What Reindeer Can Tell Us about Women
On the first day of the Twenty-third Annual Washington Convention, February 26, 27, 28, and March 1, 1891, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Convention prepared her annual address The Degradation of Disenfranchisement, and it was read by Susan B. Anthony, Vice President at Large in Albaugh’s Opera House, the largest theater in D.C.
Figure 1 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton c. 1891
In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the Declaration of Sentiments which called for women’s equality and suffrage. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence and named after the founding document of the American Anti-Slavery Society the document began with “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal…” Stanton referenced Jefferson’s principles but explained that they are conditioned solely for men. She further described the unequal, separate spheres women are forced into and called for action.
43 years later ….
Stanton remains resolute and pivots from stories of oxen to a story with reindeer in her annual address.
The story of the oxen (as told by a farmer in New York in 1871 and published by the editor of the New York Tribune) goes like this. Oxen must not be allowed to go free, be unyoked, and make decisions. Without a yoke, the farmer says he couldn’t get his day’s work done. If it were a hot sunny day, the unyoked oxen would be down with the cattle under a shade tree. The moral of the fable, says the man, is that man and woman work together in harmony; he at the plow; she yoked.
For Stanton, the oxen iconography compelled her to offer an entire change of symbolism. Here is a bit of what Stanton said about reindeer more than one hundred years ago.
In the distant northern plains, a hundred miles from the sea …a young reindeer raises her broad muzzle to the north wind, sniffing for the first time the ocean breeze….Once in her life, the reindeer must taste the sea, in one long satisfying draught, and if she is hindered, she perishes.
Neither man nor beast dare stands between her and the ocean in the hundred miles of her arrow-like path.
What a picture of human life is this; how like the march and battle of [humanity] in its struggles to satisfy the instincts for freedom;
for something of this same longing comes to every human soul to taste for once the sweet waters of liberty, from its fathomless,
inexhaustible sources.
FUN FACT: Both male and female reindeer grow antlers, while in most other deer species, only the males have antlers.
In becoming reindeer rather than oxen, women gain the power of adaptability in adversity (a sign of antlers) and the endurance to go the distance, that is get things accomplished.
It will take all my strength to raise my head as a reindeer. I am a reindeer in progress.
