Is it right to lock up your wife? The Seneca Falls Convention said ‘no’

by Katerina Lorenzatos Makris ~

Imagine a world where a husband who is tired of you, or even just annoyed with you, can lock you away indefinitely. Where he can take your pay, your inheritance, and even your children. All without batting an eye. All perfectly legal.

Imagine the laws of that oppressive place do not allow you to vote, even though you are required to pay taxes to fund the government that makes those laws. So nobody represents your needs, interests, or opinions. For no reason other than that you happen to have been born female, you have very few rights.

It’s hard for me to imagine enjoying or even enduring life in a world like that. Gives me the shivers. Yet that was the world for most women in the past, and continues for many around the globe today.

Locked up by my father

In the 1960s and 1970s I grew up in an ultra-patriarchal family where most of the males were domineering, abusive, and sometimes violent. In spring of my high school senior year, my father locked me in my room for a week—literally locked the door.

He refused to let me out except to use the restroom. He forbade my mother and grandmother from any interaction with me other than leaving trays of food just inside the door. He told the school that I was home with the flu. He warned me to never tell anyone the truth about this or my other absences.

As an eager student, it deeply pained me to miss my classes. As an ambitious young woman, it dispirited me to miss the extracurricular activities that were helping me lay a foundation for a productive future.

To this day I don’t know what offense he believed I had committed. None was specified, and none was needed. His word, in our home, was law. But in the world outside our home, at that time, draconian punishments such as false imprisonment were neither legal nor unofficially condoned, as they had been in the not too distant past. Moreover as soon as I came of age I was able to easily escape the ordeals of our family’s home and begin an independent life.

Most of our foremothers could not escape. They spent their entire lives under male domination. That heinously discriminatory, wretched world is where they grew up, married, raised children, toiled both inside and outside the home, where they struggled to keep themselves and their families healthy and their spirits intact. Everything they said and did was under the scrutiny of their fathers, husbands, and even their sons and other random males, who were all endowed by a largely anti-female society with the authority to enforce female obedience.

Dared to discuss women’s rights

On the weekend of July 19-20, 1848, in the 90-degree heat of the Finger Lakes region of New York, 300 women and men gathered to do something scandalous—discuss the oppression of females and the suppression of our rights.

For the women in attendance, it was a risk. Well-bred ladies didn’t talk about social norms or politics. They certainly didn’t question or interfere in such matters, particularly not in public, since the law barred females from public speaking. Infractions were often met with jeers, barrages of rotten vegetables, or worse. To make such efforts even less appealing, authorities tended to ignore crimes of retaliatory violence against women by their disapproving menfolk.

Given the obstacles, never before had there been a convention in the United States to address the topic of women’s rights. Just by showing up at the Wesleyan Chapel in the quiet town of Seneca Falls, the hundreds of intrepid people present took part in an unprecedented historical event.

Freed their tongues

Scholars disagree on the ultimate impact of that first Women’s Rights Convention, or Seneca Falls Convention, as it later came to be known. For example they debate whether or not it was really a significant step toward the passage 72 years later of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, or if other events and efforts were more important.

Regardless of its place in history, the meeting resonates with meaning for me. First, those people showed up. They dared to be there. Then they made full and marvelous use of the opportunity. They freed their tongues, voiced inconvenient truths, and left a legacy of incendiary words in their speeches and documents that even after 172 years give me goosebumps.

We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love.

– Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the opening day of the Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, 1848, in the first public speech she ever made (but not the last)

That passage is like a healing balm for me. Sometimes I wish Stanton could know that when she spoke out in the 1800s against men having “the power to chastise and imprison their wives” (or their daughters), she would give great solace and strength to females like me who personally experienced the malignance of that type of power decades later, in the 1900s.

Other times it seems better that she didn’t know. Probably it would have broken her heart to see that significant subjugation of women continues around the world even today in the 2000s, in spite of her daring work.

But it was in no small part because of the courageous work by Stanton, her colleagues in the Wesleyan Chapel that weekend, and many other civil rights activists during the two intervening centuries that our nation’s laws, social structure, and attitudes have been changing for the better.

So much better, in fact, that in the late 20^th century an Iowa farm girl named Peggy Whitson, could become a biochemist, next an astronaut, then break several records for things like number of days spent in space (665).  [Visit Sass101.com again soon for our upcoming SassStar article on Whitson.]

Meanwhile a petite Jewish girl from a low-income Brooklyn family faced down discrimination for both her gender and her religion to became one of the most well-known and respected U.S. Supreme Court justices in history–Ruth Bader Ginsburg–our first SassStar.

And another girl, this author, ultimately was able to rip off her muzzle, unlock the doors of her patriarchal prison, restore her spirit, and walk free.

Please join Sass101 for Part 2 of our article series about Seneca Falls, coming soon…

Abuse and tyranny vs. self-respect: Bold women’s revolt at the Seneca Falls Convention

Katerina Lorenzatos Makris, a career news reporter and fiction author, is Sass101.com’s founder and editor.

Her fiction includes 17 novels for Simon and Schuster, E.P. Dutton, Avon, and other major publishers (under the name Kathryn Makris), as well as a teleplay for CBS-TV, and a short story for The Bark magazine.

She has written hundreds of articles for regional wire services and for outlets such as National Geographic Traveler, The San Francisco Chronicle, Travelers’ Tales, NBC’s Petside.com, RescueDiva.com, AnimalIssuesReporter.com, and Examiner.com (Animal Policy Examiner).

While specializing in animal and environmental issues, Katerina has covered a wide range of additional topics such as hurricanes, elections, 12 capital murder trials, and last but not least, women’s issues.

Her hundreds of interviews include HRH Princess Irene of Greece, Pres. George H.W. Bush, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Sissy Spacek, Ted Danson, the real Col. Sanders, and Benji the Dog.

Together with coauthor Shelley Frost, Katerina wrote a step-by-step guide for hands-on, in-the-trenches dog rescue, Your Adopted Dog: Everything You Need to Know About Rescuing and Caring for a Best Friend in Need (The Lyons Press).

Please email Katerina at sass101info AT yahoo DOT com with any questions or comments. [We spell out the address that way to try to foil spammers. ? ]