Hester Vaughan: Infanticide, Woman’s Rights, and Melodrama
Patricia L. Farless
University of Central Florida/University of Florida
On February 5, 1868, writing for the feminist newspaper the Revolution, Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared that there was a "notorious `boarding-house' in this city, [New York] where mothers, married or unmarried, can be delivered of their offspring in the strictest confidence, and relieved of all bothers of maternity."[1] According to Stanton, a leading nineteenth-century feminist, the direct reason for this deplorable situation was American society's failure to educate and enfranchise women. Infanticide deeply troubled Stanton, who viewed it as another example of woman's degradation.[2] To this nineteenth-century feminist, at the heart of the infanticide issue was a woman's lack of political, economic, and legal rights.[3]
During this same month in 1868, Hester Vaughan was arrested in Philadelphia for the murder of her newborn infant.[4] The outcome of her trial served as a rallying point for Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Working Women's Association.[5] To these women, Vaughan's dilemma enveloped a variety of women's issues and rights ranging from and including: a woman's right to vote, to serve as a juror, to determine her own economic standing, and, to some extent, to defy society's sexual double-standard. The case also reveals the willingness of these feminists, either consciously or subconsciously, to use melodramatic rhetoric to make this case a paradigm of every woman's discrimination in American society.[6] As Peter Brooks notes, melodrama is democratic in its attempts to make its claims universal.[7] The Revolution made Hester Vaughan's legal troubles universal: every woman stood equal to every woman in her victimization. The focus of this paper, then, is not on the outcome of the trial; rather, it is concerned with how this trial embodied the struggle for woman's equality and how these women employed melodramatic rhetoric to make Vaughan's case symbolic of every woman's degraded position in American society. The paper also considers why they chose to do so. Stanton and Anthony were politically vulnerable following their battles to gain support for woman’s suffrage in Kansas and New York. Increasingly sensitive to their own political isolation, Stanton and Anthony sought new avenues and outlets to express their own political frustrations. Hester Vaughan's case served this purpose.
As Vaughan’s case unfolded in the Revolution, Stanton and Anthony had recently been betrayed by their abolitionist and Radical Republican allies. During the Civil War, many women’s rights activists had served their country well by establishing the Sanitary Commission, spearheading the passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and, more importantly, suspending their campaign for woman’s equality until after the Civil War to avoid hindering the Union's effort.[8] Rightfully, they expected to be rewarded with woman’s suffrage at the conclusion of the war, and, as can be imagined, were shocked and alarmed by the Fourteenth Amendment's passage in December of 1866 and ratification in July of 1868. This Amendment included the word "male" in its second section, outlining which class of citizens a state had to enfranchise and the penalty the state faced if it failed to do so. The battles that ensued as a result of this Amendment’s passage─between those in favor of universal suffrage and those solely in favor of black male suffrage─became pivotal moments for the first generation of feminists. As the states began rewriting their constitutions, the American Equal Rights Association, formed by former abolitionists and women’s rights activists, began campaigning for the removal of gender and racial voting restrictions throughout many of the states.[9]
During the battles in Kansas and New York, Stanton and Anthony felt betrayed by fellow abolitionists, African-American men, and members of the Republican Party who stumped Kansas against female suffrage, fearing that the attachment of woman's suffrage to black male suffrage would ensure the defeat of both. Meanwhile, the woman’s rights activists lost New York in part because of Horace Greeley's denunciation of woman's suffrage as unnecessary. Greeley, one of Stanton and Anthony’s former allies, claimed that women should "spend the hours which they can spare from their labors...mastering the wisdom of the sages and philosophers who have elucidated the science of government, than in attendance on midnight caucuses, or in wrangling around the polls."[10]
On December 1, 1868, in what would be the height of the Hester Vaughan story, the Working Women's Association held a meeting at the Cooper Institute in New York City. Horace Greeley, who also attended this meeting, assumed his usual reluctant approach to the broader questions of woman's rights. He contended that "he had been apprehensive that this meeting might be perverted as to injure the cause for which they were assembled."[11] To Greeley, the meeting was held to help Hester Vaughan and "they should measure their words and not complicate the case of this poor woman by any abstract notions not connected with it."[12] The issue for Greeley was a wronged woman and the theoretical issues considered by Stanton, Anthony and other female reformers should be discarded. To Stanton and Anthony, Greeley’s earlier denunciation of woman's suffrage at New York's constitutional convention reverberated in his Hester Vaughan argument. While Sarah Barringer Gordon argues that Greeley’s articles in the New York Tribune provide evidence of the growing isolation of these nineteenth-century feminists, as noted earlier, the roots of this conflict date back to the battle over the politically explosive issue of woman’s suffrage in New York.[13] Although Greeley had initially presented himself as a woman’s rights advocate, he subsequently withdrew his support when it threatened the expansion of suffrage to include African-American men. In retaliation, Stanton and Anthony embarrassed Greeley at New York’s constitutional convention when they provided his political opponents with a suffrage petition signed by his mentally ill wife.[14]
Moreover, to Stanton and Anthony, a woman’s political inequality paralleled her legal disability. In her address to Gerrit Smith, Wendell Phillips, and other former abolitionists, Stanton rhetorically questioned how do white women "fare in our own courts to-day by Saxon fathers, husbands, brothers, sons?"[15] Stanton acerbically answered her own question that Hester Vaughan was imprisoned for a crime she did not commit, while "he who betrayed her walks the green earth in freedom...Such is `manhood suffrage.'"[16] In referring to Vaughan's legal predicament, the Revolution claimed that universal male suffrage would spell the end of woman's hopes for liberty.[17] The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the subsequent behavior of their political allies in Kansas and New York, convinced Stanton and Anthony that women could no longer rely on men for their legal and political rights; women would have to rely on each other.
Following the suffrage campaigns in Kansas and New York, Hester Vaughan's case came to symbolize woman's complete discrimination in a male world. To Stanton, Anthony, and other woman’s rights advocates it provided the perfect plot structure for a Manichean struggle of good and evil embodied in women and men, respectively. Stanton, in the Revolution, questioned how man could truly understand the moral dilemma faced by a woman when she became pregnant after succumbing to man's seductions. According to Stanton, society viewed a woman's illegitimate child as her disgrace and loss of virtue. As a result of this fall from grace, she became a pariah─socially, legally, and economically vulnerable. Facing this isolation, coupled with her inability to protect herself at the polls or the workplace, a woman often resorted to tragic, desperate solutions, such as infanticide. The double standard found in the legal system did not escape Stanton who claimed America's unjust laws "make crimes for women that are not crimes for men!"[18] Of course, men participated in the Woman's Movement and were also involved in the Hester Vaughan case. Male allies were the only real political links for the feminists. Through their rhetoric, however, Stanton and Anthony sought to have women protect and rely on each other, rather than men. To Stanton and Anthony, their former political allies had broke the Garrrisonian tradition of “not compromising” or “accepting half a loaf,” when they settled for African-American male suffrage without female suffrage.
Despite close to a year's coverage in the Revolution, the reports on Hester Vaughan remained vague. The facts of the case and the possibility of Vaughan's guilt remained secondary to the broader agenda of demonstrating that situations like this occurred as a result of woman's inequitable status in American society and their betrayal by the men of the world.[19] The presentation of the case also remained inconsistent until the story was molded into the perfect melodrama. Vaughan became the helpless, victimized, child-like angel, abandoned by her proper husband, taken advantage of by her wealthy male employer, and, finally, "raped" by the legal system itself through its denial of her basic civil rights. Establishing Vaughan as a hard working, industrious, young girl was paramount to the feminists. In melodramatic form, Vaughan had to symbolize good. She was depicted as a neat, clean, and pious woman, who always kept her cell tidy. The ladies who visited her reported that while she thanked them for their help and knew they would do everything in their power to help her, she placed her trust in God. Reportedly, she recited several hymns to them, which she had learned in Sunday school back home.[20] Their reports of Vaughan always depicted her as honest, truthful, expressive, beautiful, and in every sense of the word, virtuous.[21]
Following Vaughan's desertion by her husband, she had sought employment with a wealthy "benefactor," who proved her betrayer. In melodramatic fashion, Vaughan's employer and the other men she encountered throughout her troubles were always characterized as her elusive betrayers, seducers, rapists, and villains. Symbolizing virtue and innocence, Vaughan refused to reveal the perpetrator's name, thus, protecting his new, innocent wife.[22] Eleanor Kirk, in praising Vaughan's silence at the Cooper meeting, quoted Vaughan as saying, "if he were alone I would ring his name through the whole country," but since he has recently married, "nothing will induce me to send terror and disgrace into the heart of an innocent, trusting woman."[23] In stating this, Kirk, a journalist and member of the Working Women's Association, could not help but exclaim, "Glorious Hester Vaughan!"[24] In the woman’s rights advocates’ presentation, Vaughan's submissiveness demonstrated that she was a "true woman."[25] Moreover, while Vaughan embodied the true woman because she sacrificed herself for another woman, she was also a "feminist" as she stood united with a fellow woman. Vaughan had placed united womanhood above all other considerations, including her own execution.
The circumstances surrounding Vaughan's dilemma remained ambiguous and vague, often fluctuating between rape and seduction. Only occasionally were direct statements made regarding what might have happened. Dr. Clemence Lozier, one of the first female gynecologists, reported in the New York Times that Vaughan "became a victim─not of seduction or misplaced affection─but of rape, by a brute."[26] In some sense, maintaining that Vaughan was raped enabled her to continue as a virtuous and "true woman."[27] Her physical inability to protect herself from her stronger, male employer paralleled woman's legal standing and symbolized their vulnerability in the workplace. However, allowing Vaughan to be seduced still maintained her as the victim. As a "Fallen Woman," Vaughan held the potential to be restored to the status of an angel.[28] More importantly, Stanton and Anthony viewed women's inability to protect themselves in the public sphere as the main source of their vulnerability to men's desires. As Parker Pillsbury, co-editor of the Revolution, contended "no matter though she be an accomplice...it is still true...that man's inhumanity to woman in general, to her in particular, has pointed, poisoned every arrow of her affliction."[29]
According to the Revolution’s reports, Vaughan's pregnancy resulted in her immediate release from her employment. Forced to seek refuge in a cold, airy, Philadelphia garret, she gave birth to her child without any assistance. The garret and stark scenario have often served as important symbols in melodrama.[30] Moreover, in her report about the night that Vaughan gave birth, Eleanor Kirk asserted that it had occurred during one of "fiercest winter storms" of last year.[31] Conflict or action in melodrama often finds the heroine exposed and threatened by catastrophes or natural disasters.[32] Alone, Vaughan endured childbirth and afterwards dragged herself to the door to request water from a passerby. Her request for water resulted in her arrest for the death of her newborn infant. To Stanton and Anthony, this basic request and her subsequent arrest possibly reflected their own earlier request for the fundamental right of woman's suffrage and their betrayal by their former friends. Vaughan's seduction or rape and illegitimate child also symbolized the possible threat faced by all women. It was up to women to serve as Vaughan's and every other woman's protectors.[33] Men, including the legal system, had become woman's seducers and betrayers. As Kirk noted, "Hester Vaughan fell to lust and the gallows."[34] Her victimization linked man's physical control with his legal control.
While the women’s rights activists remained deeply concerned about the sexual double-standard embedded in American society as well as woman's political exclusion, they continued to also see this case as a blatant violation of woman's legal rights. Dr. Lozier, in her investigative report of Hester Vaughan's case, held that Vaughan had been unjustly tried and sentenced as a result of several questionable legal practices in the trial. According to Lozier and Dr. Susan Smith, a Philadelphia doctor, Vaughan's lawyer had visited her once, collected the last thirty dollars "she had managed to save, by the strictest economy," and never returned to see her until the day of the trial.[35] Vaughan’s denial of adequate counseling prevented puerperal fever and blindness from being entered as the defense for why she did not see her child and had subsequently rolled on top of it, thus, crushing the skull.[36] Vaughan, to these women, was innocent. She was not a murderer and the child’s injuries resulted from Vaughan inadvertently rolling onto the child. Exposure to Philadelphia's harsh winter in an unheated room served as another justification for the child's death.[37]
Following the report issued by Drs. Lozier and Smith, the Working Women's Association at the December meeting concluded that Vaughan had been unjustly convicted of murder based on insufficient evidence. They further declared in their resolutions that
in all civil and criminal cases, woman shall be tried by a jury of her peers; shall have a voice in making the law, in electing the judge who pronounces her sentence, and the sheriff who, in case of execution, performs for her that last dread act.[38]
Hester Vaughan's lack of legal rights equaled all women's lack of legal rights. No longer did the case revolve around her wrongful sentence; rather, the solution was now to provide all women a voice in the legal system. This right also included the right to train and seek employment in the field of law.[39] According to the speeches given at this December meeting, Vaughan's case carried a lesson to the "women of wealth, education and leisure [who should] study the laws under which they live that they might defend the unfortunate of their sex."[40] Moreover, they asserted that "the wise men of New York [should] open Columbia Law School at once to girls who have brains to understand the science of jurisprudence and hearts big enough to demand justice."[41] While Stanton, Anthony, and the Working Women's Association refused to rely on patriarchal authority and power for protection of their "daughters," their request for women's admission into law school forced them to work within the male system of authority and power. This poignantly and tragically served as a reminder that all women were victims of gender oppression, thus, contributing to the belief held by Stanton, Anthony, as well as the Working Women’s Association that only women could serve as protectors for women.
The role as protectors for women was often found in the form of protective mothers: "In the name of womanhood, we implore the mothers of that state to rescue that defenseless girl from her impending fate." The article in the Revolution further lamented, "Oh! make her case your own, suppose your young and beautiful daughter had been thus betrayed,...justice should take the life of her seducer rather than her own?"[42] In this respect, the Revolution’s use of melodrama echoed Josephine Butler's crusades to help prostitute women, in which the avenging father had been replaced by an avenging and protective mother.[43] Women, in Stanton and Anthony's opinion, were the only ones who would truly protect other women.[44] Moreover, the Revolution, like Josephine Butler, used "two versions of political melodrama...the melodrama of female heroism and self-sacrifice."[45] Vaughan was heroic and self-sacrificing in her attempt to deal with adversity and in her refusal to name her betrayer. The women who supported Vaughan were also heroic and self-sacrificing in their willingness to devote their time and money in support of one of their own--an innocent, victimized woman.
The story evolved until Vaughan was innocent of infanticide. In an article entitled "Infanticide" published on August 6, 1868, the Revolution noted Vaughan's sentence of death and recognized her guilt. This recognition, however, disappeared by the December presentation of the case. Despite the accepted guilt in the August article, Vaughan was not portrayed as a criminal; rather, she was presented as a victim of the legal system. According to the Revolution, "if that poor child of sorrow is hung, it will be deliberate, downright murder. Her death will be a far more horrible infanticide than was the killing of her child."[46] To Stanton, Vaughan was the child of society and civilization, "begotten and born of it, seduced by it, by the judge who pronounced her sentence, by the bar and jury."[47] While the earlier report had also found her innocent of a crime, the argument was based on woman's political, social, and legal inequalities, not her actual innocence. By the December meeting, Vaughan's supporters conveniently failed to acknowledge her alleged admission of guilt. A special dispatch was issued on December 6, 1868 and printed in the Revolution on January 21, 1869. According to the dispatch, Governor John Geary considered the attempt by the feminists to make Vaughan a heroine "injudicious and improper" in light of her admitted guilt─once to Pennsylvania Governor John Geary's secretary, and another time to Dr. Smith. Dr. Smith, of course, denied that she had ever heard this.[48] While it is uncertain whether Vaughan actually killed her infant, what is evident is the shift in the argument by Vaughan's supporters. It was no longer acceptable to brazenly place her claims of innocence in sweeping political, legal, and judicial terms; rather, it had become necessary to establish her as actually innocent of the crime. This change did not signify that the broader issues of woman's plight had been forgotten; Vaughan, the agency used to address these rights, however, had to be more acceptable.
Vaughan’s innocence or guilt may never be determined because the Revolution’s presentation of the case remained inconsistent, ever-evolving, and universal. The gender bias of the American legal system also contributed to the truth’s distortion. However, what can be discerned from the Revolution’s reports were the editors’ attempts to make this case symbolic of woman's deprivations, by appealing to public sentiment through the use of melodrama. By viewing Hester Vaughan's case in this light, Stanton and Anthony used her story as a vehicle for promoting their overall agenda of woman’s equality. In the process, Hester Vaughan, as revealed in the Revolution, became more of a myth or symbol, than an individual case. Equally important in viewing this case is its place in the overall history of the Women's Movement. Nursing their wounds of betrayal by their former allies, Hester Vaughan's case also served as a way for these feminists to insulate themselves from the conflicts they had recently endured and those they were currently fighting.
It has been argued that Vaughan’s case was a failure for Stanton and Anthony, furthering their alienation from American society.[49] These women saw woman’s alienation already existing in American legal history and Vaughan’s trial served as the perfect opportunity, whether she was guilty or innocent, to demonstrate the need for woman’s involvement in the legal, political and economic arenas. Stanton and Anthony concluded from their own recent experiences that only women could truly understand the dilemmas faced by women. Following this case, they were willing to break with old allies, creatively challenge the Reconstruction Amendments, and to fight for woman’s access to the public sphere. Vaughan's case was a victory for Stanton, Anthony and the Working Women's Association. Vaughan received a pardon.[50]
[1] "Infanticide and Prostitution," Revolution, 5 February, 1868, 6. The use of the term “feminist” is in keeping with Ellen Carol Dubois’s demonstration of the emergence of a women’s movement, which sought to solely rely on women and to only focus on women’s rights. See DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), 19.
[2] The word "woman" is used in place of "women" because many of the nineteenth-century women's rights advocates used it to symbolize the unity of their cause. When I use the term "women," it is in my own reference to women in the plural sense. See Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 3.
[3] For a closer examination of Stanton's views on how women should be able to govern their own bodies see Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences 1815-1897, Introduction by Ellen Carol DuBois and Forward by Ann D. Gordon (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993) Originally published in 1898 by T. Fisher Unwin. Also see: The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, Introduction by Ellen Carol Dubois and Forward by Gerda Lerner (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).
[4]There are two spellings of Hester Vaughan: Vaughan, and Vaughn.
[5] The Working Women's Association was formed by a group of female typesetters, who had been hired to work as typesetters for the New York World, during a strike in December of 1867 and were subsequently fired when the strike ended. The Working Women's Association became a mixture of middle-class suffrage advocates and female laborers. The group remained divided along class lines. The first group saw the vote as one of the greatest tools to use in combating injustices committed against women, while the laborers did not want to put the vote as the priority of their organization. Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 132-134.
[Selected Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians, Annual Meeting, 2004]
©2005 by Florida Conference of Historian: 1076-4585
All Rights Reserved.
[6] Angela Ray, “Represent the Working Class in Early U.S. Feminist Media: The Case of Hester Vaughn,” Women Studies in Communication, 26:1 (Spring, 2003), 4.
[7] Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 15.
[8] Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 118-119.
[9] Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 66.
[10] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, ed., History of Woman Suffrage vol. II (Rochester: Charles Mann Printing Co., 1881. Reprint. New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 285. Hereafter referred to as HWS.
[11] “Hester Vaughan," The New York Times, 2 December,1868, 5.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Law and Everyday Death: Infanticide and the Backlash against Woman’s Rights after the Civil War,” Lives in the Law, ed. Austin Sarat, et.al., (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 72-73.
[14] DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 88.
[15] Revolution, 14 January, 1869, 24-25.
[16] Ibid.
[17] "Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 17 September, 1868, 169.
[18] “Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 19 November , 1868, 312.
[19] Ray, “Represent the Working Class,” 17.
[20] “The Case of Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 357.
[21]Ibid.
[22] Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 31, 34-35.
[23] “The Case of Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 357.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly (1966), 162.
[26] "The Administration of Justice--Hester Vaughan's Case," The New York Times, 4 December, 1868.
[27] Welter, "Cult of True Womanhood,” 54-157.
[28] Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 88-92.
[29] "The Hester Vaughan Meeting At Cooper Institute," Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 361.
[30] Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 90.
[31] "The Case of Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 357.
[32] Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 32.
[33] Ray, “Represent the Working Class,” 18.
[34] "The Case of Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 357.
[35] Ibid., 358.
[36] Ibid.
[37] "Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 360.
[38] Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 358.
[39] The claim that women had the right to practice law was defeated in the 1872 case of Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 16 Wall. (1872). In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that Illinois did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment when it employed gender discrimination to deny Myra Bradwell the right to practice law.
[40] “Hester Vaughan," Revolution, 10 December, 1868, 360.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Revolution, 19 November, 1868, 312.
[43] Josephine Butler worked as female reformer who campaigned to overturn the Contagious Disease Acts, eliminate child prostitution and the white female slave trade in Victorian England.
[44] Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 92.
[45] Ibid., 93.
[46] "Infanticide," Revolution, 6 August, 1868, 74.
[47] Ibid.
[48] "Is Hester Vaughan Guilty?" Revolution, 21 January, 1869, 35.
[49]Gordon, “Law and Everyday Death,” Lives in the Law, 73.
[50]"The Working Women's Association," Revolution, 3 June 1869, 346-347.