Another significant development of the democratic movements of midcentury was the rise in women's consciousness not only as partners in democratic change but as specific groups who should benefit from those changes. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, groups of women and people of color began to measure democracy by the degree to which it incorporated them and their interests. As a result of the 1848 revolution in France and the sudden possibility of slave rebellions in its colonies, the provisional government of France freed the slaves in all of its colonies, including the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and Senegal in West Africa. But despite many attempts to end slavery in the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation liberated slaves only in the states that had "risen in rebellion against the United States," and who, after January 1, 1863, would "then, thenceforward, and forever [be] free." Slaves in the rest of the United States did not gain their freedom until the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified at the end of December 1865 proclaiming that the Constitution would allow "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted . . ."15 One of the main goals of radical Republicans in the United States was to pass constitutional amendments to assure the freedom and civil rights of men liberated from slavery. With most states that had joined the confederacy temporarily excluded from participation in Congress until 1868 and with a number of black senators and representatives voting until 1878, the Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were added to the Constitution, insuring all men rights of citizenship, including due process of the law, and granting formerly enslaved men the right to vote and be elected to office. The Nineteenth Amendment, which made women of all colors citizens with the right to vote, did not take effect until 1920.
Women's struggles for suffrage, like other democratic campaigns, had a long history. In 1840, Elizabeth Cady, an activist in both the temperance and antislavery movements, married Henry Stanton, a member of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and accompanied him to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Hoping to take part, she and Lucretia Mott, an official delegate of two antislavery societies in Pennsylvania, and five other women delegates from the United States were refused seating because of their gender. For many Quakers like Lucretia Mott, being a Quaker entailed belief in human equality and, although Elizabeth Cady Stanton had grown up in a privileged household, she too had suffered worse losses than being excluded from a conference. But the rejection entailed more than a mere slight. As young as Stanton was, she had spent hour after hour in her eminent father's law office along with his law clerks, and knew that justice consisted in rights. Slaves needed to be free and so did women. The slight was equally memorable for Mott, a Quaker minister who said that the issue of women's rights "was the most important question of my life from an early age." Mott, though twenty years older and far more religious, inspired her young colleague. Stanton claims to have thought that "When [she] first heard from [Mott's] lips that [I] had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my convictions . . . I felt a new born sense of dignity and freedom."16
For eight years after their initial meeting in London, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott continued their political activism in different moral reform movements, and raised their families, living far apart from one another and communicating only occasionally. But in July 1848, Stanton and Mott were invited to the home of a mutual friend and instantly resumed their conversation about women's rights. In a moment of inspiration and rage that may have seemed like a calling, the two women and three friends, including Mott's sister, decided to organize a conference to meet the following week. Since Mott was a renowned speaker in the abolitionist movement, they put an ad in the local paper announcing her appearance.
Unsure at first about how to proceed, one of the organizers rummaging through various papers came upon the Declaration of Independence, and the four women began playing around with the language.17 In three or four days, Stanton sat down and wrote the "Declaration of Sentiments," which was read aloud to the audience of people who lived nearby in Seneca Falls and Rochester, New York. Nearly 300 people including about thirty men filled the audience on the first day of the two-day conference. Substituting "men and women" everywhere that the Declaration of Independence had put "men," the revised document explained that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal . . ." and went on from there, listing the way the law discriminated against women as workers and wives who lacked control over their own wages and other property. Barred from any institution of higher education, women could not aspire to professional careers. If their husbands betrayed them, they had no rights to complain to the law. And if he divorced them, they lost their children. Stanton's solution? Demand women's rights to vote. Although her collaborators thought she would undermine all their support if she made such a radical demand, she insisted. And with the help of the editor of the North Star, the famous abolitionist, former slave, and journalist
Frederick Douglass, the convention narrowly supported the demand for suffrage.18
Despite the fact that Seneca Falls was a small town, newspapers all over the East coast responded. The Associated Press, first organized the previous May 1848 as a consortium of six of New York City's most powerful newspapers, carried news about the conference at Seneca Falls and another women's rights convention that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott addressed in nearby Rochester a few weeks later. Most of the papers ridiculed the idea of women's rights, arguing that being a wife was a higher calling. Others said the demand for political and social rights would make women laughing stocks. But aside from the humor, The New York Herald published the whole "Declaration," and Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, went against his personal distaste for women's political aspirations, and admitted that "however unwise and mistaken the demand, it is but the assertion of a natural right and as such must be conceded."19
In September, 1848, Stanton responded to some of her critics. Addressing an article that appeared in the National Reformer of Rochester: "one might suppose from the articles that you find in some papers, that there were editors so ignorant as to believe that the chief object of these Conventions was to seat every lord at the head of a cradle, and to clothe every woman in her lord's attire." Ridiculing the persistent fear of role reversals, she explained that, "the real object[s] of our recent Conventions at Rochester and Seneca Falls . . . was simply our own inalienable rights, our duties, our true sphere. If God has assigned a sphere to man and woman, we claim the right to judge ourselves of His design in reference to us, and we accord to [every] man the same privilege. We think a man has quite enough in his life to find out his own individual calling, without being taxed to decide where every woman belongs."20 In the long years that followed, Stanton used the press as one of the main weapons she and the suffrage movement employed to secure the vote.
Like the women's suffrage movement in the United States that owed so much to its religious origins among Quakers, Methodists, and Congregationalist Protestants, a far-reaching Christian peasant revolution with some democratic overtones emerged in China in 1848. Of southern China's eighteen provinces, sixteen joined a revolution between 1848 and 1865. The movement called the Taiping Rebellion attempted to overthrow the Qing or Manchu Dynasty that had ruled China since the middle of the seventeenth century. The British defeat of China in the first Opium War (1839-42) in which the Chinese government had tried to resist the forced sale of opium that turned millions of ordinary Chinese into hopeless drug addicts, confirmed the inability of the Chinese authorities to control their own ports, especially those around Canton. Conditions grew worse, but the Taiping Rebellion, which swept China and led to between twenty- and thirty-million deaths in one of the most destructive wars of modern times, led to some unintended democratic consequences, including increased opportunities for decision-making by both male and female peasants.