreciated the sort of not forgetting, your not forgetting and not letting lay to the side, these interventions and the part of black people in this discussion which really made the discussion, the book, just that much richer.
Because sometimes when you work in an archive, you decide what to leave behind. Right. And what to include, and you could have written a book about three women and their interactions, their views about life and love and marriage and politics without the messiness, but you didn't neglect the messiness. And so that to me is really important.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:46:24] We have just five minutes left time for one intervention each, I know it's time is flying by, but hearing each of you in conversation with each other is just so memorable and moving. I think I'd like each of you to ask the other a final question, because I know you have lots to ask each other. So, Dorothy, what would you like to ask Thavolia?
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:46:41] I am really curious about what, what you're working on next. What, what, where has your work taken you, if you don't mind?
Thavolia Glymph: [00:46:51] No, I don't. As people who know me, you will know I've been working for too many years to count on a book on black women refugees during the Civil War, that's now become a book about black women refugees going back to the American Revolution. But that's been my pet project for several years. So I'm turning now to that project. And I'm about finished with another project, which is the history of Confederate officers who joined the Egyptian army during Reconstruction and their experience in Egypt. So it's about race and sort of imagining the South in a different space as these men who are now broke and poor and, you know, take off their Confederate uniforms and put on.Uh, Egyptian uniforms and there's some Northern officers with them too. But I'm more focused on the Southern officers. So that's what I'm trying to finish up now.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:47:57] That sounds fascinating. I'm so glad.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:48:00] I'm so glad you asked that. I know we all can't wait to read that, what an amazing topic. Thavolia, what is your final question to Dorothy, and we'll give Dorothy the last word.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:48:09] So, Dorothy, again, thank you for this amazing book.
And I'll ask you the same question. You've written three books now. And when I got the invitation to do this project on your book, I thought I need to read everything she's read-- that she's written. And so I have, and now I want to know what you're up to next.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:48:28] Oh, I was afraid as soon as I asked you that question, I knew this was coming-- and this is a total cop-out, but I, you know, I've, I'm still sort of working through with this, this book I'm on, on my book tour now.
I do have some sort of half-formed thoughts in the back of my mind, but they're not, I'm not sort of ready yet and I haven't researched them. So I think I'll just have to end on that.
Thavolia Glymph: [00:48:56] That's fine. That's fine.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:48:58] Well, we do, we do have enough time to then Dorothy, to, for you to leave our rapt audience with the final thoughts you'd like them to think about as they contemplate the incredibly important topic of your new book, The Agitators.
Dorothy Wickenden: [00:49:13] Yes, I, this is something I thought about-- this book took me seven years to write the, the country has gone through a number of very dramatic periods as I was writing it. It was-- Barack Obama was president when I started it, I was full of hope about where the country was going. And it looked as though we were going to have our first woman as president that did not happen.
And most recently watching-- in recent years watching where the country is going has been so disturbing to me because it is so reminiscent of the 1850s and on January 6th, with the attack on the United States Capitol and seeing white supremacists enter the Capitol of the United States, carrying Confederate flags.
I thought this, it actually, we could be entering an era that is as dangerous and divisive as that era was. And it was incredibly disturbing. And so what I hope people will take from this book is that these three women who at the time seemed completely ordinary and each in her own way, how could they possibly imagine that they could bring on a, they could bring out the second American Revolution?
It just seemed completely impossible. And yet they were utterly dedicated to-- they were very, it was not, it was not long after the, the Declaration of Independence had been signed, and they were committed to the words in that document. And they, and they were, and they were, they saw the flaws in the Constitution and they were determined to change that.
And they did. And so the, some of the grassroots movements we are seeing today are really an outgrowth of what those women and all of their friends were doing. So Black Lives Matter, me, the Me Too movement, all and the work that Stacey Abrams has been doing in Georgia, all of this is really important in a democracy.
And John Lewis, the great John Lewis said wrote a piece right before he died. And he said, democracy is not a state. It is an act. And you know, when when ordinary people do extraordinary things, they, they recreate the vision of what America has to be.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:51:29] Thank you so much. Dorothy Wickenden and Thavolia Glymph, for a riveting, memorable discussion of The Women's Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom and Nation and The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights.
Thanks to the McNulty Foundation and the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women's Leadership at Villanova. And thank you friends for taking an hour this evening to educate yourself about the history of the Constitution and women's rights. Thanks to all, and hope to see you soon. Thank you.
Jackie McDermott: [00:52:08] This episode was produced by me, Jackie McDermott, along with Tanaya Tauber, John Guerra, and Lana Ulrich. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler. Please rate, review, and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or follow us on Spotify and join us back here next week. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Jackie McDermott.
