"...men needed it more": Woman's Rights as "Man's Rights" in the American Antebellum Woman's Rights Movement

Henry Ward Beecher expressed the following idea at a woman’s rights meeting organized in New York in February 1860:
 Men needed that woman should have her rights. Man and woman should be put together, and society was robbed by the exclusion of woman […] Man was a brute without a woman, [applause,] man alone was like a leafless tree in winter, casting no shade […] Men were advocating this cause – not so much because women needed it, but because men needed it more. He stood, to-night, the defender of man’s rights.” (“The Woman’s Rights Meeting”, New York Times, February 3, 1860, p.8)
Such notion of woman’s rights as “man’s rights” was quite common in both the public and private discourse of men active in the American antebellum woman’s rights movement – also called “woman’s rights men.” We find it in speeches delivered at woman’s rights meetings, but also in the correspondence between those men and their – sometimes future – wives. Seen as a way to legitimize men’s place in the movement, the ‘man’s rights’ claim also allowed woman’s rights activists to engage with dominant discourses on marriage and try and define their meaning of “equal marriage.”
Through the idea of “man’s rights,” we will examine woman’s rights men’s place in the movement as well as their contribution to antebellum woman’s rights discourse. We will also analyze the way they articulated their public views with their own experience of marriage. Finally, we will explore some of the ambiguities of the“man’s rights” discourse, and some of the tensions it created within the antebellum woman’s rights movement.