| I. This dissertation is concerned with the origins and development of the women's movement in the United States, to 1870. It attempts to explore why and how a feminist ideology and perspective developed and a women's movement was organized, as well as from whence it derived its ideas.;III. The women's movement, once formed, was buffeted by external events, institutions and issues in the larger society, and it had to continuously respond to these events and pressures. Though it was hypothesized that divergent views of the family split the movement in 1869, it was necessary to explore and analyze these other political issues, particularly those which arose in the post-Civil War era, in order to ascertain whether these issues, and not conflicting family ideologies underlay the split.;IV. The pre- and post-Civil War national conventions of the movement and the controversies they revealed were analyzed and discussed in order to discover the bases of movement ideology, the conflicts which arose, the external pressures brought to bear upon it, and especially the significance of family issues.;V. A detailed analysis of Susan Anthony's journal, The Revolution (1868-1870) was undertaken to discover how her faction dealt with political, social and economic issues of the day. This shed light on the split in the movement, and the conflicts which led to it. The analysis of the articles and letters printed in The Revolution revealed, in addition, the fact that a definite ideological focus on issues pertaining to women had by then developed and crystalized. It also revealed attitudes toward marriage and divorce that were more radical than those of the women in the opposing faction. Central to the ideological focus was the conception of an idealized, independent and autonomous woman, and implicitly, the conception of "woman as a master status." Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been building on this idea, at least since 1850. In this conception woman was a status in itself that transcended the special statuses and roles of women as family members, sexually undefined citizens, or individuals attached to other groups and/or segments of society. This embodied, however, an anti-family ideology. Thus, all political, social and economic issues were viewed from the point of view of women's special needs and positions in society. Anthony, Stanton and their followers contributed then to the construction of a definite ideology that gave foundation and substance to an emerging world view and personal self-definition for women that was to become much more pronounced a century later in the contemporary movement.;II. The specific hypothesis of the dissertation is that the women's movement was subject to basic disagreements over the nature of the family, and that it split in 1869 because of underlying conflicts over the limits to which it should go to alter and restructure the family as an institution. The issue of divorce exemplified this conflict in family perspectives. Similarly, the child-bearing and rearing family functions of women posed ideological dilemmas for the movement. |
