The Revolution
In 1868 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed a newspaper which they published in New York City. They named the newspaper The Revolution. The newspaper was published as a weekly, and gave the two women an opportunity to print their views during the period when the women’s rights movement was seemingly irrevocably split. One of the reasons for the split was Stanton and Cady’s alliance with George Francis Train, an openly racist opponent to Black enfranchisement with whom they had worked in Kansas. Rather than end their relationship with Train they used his financial backing to establish the newspaper.
The business operations of the newspaper were handled by Stanton and Cady edited the paper with the assistance of Parker Pillsbury, a minister, former abolitionist, and supporter of women’s suffrage. Stanton explained the name of the newspaper as its goal, in which the owners wanted to see a complete revolution in society regarding women and their role, not simply the right to vote. Besides arguing for suffrage, the newspaper reported achievements of women, acts of discrimination against them, and supported the labor movement. It had correspondents in Europe and India, as well as across the United States.
In 1869 Stanton used the paper to report on a local scandal in which a man had murdered his ex-wife’s fiancé. Stanton’s reporting was considered lewd by many, but she used the events of the murder and the preceding divorce to argue for changes to divorce laws. The Revolution was also used to express Stanton’s views on fashions of the day, claiming they were imposed on women by morality laws written entirely by men. Cases of domestic violence, widely ignored by most newspapers of the day, were openly discussed in its pages. The American Woman Suffrage Association opposed many of the views expressed in The Revolution and soon started its own newspaper, the Woman’s Journal.
Stanton ran the paper for 29 months, during which time it steadily lost money, before selling it to Laura Bullard, who continued its publication while tamping down the confrontational style which it carried under Stanton. After sixteen months the paper was taken over by Reverend W. T. Clarke, who toned it down even further. Clarke published The Revolution for another four months before closing it down completely. Under his brief tenure the newspaper remained focused on women’s issues, but as they pertained to the home and marriage for the most part. The style was in complete conflict with the name of the paper.
The Revolution helped deepen the split within the women’s rights movement. Stanton and Cady used the newspaper to argue against ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which established that the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Woman’s Journal of the AWSA supported ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and argued in its support. At the same time that it deepened the rift between the two branches of the women’s movement it strengthened its own branch by giving its leaders a voice which otherwise would not have been available to them.