The Revolution

The Fifteenth Amendment

The Fifteenth Amendment, which sought to extend the vote to African American men, was passed by Congress in February of 1869 and ratified by the states a year later. In the time between these events, the merits of the Amendment were hotly debated in the pages of The Revolution. As some abolitionists urged suffragists to momentarily set aside their cause in favor of supporting black men's enfranchisement, the suffrage movement was deeply divided, and much latent racism was revealed. Both Stanton and Anthony quickly went on the record opposing it, believing that universal male suffrage would further male tyranny and that educated women were required the vote in order to protect the moral value in society. They argued interchangeably that suffrage should be universal and that women should receive the vote before it was extended to black men. In order to develop these claims, Stanton in particular often used highly problematic rhetoric, suggesting that black men posed an inherent danger to (implicitly white) women, while also commodifying the experience of black women in order to assert that they were as deserving of voting rights as their male counterparts. These complex argument strategies all manifest in this 1869 piece, "The Tables Turned." At the same time, other suffragists chose to support the cause for African American enfranchisement, not accepting the claim that it would come at the expense of their own. Unable to reconcile these differences, an obvious split occurred as those opposed to the 15th broke away from the American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National Woman Suffrage Association. However, the tension between race and gender can be traced to the beginning of the movement and manifests in the way that black suffragists have been written out of the history of the cause in the same way that suffrage as a whole is written out of mainstream histories.

"After depriving the sons of Adam all their inalienable rights to person, property, wages, children, they had legislated, as they undoubtedly would, on their tastes, habits, sentiments, and affections. Under this dynasty the manufacture and sale of whiskey, the importation of tobacco, the opening of gambling saloons and brothels, smoking and spitting and swearing were all strictly forbidden."

In the same way that Stanton makes an appeal to the ethos of the American Revolution in writing the Declaration of Sentiments, she makes reference here to the "inalienable rights" that are said to be guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution. This tactic serves two purposes in building her argument. First, it exposes the hypocrisy inherent to denying half the population access to the basic privileges of citizenship on the basis of their sex. Readers would be able to see the paradox of "depriving" someone an "inalienable right," and hopefully that understanding would lead them to recognize the need for suffrage. Second, to invoke enlightenment ideals in this way is to imbue women's situation with a sense of injustice and create a feeling of urgency. To many readers of the late 1800s, the concepts of used by the founders of this nation would have been held up as the ultimate standard of right and wrong. If Stanton was able to convince her audience that women's treatment fell short of that standard, they would surely recognize the need for immediate change.

"The men pricked up their ears to all this talk and thus discussed among themselves: 'Well, if these tyrannical women reinforce themselves with more of their numbers, out doom is sealed.'"

The way that Stanton uses quotation throughout this piece is a shining example of a rhetorical technique very common throughout the suffrage literature: ventriloquism. Broadly, ventriloquism is a term used to describe a number of uses for quoted material-- including reframing a direct quote from the opposition to bolster one's own argument or writing a completely fictionalized quote into a piece for a specific purpose. In this case, Stanton is doing the latter. By essentially deciding what everyone is going to say, she controls the entire narrative. Rather than simply making a straightforward appeal, this tactic allows her to construct an argument, anticipate the response, and address critics all within the same piece.

In this particular case, ventriloquism is used very carefully. After establishing an alternate reality in which men and women switch places in the social hierarchy, Stanton writes men into this world making the exact same arguments that she and other suffragists had been for decades. However, placing those words in men's mouth's gives them a different weight than they have coming from women. In this way, she forces her audience to evaluate an old argument in a new light.

“'The idea,' said they, 'is simply preposterous, that every shade of ignorant womanhood is to make laws for us, while we, refined, educated, tax-paying man have not one word to say.'"

Another shining example of ventriloquism in Stanton's piece, this is also an example of the racist rhetoric that she often used in debates surrounding the Fifteenth Amendment. Stanton wants to make the argument that educated women are more deserving of the vote than uneducated men of color, even going as far as to claim that providing the vote to the latter will endanger the former. This is problematic in numerous ways, most notably in that it implies that black men specifically are undeserving of political representation because their values and needs to not line up exactly with the needs of white Americans.

Arguments like these highlight the way that many white feminists of the suffrage movement failed to take into account issues of intersectionality. While Stanton would not be directly affected by legislation concerning black Americans, many women were. In fact, it setting up a tension between the needs of African Americans and women with this argument, she largely overlooks the fact that many people belong to both of those categories. While making this call might have seemed politically expedient in the moment, due to the sway that an argument like this might have had on a white male audience, rhetoric like this certainly created a nasty legacy that we are still unpacking today.

"The men were so charmed with the dash and brilliancy of the young orator and so confused with her sophistry, that they were about to shout 'Womanhood Suffrage!'"

Here, Stanton is using a technique that could be considered a cousin of ventriloquism. In painting men to be easily charmed and confused with high-minded language and argument, she is assigning what were considered traditionally feminine traits to them. This could have been done with one of two intentions in mind. Stanton might have hoped to make men seem just as silly and intractable as women at times, allowing her to claim that women are just as capable as they are of political engagement. Perhaps the more likely answer, she might have been attempting to show her readers how strange and damaging it is to apply characteristics like these to huge portion of the population based on only one shared trait. Readers would have likely objected to all men being spoken of in these terms, prompting at least a few to stop and consider why they felt so comfortable applying the same descriptors to all women. Stanton's desire would have been for these audience members to eventually arrive at the conclusion that making sweeping generalities about any group is problematic and begin to recognize women as individuals with unique strengths and weaknesses.