Nancy Isenberg. Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Isenberg locates the roots of Antebellum feminism in discussions and activism predating the Seneca Falls convention. She also considers the broader goals of antebellum feminists, who saw suffrage as a means to an end rather than a particular goal in its own right. And that end was to achieve "co-equality", a concept which posited that in a republican society women needed to be allowed the ability to speak for themselves and defend their personal sovereignty--including control over their own bodies--while at the same time living in a separate, gendered sphere. Antebellum feminists were engaged in a complex struggle to redefine the role of women both in their private lives and in the public sphere.
This struggle was complicated because feminists understood that the implications of republican thought--particularly in a society which had sanctioned race-based chattel slavery--on those regarded as "dependents" was fraught with challenges. Women had to find ways in which to engage in a public sphere which was gendered as a (white) male theater of action.
The push for "personhood", then, had to contend both with societal norms restricting the legitimacy of feminine engagement with politics, and longstanding legal norms denying women the agency and legal autonomy to speak or act on their behalf. The push for rights--the right to divorce, the right to own property, guardianship of their own children, etc.--was the real goal of antebellum feminism. Suffrage and appeals to abstract notions of citizenship were a means to an end.
