Document Type

Book

Publication Date

2002

Abstract

In 1895, as she launched a new journal dedicated to bringing equal rights to all the women of America, Abigail Scott Duniway had already been a key figure in the national woman’s movement for over two decades. And during those years, dramatic changes had been taking place. As she wrote, “though ‘Liberty for all the inhabitants of the land’ has not yet been secured, we have made much permanent progress, and now nobody doubts our ultimate success” (“Salutatory” PE 16 Aug. 1895). At the beginning of Duniway’s career, women’s rights were severely restricted. With few exceptions, marriage brought an end to a woman’s legal identity altogether; it meant entering into a state of civil death. A wife had no official existence apart from her husband’s. Under the principle of coverture (in which a woman is said for legal purposes to be covered, or overshadowed, by her husband’s presence), the two were made one, and that one was the masculine partner in the enterprise. In that era, married women in most of the U.S. couldn’t sign contracts, had no title to their own earnings or to property, nor any claim to their children in case of separation or divorce (Flexner, Century 7-8). But by the end of 1896, Idaho and Utah would join Wyoming and Colorado as full suffrage states, and enormous strides would be made on multiple fronts in the equal rights battle. The age of the New Woman, who had “recently discovered herself in sufficient numbers to awaken the alarm of her adversaries,” was dawning—and she had in large part been conjured by the imaginations of her pioneer foremothers, who had dared to dream, and to express those dreams in writing, as did the woman her contemporaries referred to as “Mrs. Duniway.”

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