As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by making a case so convincingly that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. For our purposes, it’s best to think of Stanton picking up where Wollstonecraft left off. Just as the latter was a product of her time – the time of the Enlightenment – so the former was a product of her time. Stanton wrote The Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. The year during which throughout Europe were popular revolutions against unpopular monarchs. And the year during which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels penned the most famous revolutionary document of all time, The Communist Manifesto.
No surprise then that while Wollstonecraft’s prose was gracious, ladylike even, Stanton did not bother with literary niceties. Notwithstanding her stable marriage, or her seven children, she challenged and indeed attacked men with not a smidgeon of hesitation. In both her politics and prose she was as fierce then as she is famous now.
The Declaration of Sentiments – the document deliberately evoked The Declaration of Independence – was released at the now-legendary Seneca Falls Convention. The Convention was a gathering of some 300 people (mostly but not only women) who came together in the summer of ’48 to declare that the patterns of the past were intolerable – and that therefore they would no longer be tolerated. To declare that women were sick and tired “of the repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” And that, henceforth, women would or at least should “refuse allegiance” to the existing government and seek to establish a new one. This new one would rectify the wrongs of the past – a past in which men had all the power and women had none – and it would be based on principles that “shall seem most like to effect the safety and happiness” of the women whose time had long since come.
The most striking thing about the Declaration is its list of the litany of abuses on the part of men toward women. In fact, a good part of the document consists of item after item in sequence, each of which documents the outrageous injustices that resulted not just in the disenfranchisement of women but also in their “social and religious degradation.”
We know now of course that the Seneca Falls Convention and the remarkable document that was its hallmark was not of itself sufficient. Women’s rights along with other civil rights took more than another century significantly to surface. Moreover, the fight continues. By no means are women equal to men – not anywhere in the world. Still, there has been progress, progress to which Stanton’s fiery prose has long contributed, and does still.
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Excerpts from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments – 1848
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her….
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men – both natives and foreigners….
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property….
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction….
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education
He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life….
Resolved. That the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to women an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce.
Excerpts from Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776,
- I have heard it asserted by some that as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness…. Nothing could be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty.
- But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young nor make war upon their families.… This new World hath been the asylum for persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from EVERY PART of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendants still.”