Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on the 12th of November 1815 into one of the most prominent families in Johnstown, New York, and she died on the 26th of October 1902, having spent most of those eighty-six years dismantling the legal and social architecture that kept women subordinate to men. Her father, Daniel Cady, was one of the richest landowners in New York State. He sat in the U.S. Congress, served as a justice of the New York Supreme Court, and ran a household staffed by as many as twelve servants. He was also, in the eyes of his own daughter, proof that power and principle are not the same thing.

  When Stanton's last surviving brother died young, she tried to comfort her grieving father by promising to be everything her brother could have been. Her father replied: "Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy." That moment lodged itself in her. She spent the next seven decades answering it.

  What follows is the story of how a woman raised inside privilege and convention spent her life attacking both. She organized the first women's rights convention in American history, wrote the document that defined the movement's goals, forged a partnership with Susan B. Anthony that lasted nearly half a century, and published a book that challenged the Bible itself. She also made choices that still disturb historians, using the language of racial contempt to argue for the rights of women. The questions her life raises are not simple ones: What do we make of a reformer who is also a bigot? What does it mean to demand justice for some while denying it to others?

• 2. Privilege and Provocation

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  Johnstown, New York, in the early nineteenth century was shaped by families like the Cadys. Their mansion on the town's main square announced their standing. Daniel Cady had the money, the law, and the legislature behind him. His wife, Margaret Livingston Cady, was by some accounts nearly six feet tall, strong-willed, and the only person in the household not in awe of her husband, who was twelve years her senior. Margaret quietly supported the radical Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement and signed a petition for women's suffrage in 1867.

  Elizabeth was the seventh of eleven children. Six died before reaching full adulthood, including all of the boys. Her mother, exhausted by repeated childbirth and the grief of watching children die, became withdrawn and depressed. Much of the practical work of raising Elizabeth fell to her oldest sister Tryphena and Tryphena's husband Edward Bayard. Bayard taught Elizabeth philosophy and horsemanship. Their neighbor, Reverend Simon Hosack, taught her Greek and mathematics. Her father brought her law books so she could hold her own in dinner-table debates with his law clerks.

  At Johnstown Academy, she was the only girl in the advanced mathematics and languages classes. She won second prize in the school's Greek competition and became a skilled debater. She said she encountered no barriers there because of her gender. But no college in the United States would admit her. Her father eventually enrolled her at the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, run by Emma Willard. There, a six-week religious revival conducted by the evangelical preacher Charles Grandison Finney terrified her with visions of damnation. She said the experience "prostrated" her health. Stanton later credited her father and Bayard with pulling her out of that terror by taking her on a trip to Niagara Falls and introducing her to works of rational philosophy. One of Stanton's biographers has noted that this account has problems: Finney did not preach for six weeks in Troy while Stanton was there, suggesting she may have shaped the memory to emphasize her belief that religion harms women.

• 3. Marriage and Method

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  Stanton met Henry Brewster Stanton at the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith, a man whose political views were entirely unlike those of her conservative father. Smith was an abolitionist and a member of the "Secret Six," a group that financed John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Henry Stanton was a prominent abolitionist agent. Despite her father's reservations, the two married in 1840, deliberately omitting the word "obey" from the ceremony. Stanton later wrote: "I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation."

  She kept her identity inside the marriage. She signed herself Elizabeth Cady Stanton or E. Cady Stanton, not Mrs. Henry B. Stanton. The couple eventually had seven children. After giving birth, she would raise a red flag in front of the house for a boy and a white one for a girl, a public statement in an era when childbirth was considered a subject requiring great delicacy. One historian concluded from the spacing of the children's births that the Stantons used birth control, which aligned with what Stanton herself described as "voluntary motherhood."

  In practice, the marriage was an uneven arrangement. Henry's work as a lawyer and politician kept him away from home for nearly ten months of every year during the 1850s. Elizabeth found Seneca Falls, where they moved in 1847, intellectually stifling. The couple maintained separate households for several years. Henry remained in New York City in a rented apartment after 1868 while Elizabeth lived in Tenafly, New Jersey. Their marriage lasted forty-seven years, ending with Henry's death in 1887. Despite being a staunch abolitionist himself, Henry disagreed with the idea of female suffrage. One of Stanton's biographers described him as, at best, a halfhearted "women's rights man."

  In 1885, just before his eightieth birthday, Henry published a short autobiography called Random Recollections. He described having married the daughter of the famous Judge Cady. He did not provide her name. Only in the third edition did he mention his wife by name, and then only once.

• 4. Seneca Falls and Its Declaration

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  On a summer day in 1848, Lucretia Mott traveled from Pennsylvania to attend a Quaker meeting near Seneca Falls. She was invited Stanton to visit with her and three other progressive Quaker women. Stanton later said she "poured out" her long-accumulating discontent with "such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything." Within days they had agreed to hold a women's rights convention, still days away, while Mott was still in the area.

  Stanton was the primary author of the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled directly on the Declaration of Independence, which listed the wrongs done to women by a society run entirely by men. Its call for women's suffrage was controversial even among the organizers. Henry Stanton told his wife the suffrage demand would turn the proceedings into a farce. Mott, the main speaker, was also troubled by it. An estimated three hundred women and men attended the two-day convention. The suffrage resolution was the only one of the convention's resolutions not adopted unanimously. It passed only after Frederick Douglass, who had formerly been enslaved, gave it his strong support.

  The convention generated press coverage in newspapers from New York City to Philadelphia and many other places. Its Declaration of Sentiments became, in the words of historian Judith Wellman, "the single most important factor in spreading news of the women's rights movement around the country in 1848 and into the future." Two weeks later, a Rochester Women's Rights Convention was organized by local women who had attended the one in Seneca Falls. That convention was chaired by a woman, Abigail Bush, another historic first. Stanton herself had spoken against the election of a woman as chair. She later acknowledged that mistake and apologized.

  When the first National Women's Rights Convention was organized in 1850, Stanton could not attend because she was pregnant. She sent a letter entitled "Should women hold office" that argued women could bring a "purifying, elevating, softening influence" to the American republic. Reading a letter from Stanton became a tradition at national women's rights conventions. She did not participate in person in a national convention until 1860.

• 5. Anthony and the Engine of Change

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  Susan B. Anthony was introduced to Stanton in 1851 by their mutual friend Amelia Bloomer. Anthony was five years younger than Stanton and came from a Quaker family active in reform movements. The relationship that followed was central to the women's movement for nearly half a century. Stanton later described it: "In writing we did better work together than either could alone. While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic."

  The division of labor was practical as much as complementary. Stanton was homebound with seven children. Anthony was unmarried and free to travel. Anthony would watch Stanton's children while Stanton wrote, then deliver the resulting speeches herself. One of Anthony's biographers wrote that "Susan became one of the family and was almost another mother to Mrs. Stanton's children." Stanton's husband described the dynamic in one line: "Susan stirred the puddings, Elizabeth stirred up Susan, and then Susan stirs up the world!"

  The two were not without friction. Anthony could not match Stanton's natural charisma. In 1871, Anthony acknowledged having spent ten years working in Stanton's shadow, saying she had paid "a fearful" price for it. She did so willingly, she said, because the cause was best served by letting Stanton be seen and heard. Anthony deferred to Stanton in formal ways as well, declining to accept any organizational office that would have placed her above Stanton.

  By 1854, their collaboration had made the New York State women's movement the most sophisticated in the country, according to Ann D. Gordon, a professor of women's history. After the Stantons moved to New York City in 1861, every house they lived in included a room set aside for Anthony. One of Stanton's biographers estimated that, over her lifetime, Stanton spent more time with Anthony than with any other adult, including her own husband.

• 6. Race, Rights, and the Movement's Fracture

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  After the Civil War, Stanton and Anthony organized the American Equal Rights Association, whose purpose was to campaign for equal rights for all citizens regardless of race or sex. The alliance held until Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage on the grounds of race. The amendment would enfranchise Black men. It said nothing about women.

  Stanton opposed the amendment. She argued that enfranchising all men while excluding all women would create what she called an "aristocracy of sex." She insisted that all women and all African Americans should receive voting rights at the same time. Her argument had a coherent logic. Its expression often did not. In the pages of The Revolution, she wrote appeals to the racial prejudices of white readers, warning "American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement" against letting "the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood" make laws for them. In another article, she referred to "Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic." She also used the term "Sambo" on other occasions.

  Frederick Douglass, an old friend who had escaped from slavery and who had supported women's suffrage since the Seneca Falls Convention, reproached her for those remarks. He supported women's suffrage but argued that the vote was, for Black Americans, a matter of life and death in a way that it was not for white women. He pointed out that white women already exerted influence through the votes of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Sojourner Truth, who had also been enslaved, took the opposite position, arguing that without voting rights, Black women would remain subject to Black men the same way they had been subject to white men.

  The AERA dissolved after an acrimonious meeting in May 1869, splitting into two competing organizations. One consequence, in the words of one of Stanton's biographers, was that "old friends became either enemies, like Lucy Stone, or wary associates, as in the case of Frederick Douglass." Despite her record of racially insensitive language, Stanton applauded the marriage in 1884 of Frederick Douglass to Helen Pitts, a white woman. She wrote him a warm letter of congratulation, to which Douglass replied that he had been sure she would be happy for him.

• 7. The Woman's Bible

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  In 1895, Stanton published The Woman's Bible, a work that provoked a fiercer reaction than almost anything else she had ever done. The book examined the Bible passage by passage, quoting selected texts and commenting on them, often sarcastically. It was grounded in the proposition that much of the Bible reflected not the word of God but the prejudice of a less civilized age against women. The process of critically examining the Bible was already established among scholars. What Stanton did that was new was to apply that examination specifically from a woman's point of view.

  The book was a best-seller, going through seven printings in six months and translated into several languages. A second volume followed in 1898. Stanton had predicted the controversy. She told an acquaintance beforehand: "I am in the sunset of life, and I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear."

  In the book, she made explicit what her religious views had long implied. She wrote: "I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her." She closed the book by expressing hope for "a more rational religion for the nineteenth century."

  The NAWSA held its 1896 convention and a rising young leader named Rachel Foster Avery attacked the book directly, calling it a volume with a "pretentious title" that lacked "either scholarship or literary merit." The convention voted to disavow the book, a rebuke that stung Stanton deeply. She had helped build the organization, and it now wanted to distance itself from her. Matilda Joslyn Gage, who had helped Stanton write both the History of Woman Suffrage and The Woman's Bible, shared her view that the women's movement was making a serious mistake by narrowing its focus to suffrage alone while ignoring the religious and social structures that kept women subordinate.

• 8. Legacy and Last Years

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  In 1892, Stanton delivered what she considered her finest speech three times in the space of three days. She gave it twice to Congressional committees and once as her final address to the NAWSA. It became known as The Solitude of Self. Its central argument was that every woman, however loved and supported, must ultimately stand alone, and that this fundamental solitude required women to develop themselves fully, acquiring education and an inner belief in their own competence. Self-sovereignty was the essential element in a woman's life, not her role as daughter, wife, or mother. She said: "no matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone." Lucy Stone, who had become Stanton's rival and in some ways her enemy, printed the speech in its entirety in the Woman's Journal in the space where her own speech would normally have appeared.

  Stanton was the primary author of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, a six-volume work of more than fifty-seven hundred pages written over forty-one years. She wrote in 1878, with Anthony's help, the text of a women's suffrage amendment they convinced Senator Aaron A. Sargent to introduce in Congress. More than forty years later, that text was ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

  She died on the 26th of October 1902. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, eighteen years after her death. Her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch became, like her mother, a leader of the women's suffrage movement, carrying the work into the next generation. The house Stanton and Anthony shared in Tenafly, New Jersey, is now a National Historic Landmark, and the house in Seneca Falls where the 1848 convention was organized is now part of the Women's Rights National Historical Park.