Freedom isn't free: women and money
One reason it took 72 years for women to get the vote: money.
In 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton first called for the vote at Seneca Falls, most women didn’t have access to money. A married woman didn’t have control over her own wages (if she earned any)—those went right to her husband. Lucrative employments weren’t an option for single women trying to support themselves and their families, so they likely didn’t have spare cash to support causes they might have cared about. It was a problem because it costs money to start and run a revolution.
It costs money to put out a newspaper that promoted ideas of female equality, a necessity because other publications of the day weren’t giving much (if any) space to the topic of women’s rights. Paper, printers, and postage were a significant cost, never mind paying oneself to write and edit a publication on top of running a household. For years, the number of women who were both interested and could spare the cash for a subscription was incredibly small.
It cost money to pay for lecturers and organizers to go out and raise awareness and collect signatures on petitions. The Anti-Slavery society funded Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper at this time. Lucy Stone started charging admission and was able to support herself that way. A few other brave women tried to earn a living by lecturing. But a sustained and organized campaign of dedicated activists for women’s rights was just not affordable.
Then two wealthy dead men came to the rescue.
In the late 1850s, two bequests from Francis Jackson and Charles Hovey changed the game. They left money to support both abolition and women’s rights with the stipulation that if the enslaved were freed, the remaining money would go to women’s causes. A man named Wendell Phillips was in charge of distributions. Now Lucy and Susan had a salary and money for printing pamphlets and organizing conventions.
But then the Civil War happened and the women put aside their cause in order to support abolition and the north with the understanding that their abolitionist friends would support them after the war. It didn’t work like that. Even though the enslaved had been freed, the Wendell Phillips of refused to give money to support the cause of women’s suffrage, or even to give them space in his anti-slavery publications—even though they were advocating for universal suffrage. His reasoning was that the Black man wasn’t really freed until he had the vote. To which Elizabeth Cady Stanton retorted: “Does he think the Black race is comprised entirely of males?”
I think this short-sighted decision really pitted white women against the rights of Black people and this is when you see some really racist arguments from the Suffs (which deserves it’s own post). I think the repercussions of this are still with us today.
Women’s rights activists lost their allies—the abolitionists—and access to money to champion their cause. In the feuds over this funding, they even lost what little space in the abolitionist press they were given. This is when Susan and Elizabeth accepted the financial assistance of a wildly controversial man named George Train. With his financial backing, Susan and Elizabeth were finally able to put out a newspaper of their own called The Revolution (tagline: Men their rights and nothing more, women their rights and nothing less). Lucy Stone and her husband also started publishing the Woman’s Journal. Activist and Suffragist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin launched Woman’s Era, the first national newspaper by and for Black women. Though these publications would struggle for revenue and subscribers, the word was finally getting out.
In the 1870s the “lecture circuit” became a thing and people could make a decent living touring the country and giving talks. This is how a great number of women’s rights advocates made their living and raised awareness for the cause. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, finally free from small children, now had to go out and earn enough to pay for seven college educations (she did). Susan toured. Everyone toured. Women’s suffrage started getting mainstream attention.
Finally, women were earning money. As the century progressed, it became more and more common for women to get an education and to work. We see the first female lawyers and doctors and journalists. Women who worked in factories may not have had a ton of extra spending money, but they had freedom to organize and they did get involved in the suffrage movement. You do find stories of working women giving up bus money or lunch money to the cause because they believed it mattered.
Finally, women could keep their own money after laws were passed that granted married women their own damn money.
But just pause for a moment to consider the slow grind of change that it took in order for women to earn enough money to support the cause of their own freedom.
In the 1900s, two fabulously wealthy ladies came to the rescue.
Alva Vanderbilt Belmont is best known for her Gilded Age feud with the Mrs. Astor to become leader of New York society. She also famously forced her daughter Consuelo to marry the duke of Marlborough, perhaps to rehab her own reputation after scandalously divorcing William Vanderbilt. She then married Oliver Belmont, and after he died, she had a huge fortune from two husbands. She generously funded suffrage activities, including Suffrage lunchrooms where anyone could come in and get an affordable hot meal, surrounded by “votes for women” propaganda. She funded a suffrage settlement house in Harlem and paid the bail money of female garment workers arrested for protesting. She was also a huge supporter of Alice Paul and her radical tactics, which included a dramatic parade and picketing the white house. Alva Belmont was rich AF, demanding and complicated and I think she spent her money well.
The Suffs also received another windfall from the estate of Mrs. Frank Leslie in the last few years of the fight. Mrs. Frank Leslie is a wonderful 19th century character. She was born Miriam Florence Follen, incredibly poor and possibly biracial. In the 1870S, she married Frank Leslie, a newspaper tycoon. When he died, she legally changed her name to Frank Leslie and took over his newspaper empire. When she died, she left the bulk of her fortune to women’s suffrage. That money was used to set up the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission—basically, the press operation that supported “winning plan” that ultimately secured the 19th Amendment. For more on how they used the money—a brilliant publicity blitz, among other things—check out this short and fascinating article.
I had this post half written in my head for a while when a statistic from The 19th Newsletter caught my eye and prompted me to finally write it all down:
A recent report from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) took a close look at races for state-level offices and found that women are significantly less likely to make political contributions both big and small — meaning that women’s voices aren’t evenly impacting who decides to run and what policies they stand for.
An earlier draft of this post was written before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee and before she raised hundreds of millions of dollars, practically overnight. It is beautiful to see a woman running for office with that level of enthusiasm and financial support. Talk about living the dreams of our ancestors!
But VP Harris isn’t the only woman on the ballot this November. State and local offices are where the real change is made—and where we need more women in office. Harris knows this—she donated 25 million of her campaign money raised to down ballot races.
As we head into an election season, we need to remember the ladies and to remember that ladies need money. Women in America now hold an unprecedented amount of wealth and spending power as both individuals and as “the decider” in so many families. Let’s use this hard-won position to further power women’s rights and equality, up and down the ballot.
I knew about George Train, but didn't know about the prior history with Wendell Phillips and distributing the bequests - so thank you for that nugget!