The Woman Question in the North American Branch of the International Workingmen’s Association, 1867–1876

This article investigates the relationship between members of the American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association and the women’s rights movement. The International in the United States supported the formation of women workers’ sections. Its members also tended to privately support women’s suffrage, but did not want its inclusion in the International’s platform. In the United States, the question of what women workers should be organized toward was refracted through the struggles over voting rights and political power ushered in by Reconstruction. What distinguished this question in the United States was the entanglement and disentanglement of the abolitionist, feminist, and labor movements, particularly with regard to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Drawing on the papers of the North American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association as well as the minutes of labor and women’s rights conventions, this article shows that the split in the International over women’s suffrage was fundamentally over the question of political power. First, this article examines the split between former abolitionists and the women’s rights movement, which led suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony toward organized labor. The second part follows the split over Section 12’s rise and fall within the International, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's candidacy for president of the United States. The article then moves toward the ruling of The Hague Congress of the International against Section 12 in the third part. Finally, it concludes with Section 26 in Philadelphia’s attempt to enfranchise women in the state constitution of Pennsylvania.