Lucinda Banister Chandler

• Lucinda Banister Chandler
• Born: April 1, 1828
• Died: March 9, 1911

Social reformer and feminist, was born in Potsdam, New York, the daughter of Silas Banister and Eliza (Smith) Banister, both of New England ancestry. As an infant she suffered a spinal injury that kept her an invalid throughout her life and caused her constant pain.

A voracious reader, she entered St. Lawrence Academy at the age of nine and was quickly advanced two grades, but additional spinal deterioration forced her to abandon formal education permanently when she was thirteen. In 1858 she married John H. Chandler of Potsdam. Their only child, a son, drowned at the age of three.

How Chandler became involved with the social reformers and feminists of the nineteenth century is unclear, but she lived for a time in Vineland, New Jersey, a center of radical thought. In 1870, while recovering from an illness, Chandler wrote her first work, “Motherhood: Its Power Over Human Destiny.” It was well received in the community of Vineland and was subsequently serialized in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly in 1871. Circulated as a booklet, it established Chandler among the writers of social reform and moral education of the nineteenth century.

Chandler became active in organized societies concerned with the proper conduct of sexuality, marriage, and parenthood. Among these were the Boston Moral Education Society and the Boston Moral Science Committee, which she helped form during a trip to Boston in 1871. She was commissioned in 1872 to travel to Philadelphia and Chicago, where she held parlor meetings and lectured to mothers on the subjects of good motherhood and moral education, which she held to be of paramount importance to the welfare of society as well as to the development of individual character. In spite of her belief in the evangelical Christian tradition of child salvation, Chandler felt that the church was insufficient for the moral education of children. It was imperative that mothers be morally enlightened and educated themselves, because they alone could instruct with a “power of purity” to save the child from society’s evils.

Though Chandler believed in equality of the sexes, she saw a natural separation in their tasks and responsibilities; all women, in her view, were, in a spiritual sense, mothers. She held that women must have the right to control their reproductive capacities—not through contraception, but through the containment of sexual impulses. She believed in “self-ownership,” meaning by this that women should not be subject to the sexual desires of men (whose moral instincts were thought to be less refined than those of women), but should have the right to decide when, where, and how the sex act would be performed. The husband should, she wrote, hold his wife “not as the instrument of his gratification, but sacredly as the temple of divine incarnation.” Chandler’s concern with subduing male lust was consistent with that of other nineteenth-century sex reformers who viewed marriage as a spiritual experience.

After several years of writing prolifically for virtually every major feminist periodical, Chandler joined the struggle for woman suffrage and in 1873 was a participant in the meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Women. She was elected vice president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1877. In 1880 she founded the First Margaret Fuller Society of Chicago, where she had settled. The proceedings of that organization reveal that Chandler delivered lectures on finance, banking, usury, land reform, the Republican party, and American history. Her politics were Christian Socialist, and her writings contain numerous references to collective ownership of natural resources, based on Christian principles of brotherhood. Mothers, she believed, have a duty to seek the reform of the economic system into which their children are born. “It’s a cruelty if not crime,” she wrote in 1900, “to bring them into such bondage.”

It may have been Chandler’s obsession with the power of motherhood that put her at odds with other suffragists. She openly opposed the tactics used by Susan B. Anthony because she thought that they were the methods of “scalawag politicians.” Only if women remained within the confines of their maternal, “womanly” nature, she believed, would society benefit from their enfranchisement, which would purify and elevate politics.

Chandler was the first president of the Chicago Moral Educational Society (1882) and vice president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Alliance of Illinois. As she grew older, Chandler withdrew from political struggles but continued to hold the esteem of many radical thinkers. In 1888 she was one of several women suggested for the editorship of Lucifer, a journal of sexual radicalism.

Chandler published sporadically until 1897. She was not a public figure after 1900, probably because of the effects of her spinal injury. She died in Chicago at the age of eighty-two; her body was cremated.

The Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College possesses the proceedings of the First Margaret Fuller Society of Chicago and the Papers and Letters of the First Woman’s Congress (1873). The only biographical sketch of Lucinda Banister Chandler appears in F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967). W. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union (1980), offers the most insightful portrait of Chandler and her place in the nineteenth-century reform and feminist movements, as well as a complete bibliography of her work. Chandler is also mentioned in D. J. Pivar, Purity Crusade (1973). An obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1911.