Women's Rights After the Civil War: Progress and Backlash

Introduction: The Unfulfilled Promise of Abolition

Given the overlap between the abolitionist and women's rights movements, one might have expected to see a significant change in women's rights at the end of the Civil War, following the end of slavery. After all, the two movements had been so closely intertwined — with advocates in both comparing their plights to one another's — that an increase in rights for those who had previously been enslaved would have seemed naturally linked to an increase in rights for those treated as subordinate because of their gender. However, the reality was that abolition did not lead to an expansion of women's rights. On the contrary, the women's rights movement seemed to lose momentum after the Civil War, and it was almost another half century before women actually gained the right to vote.

The Suffrage Split: Women's Rights vs. African American Enfranchisement

In order to understand why the women's rights movement lost steam after the Civil War, one must recognize that the people who advocated most strongly for women's rights were also those most likely to speak out against slavery and for equal rights for African Americans. With the abolition brought about by the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, it soon became clear that a victory had been won on one front. Historically, there had been stronger public support for abolition and for civil rights for Black Americans than for women's rights, particularly the right to vote. Because of the momentum in favor of expanding rights for African Americans, many people in both the abolitionist and women's rights movements advocated shelving the issue of women's suffrage and concentrating on securing the franchise for African American males. They felt it was "unfair to endanger black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis" (A&E Television).

It is critical to understand that this approach was not universally supported within the women's suffrage movement. "Some woman-suffrage advocates, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage" (A&E Television). Therefore, they did not support the 15th Amendment. On the contrary, they "even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women's votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans" (A&E Television). In 1869, this group created the National Woman Suffrage Association, whose goal was a universal suffrage amendment to the federal Constitution that would guarantee women the right to vote.

Abortion, Birth Control, and Legal Restrictions on Women's Bodies

The right to vote is only one of the civil rights that affect women, and the Civil War had very little impact on the rights women enjoyed or were denied in their daily lives. The period just before the Civil War was marked by increasing restrictions on women's lives. For example, while abortion is often regarded as a modern political issue, it was not a significant controversy in early America. Opposition to abortion seemed to follow in the wake of the women's rights movement, which began less than fifteen years before the Civil War. It was only in 1859 that the American Medical Association — composed solely of men — announced its opposition to abortion (The Prism). By 1860, one state had already prohibited all abortions, and this trend continued well past the Civil War. By 1900, most abortions in the United States had been outlawed, and by 1965 every state had banned abortion, though some made exceptions. One could therefore argue that the conservative backlash following Reconstruction helped usher in greater restrictions on women's reproductive rights than had existed before the Civil War.

It was around this same era that reliable birth control first became a real possibility. Condoms became widely available around the time of the Civil War, and most states did not initially restrict their sale or use. However, just a few years after the war, access to birth control changed dramatically. In 1873, Congress passed an anti-obscenity law that deemed birth control obscene and outlawed its dissemination (Time). This made the United States the only Western nation to criminalize contraception at that time (Time). While women and men continued to access birth control illegally — often using devices labeled for other purposes — it would be decades before contraception could be openly obtained in the United States. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, but it was shut down within ten days (Time). It was not until 1938 that a federal judge lifted the federal ban on birth control (Time).

Conclusion: Complexity and Unfinished Progress

The status of women following the Civil War was complex. On the one hand, there was a growing awareness of women's rights and women's issues, and one can clearly see the roots of change emerging in the period before the Civil War and gaining strength during and immediately after the war. On the other hand, a backlash against women's equality was also taking shape during this period, so that changes that seemed imminent took far longer than anyone might have imagined. In fact, the Equal Rights Amendment — which would essentially do for gender what the 14th Amendment did for race — has still not been ratified. What this makes clear is that women's rights did change in the period following the Civil War, but those changes have not yet proceeded to the point where women are wholly equal, in the eyes of the law and of society, to men in the modern United States.

Works Cited

A&E Television Networks. "The Fight for Women's Suffrage." History.com. N.p., 2012. Web. 16 May 2012.

The Prism. "The Path of the Women's Rights Movement: A Timeline of the Women's Rights Movement 1848–1998." The Prism. N.p., Mar. 1998. Web. 16 May 2012.

Time. "A Brief History of Birth Control." Time Magazine. N.p., 3 May 2010. Web. 16 May 2012.