The Revolution

The Revolution, weekly American women’s rights newspaper, first published on January 8, 1868, under the proprietorship of Susan B. Anthony and edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury.

A scant three years after the end of the Civil War, the United States was embroiled in the issue of suffrage for African American men, and many suffragists—notably those who formed the American Woman Suffrage Association—felt it necessary to postpone the fight for woman suffrage. The editors of The Revolution, however, boldly declared its uncompromising position in the paper’s masthead: “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”

Although The Revolution’s circulation never exceeded 3,000, its influence on the national women’s rights movement was enormous. The paper functioned as the official voice of the National Woman Suffrage Association and discussed controversial issues of divorce, prostitution, and reproductive rights and linked change to female enfranchisement. The Revolution was instrumental in attracting working-class women to the movement by devoting columns to concerns such as unionization and discrimination against female workers.

In 1870 the American Woman Suffrage Association launched a more moderate rival periodical, the Woman’s Journal. By May 1870 The Revolution was deeply in debt. Anthony assumed the paper’s $10,000 debt and transferred her proprietorship to Laura Curtis Bullard. Without Stanton, Pillsbury, or Anthony, the publication continued as a literary and society periodical until 1872, when it was absorbed by the New York Christian Enquirer.