Sexism, Presentism and the Founders

 

It is often said and written today, and assumed to be an obvious and uncontested fact, that the Framers of the Constitution and the Founders of our country intended the rights in the Constitution and the new government to apply only to white males or white male property owners. Historian John Hope Franklin, for example says: “Jefferson didn’t mean it when he wrote that all men are created equal; we’ve never meant it.  The truth is we’re a bigoted people and always have been.”[1] Various versions of this Proposition are repeated everywhere in one form or another, and are even being taught in our schools. 

 

Lorna Mason, for example, in her eighth-grade history textbook says that “When Jefferson spoke [in the Declaration of Independence] of ‘the people,’ he meant only free white men.”[2]  Cummings and Wyse’s Democracy under Pressure, a college political science text says, “And today, two centuries later, women in America are still struggling for the full freedom and equality denied them by the framers.”[3]

 

This statement (the Proposition) and variants of it, make the Framers out to be at best naïve or insincere and at worst hypocrites. It suggests that the Founders were in some sense elitist, racist and sexist. This is a very serious charge, and I have taken several years to examine it carefully. I hope to share part of my research with you today.

 

I dispute the Proposition.  In my talk today I intend to challenge only the sexist part of it. I hope to demonstrate that with respect to women the proposition is untrue, unfair and unhistorical.

 

With your kind indulgence I will present this essay in about thirty minutes, after which I look forward to hearing your ideas on this question as well. To help keep things clear, the essay is in two parts.  Part I, the longest, will examine mainly the historical context and the Constitution.  Part II will make some linguistic arguments and observations on language usage which, I believe, support the points in Part I. I will introduce Part II by showing a five-minute film, that I hope will amuse you with some comic relief as well as help you see my point about language usage.

 

Returning now to the Proposition:  The Founders were sexists and did not mean for the rights in the Government they were creating to apply to women. I do not pretend to know the motivation of the Proponents, but today I hope to demonstrate that the Proposition is based in part on an attitude which historians refer to as “Presentism” and in part on linguistic misinterpretations that stem from that attitude.  These will be defined in due course.

 

Kindly let me make two points before getting to my arguments.  First, sexism is more than a vast enough topic for thirty minutes, so of course I have left aside the questions of race and slavery, though I imagine they will come up in our discussion[4].  Second, though I plan to defend the Founders as not being sexist, I fully support women’s liberation, and I am in no way advocating or suggesting that we return to the attitudes and language habits of the 18th Century.  What I am suggesting is that we try to understand the past before we condemn it.

 

PART I: HISTORICAL:

 

The Constitution begins by saying:  “We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice . . . promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. . .”.  Proponents of the Proposition contend that the word, People, was not meant to apply to women.  However, a careful reading of the Constitution shows clearly that the words people and ourselves and other personal pronouns, refer to persons of both sexes.  Take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, for instance:

 

“ARTICLE V:  No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury. . .; nor shall he be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. . . [Nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…].”

 

If the Proposition were true, then the word, “himself” would apply only to males, so  women could be jailed without indictment, and be forced to testify against themselves. Such an outrage has never been advocated or practiced towards women by any court in the entire history of  the United States. Women have had Fifth Amendment rights from the beginning, the same as men, and no one has ever suggested it was unconstitutional. The word, “himself” meant both men and women at the time and everybody knew it.

 

The fact that women have been exercising their Fifth Amendment rights for over two hundred years means that this single and extremely important example proves the Proposition false. The fact that WE would word that Amendment differently today is irrelevant.  [Parenthetically, kindly note there is also nothing there about being white or owning property, so those who go around repeating that the rights in the Constitution applied only to white male property owners  have not read the Fifth Amendment very carefully, by which I mean in its historical context.]

 

Furthermore, the Constitution guarantees many other rights that clearly apply to both women and propertyless men. I will not take time to read each one to you but anyone who reads it carefully will agree categorically that gender is not mentioned as a requirement for any rights in the Constitution. Thus, a woman or a man could constitutionally become a, Representative, a Senator, or President or hold any office, if they met the requirements of age, birth and residency.   Indeed women have become Representatives[5] and Senators[6] with no need to amend the Constitution.  These rights also prove the Proposition demonstrably untrue.

 

Likewise with the privilege of Habeas Corpus (Article I, Section 9. 2):   Does anyone contend, or has any court ever maintained that women could be arrested and jailed without trial?  If not, then the Proposition is again proven false.  So, when someone says the rights outlined in the Constitution did not apply to women, ask them which ones?  Since there are none, the Proponents should stop repeating the Proposition because it is patently untrue.

 

Secondly, the Proposition is unfair because it attributes “flaws” and limitations of certain rights of women to the Founders and Framers.  One hears, for example, things like: “OK, women were entitled to trial by jury but the juries were all male; women didn’t get the right to vote until the 20th Century, etc.”  Well, the Constitution was a framework “to form a more perfect Union.” This meant a Union of the States.  The Framers did not create the States or their respective constitutions. They were visionaries, but they did not create an entire society from scratch, devoid of its particular social mores and prejudices.

 

Voting rights were not a major point of discussion during the Constitutional Convention. Clearly, at that time, the right to vote was a question for the States, not the Federal Government.  So, even on the question of women suffrage, the Framers did not set out to discriminate against women.  It is unfair to imply that they did.  Indeed, had some of them even wanted to raise this issue from a modern perspective, it is very unlikely the Convention would have come up with any document at all or that such document would have been ratified.  All fair-minded people should be grateful to the Framers for creating the legal basis for later forcing the states to grant rights specifically to women and certain minorities.

 

So, those who say that rights in the Constitution do not apply to women are making a false generalization doubtless stemming from their outrage that women did not have the right to vote for so long. This applies a stigma of guilt to the Framers that is undeserved.   As I said, qualifications for voting were left to the several States, not the Federal Government created by the Constitution.  But since women’s not having the vote is at the heart of so much venom directed at the Founders, let’s examine that idea more deeply.

 

First of all, many people believe that no women voted until after the XIXth  Amendment was passed in 1920; the understanding seems to be that before then it would have been “unconstitutional” for them to vote.  Well, the facts do not support that contention either. Indeed, women were granted suffrage in the New Jersey Constitution of 1776.  Women voted in elections there regularly until 1807. This was unprecedented in world history. When the Constitution went into effect in 1789, no one said the women’s vote was “unconstitutional”. Indeed, it is based on the Founders’ equality principle. The records are scarce for that early period, but there is no question that women also voted earlier in New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire as well.  Now, whether we like it or not, the idea of women suffrage was not a burning issue in those days, and the States simply didn’t consider it important.  In any case, in 1869 the Wyoming Territorial legislature granted full voting rights to women, Utah followed suit in 1870.  In 1890 Wyoming enters the Union as the first state granting full women’s suffrage.  Other states also did so: Colorado, 1893; Utah and Idaho, 1896, Washing State, 1910, California, 1911: Oregon, Kansas and Arizona, 1912; Montana and Nevada 1914; S. Dakota and Oklahoma, 1918. 

 

So, in 1920, when the XIXth Amendment was ratified women, contrary to the popular belief, were already voting in thirteen states.  No one claimed it was unconstitutional or that it went against the alleged “sexist” intent of the Framers. No.  The XIXth Amendment simply forced the states to accept the rights implied in the Constitution and intended by the Framers from the beginning.  To blame the Framers for what States and society at large failed to do earlier is both unfair and unhistorical. 

 

Allow me to underline the important and forgotten fact that the Framers were not in control of this issue by pointing out to point out that the XIXth Amendment was ratified in 1920, but only by 36 of the 48 States, which is exactly the required three fourths.  Twelve states were still holding out[7]; if one more had done so the Amendment would not have passed.  Would the Proponents have blamed that as well on the “sexism” of the Framers?

 

(By the way, the first woman to ever run for President, Victoria Woodhull in 1872, said that the Constitution already gave women the right to vote and an Amendment was not necessary[8]. Indeed, she so argued in Congress. I think she may well have been right.)

 

But to return to the Framers, the idea of blaming them is unhistorical in that it makes judgments based on modern conditions and attitudes, historians call this “Presentism”. It fails to understand the past in its own context—which means it fails to understand the past.  It also translates to a virtually complete lack of empathy. Women suffrage was simply not an issue.  Rightly or wrongly, both men and women in the founding days generally felt that women were equal, that the interests of the two sexes were the same, but their roles were different.

 

Women looked forward to being wives and mothers to their children.  Generally, it is fair to say they were no more interested in getting the vote than in getting muskets and joining George Washington at Valley Forge. They simply had other roles to play.   Abigail Adams express the prevailing attitude in a letter to her husband, John:  “A well ordered home is my chief delight, and the affectionate domestic wife with the relative duties which accompany that character (is) my highest ambition.”[9]

 

In 1776 and immediately after,  the main concern of both sexes generally was to get out from under British domination and found a new nation.

 

When Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of a “Government of the people, by the people and for the people,” he was reflecting the ideals and the intent of the Founders and Framers.  It took a brutal civil war to help realize some of them.  The Constitution wanted to form a “more perfect Union” [than had been the case under the Articles of Confederation]. The Civil War made the Union a little more perfect, as did the XIXth Amendment and the subsequent Civil Rights Act, etc.   The proponents of the Proposition, however, are implying that it should have been “perfect” from the start.  They fail to recognize that politics is the art of the possible, and they fail to appreciate, it seems to me, that we are standing on the shoulders of the Founders and Framers.  We should be grateful for that support and stop castigating them with untruths about their intentions.

 

Neither the Proponents in general nor the textbook authors mentioned earlier make any effort to try to understand how on earth the Founders could have viewed women as equal without guaranteeing them the right to vote.  Instead they simply assume that the Founders were insincere or confused and that when they said, “All men are created equal,” they did not mean that all human beings have the same rights. 

 

Well, Alexis de Tocqueville found that the sexes did view each other as equals in America. He marveled greatly at it and contrasted it to Europe’s prevailing “paternalism”.

 

“In Europe, . . . women are regarded as seductive but incomplete beings. . . American legislators . . .  punish rape by death. . . . In France, where the same crime is subject to much milder penalties, it is difficult to find a jury that will convict.  Is the reason scorn of chastity or scorn of women?  I cannot rid myself of the feeling that it is both. [T]he Americans . . . think of men and women as beings of equal worth, though their fates are different . . . [[A]lthough the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station.”[10]

 

This was a new “Republican” family relationship, different from the paternalistic European system where parents chose spouses and so forth.[11]  Lots more could be said on the legal aspect of the sex question as well, for example that soon after the Constitution was ratified, all states abolished primogeniture, which had given eldest sons priority in inheritances, so that now daughters inherited more nearly equally with their brothers. Unfortunately time does no allow us to explore that path further.  The Founders’ principles are fully compatible with voting rights for women; changes in circumstances since the late eighteenth century made female voting more practicable.

 

However, from this brief overview we can see that it is patently unfair to look back with today’s perspective and say that women were thought to be inferior and blame that on the will of the Framers; it is totally unrealistic to criticize them for not having done something about the vote and so forth.  They, like us, are operating in our own historical context.  Powerful forces like tradition, the Bible, Christianity itself were at work keeping women in a generally “inferior” position from today’s perspective.  Who in the Church, for example, was protesting this state of affairs?[12]  Since the Church operated in the local communities, they could perhaps have influenced the States—much more than the Framers, who were working hard and making compromises to form a more perfect union.  Looking back with a presentistic point of view does not give an accurate or fair picture.

 

[Another point inextricably linked in people’s minds today with the Proposition is the idea that in addition to sexist discrimination against women, the Framers were also elitists in that only white, male property owners could vote in those days[13].  Thus, it is alleged, the Framers discriminated against even white males who did not own property.[14] This contention also misses the point.  The Constitution did not give the right to vote to anybody.  So for textbooks and other commentators to keep repeating that the Framers denied the right to vote to anyone is absurd.  The Constitution did not deny or grant the right to vote to anyone. Of course, and undisputedly, women were generally not able to vote for too many years, and they were not treaded as equals in many other ways as well, but that whole sad state of affair—sexism and elitism, etc.--was a very entrenched inherited legacy from Europe. I’m wondering if it is at all fair or realistic to expect that the Founders could eliminate them all in 1789 even if they were to go back there in a time-machine from our time period and try to do so.]

 

Now, since this essay has already proven, I believe, that the Constitution did not deny women any rights (as alleged), the issue is resolved.  Likewise, since white and property owner are not mentioned there either, the Framers did not discriminate against non whites or the propertyless in the Constitution.  So those who say they did are in error. They are victims of Presentism.

 

Getting rid of Presentism is difficult; it requires an in depth study of past societies and an attitude of open-mindedness.  With a certain discipline, and honest work however, I believe at least one aspect of the process can be dealt with: the linguistic, that is, language usage. To introduce this topic and give you an idea of what I mean, I would like to now show you about six minutes of excerpts from a movie.

 

PART II: LANGUAGE USAGE:

 

“His Girl Friday” dates from 1947, stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

Russell is the ex-wife of Cary Grant; she is also an ex-reporter for the paper he edits. In looking at these excerpts I would ask you to kindly ask yourself in anyone could make a movie using such language today—a couple of words in particular--and not be condemned and perhaps picketed and boycotted. 

 

Well, I hope you enjoyed those few excerpts.  It seems hard to believe that just sixty years ago that kind of language was quite acceptable.  Few men today would tell women she should have been a “gentleman” or refer to her as a newspaperman (twice).  Likewise, few women would call themselves newspapermen.  The point here is that this film is less than sixty years old and I believe if we look at it with what I am calling Presentism, one might well hear it said that Carry Grant was sexist and that Rosalind Russell was a dupe held at bay like all her sisters by sexist misogynists. But that is not the case at all.  Indeed Russell is proud of her “diploma” of being a bona-fide, first-rate “newspaperman.”  In fact this film was “progressive” even in modern terms in that a woman was given status as a worker equal to a man, indeed she is the best writer on the paper and better in every (human) way than all the other reporters shown—all males.

 

The linguistic fact is that those words were inclusive. In the same way that the Screen Actors’ Guild includes actresses as well. Yet, if we are so easily out of touch in just sixty years what about two-hundred and twenty-five?

 

Webster’s Unabridged still includes the generic meaning for the word man, and says it is declining.  Of course, if a whole segment of society is offended by a particular use of a word, one should be careful about it as a courtesy if nothing else.   However, it is Presentism in the extreme to assume that women in the past were offended or somehow degraded by that usage. The generic use of the word, man, certainly included women and was so understood when written. 

 

When in the Seventeenth century John Donne (1573-1631) said, “No man is an island,” he meant person, as he makes it clear when he continues, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am part of Mankinde.”

 

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau said in mid Eighteenth Century, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” he was certainly not suggesting that women were free. 

 

Finally, since we are talking about language usage, we could legitimately move out of the field of politics.  Let’s take, say, The Baltimore Catechism, used for many years to indoctrinate Catholic children:

--“WHAT IS MAN?

--MAN IS A CREATURE COMPOSED OF BODY AND SOUL AND MADE IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF GOD.”

 

Does anyone doubt that only the linguistically ignorant would contend that this Catechism is teaching that women do not have souls?

 

Certainly, and justifiably, today we would write these precepts differently.  However, the main point of all of the above is that we must be careful when judging the past that we do not unfairly impose our standards on our forebears.  It is certainly easy to judge the past; it is also easy to be wrong.

 

I believe, and I hope you agree, that for modern commentators to suggest that the Framers were interested only in the rights of white, male property owners is not supported by even this limited examination of their efforts to make us free.

 

Let’s look at it another way: If the Founders wanted to perpetuate all rights to themselves, white male property owners, they could have formulated a much better system to do so, perhaps along the lines of the British system of the time.  They did not do so—the words white male do not appear in the Constitution or any foundation documents, which makes the Founders, then, in effect, negligent to their caste.  What they did, on the contrary, was to make politically possible for anybody to become a senator, representative or president.   This was new, dynamic and selfless.  To impute a desire on their part to keep hegemony on political power to themselves flies in the face of what they actually did in the Constitution. 

 

President Lincoln understood this well.  I shall finish with a quote from a letter he wrote on the eve of the Civil War:

 

“All honor to Jefferson—the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.[15]

 

When Jefferson said, “All men are created equal” he certainly meant women as well. 

 

Thank you.

                                      ***********************

 

                                                                             --Joe Wetzel,  April 17, 2004


[1] John Hope Franklin, “The Moral Legacy of the Founding Fathers, University of Chicago Magazine, Summer 1975, 10-13.

[2] Lorna C. Mason et al., History of the United States, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1877 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992, 188.

[3] Milton C. Cummings and David Wise, Democracy under Pressure: An Introduction to the American Political System, 7th ed. (Fort Wroth: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 45.

[4] A very interesting comment was made by Condoleezza Rice in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission: “So it’s going to be a slow process. We know that the building of democracy is tough. It doesn’t come easily. We have our own history. When our Founding Fathers said, We the people, they didn’t mean me. It’s taken us a while to get to a multiethnic democracy that works.”   NBC News, April 8, 2004.

Talking about this statement is complicated by the fact the Ms. Rice is both a woman and black. Also, to be fair to her, this was simply a remark made in passing, not a thesis she was developing.  From the context it appears she was mainly referring to her race rather than her gender. In any event,  I would also dispute the notion that the Founders did not mean to include blacks in the word, “people,” as free blacks were granted all the rights in the Constitution from the beginning.. It was State Laws and local prejudice that made their life a horror.  Again, in this case as well, the Framers are getting a bad rap when it comes to the rights outlined in the Constitution....   But that is another topic. [As to the abomination of slavery, which is bound to be in everyone’s mind at this point, I would suggest beginning any examination of that question, visa- vis the Constitution, by asking: Would the prejudice of the times as to their legal status as citizens or “property” have been any different had the slaves been of the white race—as millions of slaves have been in history? ]

 

[5] Jeanette Rankin of Montana is the first woman representative elected to Congress: 1916

[6] Rebecca Felton is appointed the first female U.S. Senator, 1922.  Served for one day.

Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas is the first woman to win an election to the U.S. Senate, 1932.

[7] My research indicates that six states still haven’t ratified the XIXth Amendment:

[8] She based her argument on the XIVth and XVth Amendments, passed after the Civil War.

[9] Abigail to John Adams, 20 June 1783, in The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 354.

[10] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp 600-603.

[11] Studies have been done on the style of family portraits in the decades before and after the Revolution of 1776. It is clean and undeniable that there was a significant change:  before the Revolution, the father was generally standing behind with his arms on the shoulders of his seated family, all in a row.  After the Revolution,  the father was in line with the other members, part of the family.  The “paternalistic” aspect is completely gone.  The Framers, espousing the ideas of liberty and equality of the Enlightenment had  reversed the entire  social mindset and set the stage for permanent change.  Let’s not fault them for not changing everything at once.

[12] One powerful example of the Church’s attitude can be found in John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1559:  “The empire of women is repugnant to nature” is but one theme where he uses the Bible to justify the complete removal of women from any role in politics.

[13] Even this statement is an exaggeration in that it did not apply universally and unequivocally without modification in all the States. Jefferson, for instance, proposed that in Virginia veterans be allowed to vote regardless of property holdings.

[14] I am leaving aside the alleged discrimination against blacks as this is a subject worthy of its own essay, and further is virtually impossible to talk about without also talking about the slavery question—again a serious issue worthy of full treatment in its own right, not as an aside in an essay about sexism.

[15] Abraham Lincoln, letter to Henry Pierce and others, 6 April 1859, in Collected Woks of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy T. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J> : Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953), 3:376.