å Saturday, February 11th, 2017

I’ve just finished reading through your responses to chapter three from Davis’ work, Women, Race & Class (1983). Before commenting on the substance of your posts, I want to make a few comments about the more formal aspects of your writing.

Please make sure to proofread before you publish. If there are numerous spelling and / or grammatical errors, you will receive partial credit. As I mentioned in class, posts might appear in wingdings if you use a web-based platform (like google docs) to compose your post, and you accidentally copy html when transferring the content to WordPress. To prevent this from happening, you can write and edit in Microsoft Word. Alternatively, you can review your post in WordPress using the text editor (above) and remove any html coding that appears (HTML coding is everything that appears in brackets <> ). Make sure everything is written in your own words, and any paraphrased text includes a citation. Finally, the only category assigned to your post is the assignment for that week. For example, this week you should have tagged your post with the category on the right: “assignment 01.”

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In your responses to Davis, many of you noted who was not asked to attend the Convention at Seneca Falls. These omissions, as some of you stressed, are all the more shocking because of the recent struggles faced by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott when attempting to contribute to the Anti-Slavery Society on equal terms with male abolitionists. In light of these experiences, we might expect Stanton and Mott to have been more sympathetic to “outsiders” to the women’s movement.

By way of introducing details about the life of Charlotte Woodward, Davis considers the different motives working women had for attending the convention at Seneca Falls. On the whole, the declarations that were the outcome of the convention addressed challenges that faced middle and upper class white women. Charlotte Woodward and some others were looking for guidance on how to improve the conditions of their lives as workers, but the conditions of working women seemed to be a marginal concern at the convention. This was too bad, because the activism of working women prior to the convention suggests what these women could have contributed to the movement had their problems been fully incorporated into the Seneca Fall Declarations and the tenets of the women’s movement during this period. In fact, by making the struggles of married women a primary concern, we could argue that Stanton and Mott reveal how much they didn’t understand about the conditions governing access to “rights.”

Some white women were quick to make comparisons between the lives of married women and that of slaves. From this analogy they did not mean middle and upper class women should dissolve their marriages in protest. I say this only partially in jest because to make this case would have required these women to see the way inequalities based on race, gender, and class were (and are) linked to accumulations of wealth in a capitalist economic system. As Davis underlines in this chapter and throughout her book, it was their mistake to think the subject of rights could be addressed separately from the economic concerns about labor (both slave or wage-based) that were also unfolding during this period.