In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (17 page)

Such descriptions seem typical of Stanton’s high level of energy. Indeed, one story repeated in Seneca Falls claimed that the nurse had not arrived before the baby and that Mrs. Stanton met her train the next day. Stanton’s abundant energy and her ability to nap at will were as characteristic of her daily life as her self-confidence. A few weeks after the baby’s birth, however, the hyperactivity and mood elevation of childbirth had been replaced by postpartum depression. Stanton admitted to being unable to nurse, “rundown and anxious.” To Libby Miller she insisted, “This is my last baby.”
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Added work, added care, Henry’s absence, Anthony’s demands, all contributed to her fatigue and discontent.

Stanton had difficulty selecting a name for her daughter. She was hesitant to name her for some adult friend, who might later become a critic. Each of the boys bore names of people who had found fault with her at one time or another. Nor did she select the name of one of her close female friends—Elizabeth, Susan, or Lucretia. “What shall I call her?” she asked Libby Miller. “What is the most beautiful name ever given to woman?”
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She finally named her daughter for her mother, Margaret Livingston. Her decision was testimony to the new relationship between mother and daughter as adult women. It was Stanton’s first public acknowledgment of the significance of her mother’s influence.

Each new child increased Stanton’s caretaking tasks. After Margaret’s birth, Stanton took inventory. “I have five children, two Irish servant girls, and many public duties.” Even with the older boys in school and the help of a full-time housekeeper, Stanton’s daily life was spent with small children and chores. After her defeat by the Woman’s State Temperance Society in June 1853, she had stopped wearing bloomers and stayed home from the Fourth National Women’s Rights Convention in Cleveland. A letter to Libby Miller in September 1853 described the range of Stanton’s domestic duties.

After you left me, if I may go back so far, I plunged at once into preserving, in which dispensation I continued until my little closet and every available bowl and tumbler in the house were filled. . . . The spoons and tables, the knobs of the doors, the children’s bibs, the servants’ hands, and even your blessed Johnson were all more or less sticky. . . . After this I cleaned house, then fitted up the children and their parents for winter, and it is only now that I am just beginning to breathe freely and to feel like taking a kind of geographical survey of my friends. . . . After going to bed last night, I read
Bleak House
for an hour or two. I laughed so hard over Mr. Chadband’s sermons that I awoke Maggie who lay in bed beside me, and that ended my reading.
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As Stanton’s disaffection with her domestic routine grew, her sense of humor about it would diminish.

Stanton read whatever and whenever she could, unsystematically and voraciously. She continued to write short essays and long letters. She was searching for ways to express her ideas. Rather than initiate activities, she waited to be invited. Outbursts of impatience were rare in the early 1850s, but to Anthony she exclaimed in 1853: “Men and angels, give me patience! I am at the boiling point! If I do not find some day the use of my tongue on this question, I shall die of intellectual repression, a women’s rights convulsion! . . . How much I long to be free of housekeeping and children, so as to have time to think and read and write.”
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Henry’s prolonged absences had not yet become annoying. From the time he had moved to Boston ahead of her, much of their married life had been
lived apart. Henry was not present for the births of any of his children, nor was he always home for Christmas. Having acquired itinerant habits as an abolition agent during the 1830s, he enjoyed the variety of travel. His retirement from elective politics in 1851 had not guaranteed his return to the domestic circle. His law practice required regular trips to register patents and try cases. He continued to attend political meetings and to campaign for other candidates and causes. Henry was away from home for almost ten months every year during the 1850s.

When he was away, Henry claimed to miss his wife very much. He wrote entertaining, interesting letters, which she seldom answered. From Albany, en route to New York, Henry entreated her: “Do write me, for I want to hear from you very much, and I want to see you and kiss you, not having enjoyed the pleasure of kissing anybody for nearly two months.” His letters admonish the older boys to mulch the apple trees, hoe the vegetables, haul the firewood, and mind their mother.
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He no longer had time to supervise the orchard or his children.

Elizabeth’s reaction to Henry’s absence was ambivalent. She was used to it, she missed him, she resented him, she wished she could accompany him. She did not like reading his reports of debates and dances she could not attend. Both of them anticipated his homecomings and enjoyed brief interludes of ordinary domesticity. One of the younger children remembered Henry as the man who came home with presents, but once he was home the whole household knew not to interrupt what his wife sarcastically called “his devotions to his God, his evening paper.”
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When Henry left again, his wife enjoyed having total authority at home. Henry joked that every time he went away, “Elizabeth cuts a door or window.” She relished the role of head of household and encouraged similar independence among her neighbors.
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Managing efficiently was another source of self-confidence and success, reinforcing her independence. On the other hand, Henry’s absence made it more difficult for her to travel on her own.

Unable and unwilling to leave her children for long, Stanton invited friends to visit her. Many accepted. Her sisters came for extended visits, as did Henry’s relatives, who had followed him from Connecticut to the Rochester area. When Seneca Falls became a stop for lyceum lecturers, she invited them to stay at her home. Son Gerrit Stanton claimed that his father stayed away or at hotels because he found “rooms full of people and no vacant chairs in the dining room” when he did come home.
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But the expansive Henry extended his share of invitations, too. Both Stantons liked to offer hospitality. Their invitations were accepted because they were engaging and attractive people.

Local friends soon replaced their Boston coterie. “A magnetic circle of
reformers” lived in the vicinity of Seneca Falls: William Henry Channing, nephew of the founder of American Unitarianism, and Frederick Douglass, the former slave, in Rochester; the novelist Catherine Sedgwick in Syracuse; United States senator William Seward and Martha Wright in Auburn. In Seneca Falls, Mrs. Stanton became “quite intimate” with Frances Hoskins, the principal of the girls’ department at the academy; Mary Crowningshield, who taught piano; and Mary and Ansel Bascom, neighbors and political allies.
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These friends were members of the Seneca Falls Conversation Club, which Stanton had founded in late 1848. Modeled on Margaret Fuller’s Boston “Conversations,” it was less elite and erudite in composition. A disparate group of men and women met every Saturday evening to discuss public issues. After conducting a serious debate, the company adjourned to dancing and social chatter. To cut back on elaborate refreshments and observe temperate standards, only cake and water were served. In the 1850s the group sponsored a public lecture series, including a presentation on female physiology. The Conversation Club was the closest Seneca Falls came to having a salon, and Mrs. Stanton was its savant.
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Stanton’s actions and comments provoked attention and gossip. Once when she was briefly out of town, Mrs. Bloomer wrote on the back of a letter she was forwarding in her capacity as assistant postmaster, “Shorten your visit as much as possible, for people have nothing to talk about while you are gone.” Not everybody in town liked Stanton. One young woman refused to ride with her. “I wouldn’t have been seen with her for anything, with those ideas of hers.”
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Unable to attend national women’s rights meetings, Stanton turned her attention to the first meeting of the New York association. Stanton signed a call for a February 1854 meeting in Albany, scheduled to coincide with the state legislative session. The women decided to present their case to the lawmakers directly. It was apparent to the organizers that Mrs. Stanton was their most able advocate, so they urged her to testify. “On all accounts you are the person to do it, at once from your sex, talent, knowledge of the subject, and influence,” wrote William H. Channing. “There is not a man of us, who could tell the story of woman’s wrongs as strongly, clearly, tersely, eloquently as yourself.”
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Stanton accepted the challenge.

Worried about finding time to prepare adequately, she turned to Anthony for help.

I can generalize and philosophize easily enough of myself but the details of the particular laws I need. . . . You see, while I am about the house, surrounded by my children, washing dishes, baking, sewing, etc., I can think up many points, but I cannot search books, for my hands as well as my brains would be necessary for that work. . . . Prepare yourself to be
disappointed in its merits, for I seldom have one hour undisturbed in which to sit down and write. Men who can, when they wish to write a document, shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production.
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Anthony hurried to Seneca Falls and Stanton went to Rochester to read her address to Channing. With additional legal references, the speech was ready.

Whether Judge Cady provided those references is unclear. In her autobiography and in an unpublished essay Stanton claimed that her father listened to the speech before it was delivered and improved it with additional citations. According to these accounts, Stanton stopped in Johnstown en route to Albany. There she was confronted by her father, who had read a newspaper announcement of the upcoming event. He demanded to hear what she planned to say. When she read her speech, Judge Cady was “magnetized” and “moved to tears” by her eloquence. Stanton claimed that her father wept that she had ever been exposed to such injustice as women suffered. She responded that she had learned about women’s legal wrongs in his law office. Then father and daughter stayed up late revising her draft.
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Other sources and contemporary evidence contradict her later memory. These variations repeat the details of the episode—Judge Cady learning about her speech in the paper and confronting her for an explanation. But in these versions, rather than offering assistance, Judge Cady first attempted to bribe and then threatened Stanton: he offered her the deed to some property she wanted, then he claimed he would disinherit her entirely. This account ends with father and daughter storming out of the room by separate doors.
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Despite the embarrassment Stanton was causing her father, she gave the speech.

Whether these accounts represent one or two encounters, in 1848, 1854, or later, they indicate the state of Stanton’s mind at two periods. The autobiographical fragments, emphasizing her father’s approval, sympathy, and cooperation, show that the older, public Stanton did not want to admit that she had been opposed by her family. She wanted to legitimize her feminism by making it seem acceptable to Daniel Cady, the respected jurist and social conservative. In the same way that she never alluded to Henry’s absence from the 1848 meeting, she obscured her father’s disapproval in 1854. These later accounts indicate reluctance on her part to admit that she was not supported by her male relatives. Her earlier willingness to vent her frustration to Anthony or Miller shows how angry she was at the time, too angry and impolitic to dissemble.

When Stanton stood in the Senate chamber before the legislators on February 14, 1854, none of her family was present. Only Anthony was there.
She had had fifty thousand copies of the speech printed. She put one on every legislator’s desk and planned to sell the remainder as tracts. Having abandoned bloomers, Mrs. Stanton wore black silk with a white lace collar, secured with a diamond pin. She was thirty-eight years old. It was, she remembered, a “great event” in her life.
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In her address Stanton described the legal position of women in American society—as woman, wife, widow, and mother. Women were “persons,” Stanton asserted, “native, free-born citizens, property-holders, taxpayers.” Yet they were denied the right to vote, to hold office, to be tried by peers, to equal treatment under the criminal code. Women as wives, Stanton continued, asked that the marriage contract be subject to the laws of civil contracts, outlining its obligations and allowing suits to break it; she even wanted to limit the age of the contracting parties. Once married, wives had to be protected from the abuse and insolvency of husbands, so married women must have the right to earn and inherit money; voting would enable women to protect this newly held property. Women as widows needed fair inheritance and tax laws and the right to serve as their husbands’ executors. Women as mothers needed to share in the custody of their children, whom fathers could then apprentice or bond or will to other parties without the consent of the mother. Women also needed education to train their children and protection against habitual drunkards.
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Logically, passionately, relentlessly, Stanton attacked the subordinate status of women. The speech was a tour de force. It was widely praised, and Stanton was celebrated and congratulated. Yet it was her last public address for six years.

Mrs. Stanton had brought with her to Albany the three children then at home and Amelia Willard. They stayed at Delevan House for one dollar per bed per night. When a hostile woman demanded where Stanton’s children were while she was making speeches, she could answer smugly. She replied that she had been absent from her children no longer to make the speech than her questioner had been to attend it. In another version she added that unlike “ladies of fashion or politicians” (like Henry), she stayed home with her children or took them with her. Stanton’s repetition of this anecdote indicates that in 1854 she was interested in appearing and remaining a conscientious mother, and increasingly resentful of Henry. Although she found such “frivolous objections . . . as exasperating as they were ridiculous,”
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she always attempted to answer with patience and wit.