In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (19 page)

The summer after Harriot’s birth in 1856, Henry Stanton was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, which nominated John C. Frémont for president. During the campaign for “Frémont and Freedom,” Henry was assigned to canvass Pennsylvania. He also made stump speeches from New England to Ohio. His speeches, more radical than any he had made in the 1830s, were better received. “Great questions are at stake. A victory would be glorious, a defeat now most disastrous,” Henry reported; “I have got my feelings so enlisted that I cannot stop till we reach the end for good or evil.”
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When Frémont lost, Henry again lost any chance for a government appointment. He returned to Seneca Falls disappointed and exhausted. As in the past, he found solace in the garden, harvesting ten acres of squash and strawberries.
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To recover financially, Henry became a temporary lecturer on the lyceum circuit. The irony cannot have been lost on Elizabeth. Henry was doing what she wanted to do and what he had discouraged her from doing. Meanwhile she stayed home, minding the children and making no public appearances.

Stanton was not the only feminist staying home rocking cradles in late 1856. The small circle of leaders of the women’s rights movement had been further diminished by marriage and motherhood. In May 1855 Lucy Stone had married Henry Blackwell, a Cincinnati abolitionist and merchant with strong feminist connections.
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Stone’s decision to keep her own name was
newsworthy even among feminists. Stanton congratulated her for the decision, and Mrs. Mott, less convinced of the propriety of such an action, finally approved. “Seeing there are so few to advocate woman’s whole cause, it is needful for some of us to be ultra,” she explained to a niece; “I have become quite a defender of Lucy Stone’s name.”
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The Stone-Blackwell marriage produced one daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, born in September 1857, and a son who died in infancy. For the next ten years Lucy Stone limited her public appearances, refusing to be away from her daughter overnight. In January 1856 another Oberlin graduate and the first female minister, Antoinette Brown, married Stone’s brother-in-law, Samuel Blackwell. The first of their seven children was born in 1857. Meanwhile Mrs. Stanton was nursing her sixth baby. Miss Anthony, on whom the mothers relied to take up the banner in their absence, was understandably annoyed. “Those of you who have talent to do honor to poor—oh! how poor—womanhood have all given yourselves over to baby-making; and left poor brainless me to do battle alone.” Mrs. Stanton counseled Anthony to be patient.

Let Lucy and Antoinette rest awhile in peace and quietness and think great thoughts for the future. It is not well to be in the excitement of public life all the time; do not keep stirring them up or mourning over their repose. You need rest too, Susan. Let the world alone awhile. We cannot bring about a moral revolution in a day or year. Now that I have two daughters I feel fresh strength to work. It is not in vain that in myself I have experienced all the wearisome cares to which woman in her best estate is subject.
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The maternal responsibilities of its leadership were not the only problem plaguing the women’s movement in 1857. The momentum of the early 1850s had been dissipated in antebellum politics. One crisis after another propelled the nation toward civil war. Current events consumed the attention of the reformers from whom the women’s rights groups drew their support. What time women like Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown did have was increasingly devoted to antislavery fairs or abolition agitation. Issues like the
Dred Scott
decision, which held that slaves remained chattel even in free states, and the Lecompton Constitution, relating to the extension of slavery into the Kansas Territory, divided their ranks as well.
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It was hard to focus any attention on women’s rights.

Under such circumstances the scattered leadership of the women’s movement
decided not to hold its annual national convention in 1857. Lacking leaders, followers, and money, the early women’s movement had reached its nadir. The financial crisis was severe. Previously funded by individual contributions as needs arose, there was no ongoing fund-raising scheme. Gerrit Smith, a major donor in the past, withheld his usual support in 1856. He was displeased that earlier conventions had not pressed for dress reform, which he believed to be the most important aspect of female emancipation. In appealing to her cousin to repeat his past generosity, Elizabeth Stanton summarized the gains women had made so far.

My noble cousin,—You said you have but little faith in this reform—the Woman’s Rights Movement—because the changes we propose are so great, so radical, so comprehensive; whilst they who have commenced the work are so puny, feeble, and undeveloped. The mass of women are developed at least to the point of discontent. . . . In the human soul, the steps between discontent and action are few and short indeed. As to the general cause of women, I see no signs of failure.
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Smith was not persuaded. He remained more interested in antislavery and instead underwrote John Brown’s bloody raid in Kansas.

Then in 1858 another philanthropist, the wealthy Boston merchant Francis Jackson, made an anonymous gift of five thousand dollars to the women’s rights cause.
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Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, and Susan Anthony were named trustees of a fund to be used to win the ballot for women. The Jackson gift was generously supplemented in 1859 when another Boston entrepreneur, Charles Hovey, endowed a fifty-thousand-dollar trust fund for “the promotion of the antislavery cause and other reforms,” including women’s rights. The four trustees of the Hovey Fund—Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, and Abby Kelley Foster—were required to expend a minimum of eight thousand dollars annually.
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After the 1857 hiatus, the stalled women’s movement pulled itself together. Finally solvent, the feminists could reflect on the gains they had made. Wisconsin and Nebraska territories were considering local suffrage for women. Ohio and New York had passed model property rights legislation for married women. Iowa allowed women to sue for divorce on grounds other than adultery. Mount Holyoke and Elmira College were advancing women’s education, and Oberlin was graduating men and women. In 1857 Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell had opened the New York Infirmary, staffed entirely by women. The leaders organized an eighth national convention in 1858, scheduling the meeting to coincide with an annual meeting of the
American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. Lucretia Mott presided. Unable to avoid the connection between abolition and women’s rights, the organizers decided to combine their resources.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Cady Stanton was at home in Seneca Falls, surrounded by children, immured in domesticity. In responding to yet another of Anthony’s exhortations, Stanton described her life in 1857.

How I wish I could respond to your letter in a tone I know you desire. But I dare not promise to undertake any work beyond the imperative duties each day brings forth. In the first place, the weather is enervating. If we ever have another shower, I may recover in a measure my vitality; but at present I am thoroughly dried up. In the next place, my baby is cutting her eye teeth, is restless at night and troublesome by day. Then again, my boys have a four weeks’ vacation and so they are on my hands. Furthermore, my friends will all visit me in August and I have no Amelia to share a single care. From the roast beef and jellies down to the dish cloth and soap grease, my eye must penetrate everywhere and my influence be omnipresent. Under such circumstances how could I sit down to think and write? But in two or three years I shall be able to have some hours of each day to myself. My two older boys will then be in college or business and my three younger children will be in school.
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With Amelia Willard on vacation, Stanton was so undone that she forgot to count the newest baby in her enumeration.

Stanton comforted herself by anticipating her future. She tried to reassure Anthony, and herself. “Courage, Susan, this is my last baby and she will be two years old in January. Two years more and—time will tell what! You and I have the prospect of a good long life. We shall not be in our prime before fifty, and after that we shall be good for twenty years at least.”
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Stanton had models of serene, independent, active older women, like her mother and Mrs. Mott. She expected to live as long as her other Cady relatives had, and she expected to spend her prime working for women’s rights. What she lacked was a model to help her contend with her immediate situation.

Despite her outbursts against the work and constraints imposed by her children, Elizabeth Cady Stanton thrived as a mother. She recognized the power women had both in their homes and over their children. Her children were a source of enormous satisfaction for her. What she perceived as her success as a mother increased her self-confidence. She chose to stay close to her children rather than travel because she felt responsible for them and cared for them. Coming home after a short trip, Stanton reported to Libby Miller: “I have kissed and hugged [the baby] til she went to sleep. The joy a mother feels on seeing her baby after a short absence is a bliss no man’s soul can ever know. There we have something that they have not! But we have purchased the ecstasy in deep sorrow and suffering.” Although
she sometimes regretted her choice, she surrendered to the bonds of affection that tied her to Seneca Falls. As she joked to Wendell Phillips in 1860, when her children ranged in age from one year to eighteen, “I am anchored here, surrounded by small craft, which I am struggling to tug up life’s stream.”
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The voluntary, sometimes involuntary, retirement of Stanton, Stone, and Brown infuriated Anthony. She worried about the responsibilities thrust upon her and nagged her colleagues. She felt superior to their married states and at the same time resented their security. She was tempted by the idea of romance but never found an agreeable partner. She had “very weak moments,” she confessed to Stanton. “I sometimes fear that
I too
shall faint by the wayside—and drop out of the ranks of the faithful few [to marry].”
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But no one ever proposed, and Anthony never surrendered.

Once she enlisted, Anthony committed her life to reform. During the 1850s she was employed as a temperance society organizer and an abolition agent. For the first five months of 1855 she collected petitions favoring extending married women’s property rights. Carrying a carpetbag full of tracts written by Mrs. Stanton, Anthony walked through fifty-four New York counties. She supported herself by passing a hat while making speeches and by selling the tracts. After the
Dred Scott
decision, Anthony canvassed western New York for antislavery. Meanwhile she continued to devote most of her energies to women’s rights. She was unstinting in the demands she made on herself and others.

In Stanton’s case, Anthony was relentless. She refused to let Stanton surrender to domestic bondage. In June 1856, six months after Stanton had given birth to Harriot, Anthony asked the new mother to write a speech for an upcoming state teachers’ meeting.

So for the love of me and for the saving of the reputation of womanhood, I beg you, with one baby on your knee and another at your feet, and four boys whistling, buzzing, hallooing “Ma, Ma,” set yourself about the work. It is of but small moment who writes the address but of vast moment that it be done well. . . . Don’t say no nor . . . delay it a moment. . . . Now will you load my gun, leaving me to pull the trigger and let fly the powder and ball? . . . Do get all on fire and be as cross as you please. You remember, Mr. Stanton told how cross you always get over a speech.

Stanton replied tersely: “Come here and I will do what I can . . . if you will hold the baby and make the puddings.”
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The speech advocated coeducation at all levels. It expanded on themes Stanton had first outlined in a lecture on education to the Seneca Falls Village Lyceum in 1855. Controversial as always, she urged that, since both sexes were equal in intelligence, schools, from academies to universities,
should provide equally for boys and girls. The speech ended by upbraiding women teachers for not demanding equal wages. It was not well received. One opponent charged that coeducation would undermine feminine delicacy and destroy the sanctity of marriage. The teachers, put on the defensive, rejected the concept of equal pay as unseemly. When Anthony reported the reaction, Stanton was outraged. “What an infernal set of fools these school-marms must be!! Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The sooner the present generation of women die out the better. We have jackasses enough in the world now without such women propagating any more.”
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Stanton made one more effort for Anthony in 1856. In November she sent her annual letter to the Seventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City, for Anthony to read. In her letter, Stanton condemned marriage for putting women in a “false position” and defended divorce.
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The subject of divorce, first raised by Stanton at temperance meetings in the early 1850s, became a tenet of her feminist philosophy.

In thinking about the conditions of an ideal marriage, Stanton undoubtedly reflected on her own situation. She was trapped by tradition. She loved Henry and the children, but she longed to be free of her obligations to them. Having postponed her dreams of a reform career for ten years, since she penned the Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton grew increasingly angry. Her frustrations exploded in a letter to Anthony on the Fourth of July, 1858.

Oh how I long for a few hours of blessed leisure each day. How rebellious it makes me feel when I see Henry going about where and how he pleases. He can walk at will through the whole wide world or shut himself up alone, if he pleases, within four walls. As I contrast his freedom with my bondage, and feel that, because of the false position of women, I have been compelled to hold all my noblest aspirations in abeyance in order to be a wife, a mother, a nurse, a cook, a household drudge, I am fired anew and long to pour forth from my own experience the whole long story of women’s wrongs. I have been alone today as the whole family except Hattie and myself have been out to celebrate our national birthday. What has woman to do with patriotism? Must not someone watch baby, house and garden? And who is so fitting to perform all these duties, which no one else wishes to do, as she who brought sin into the world and all our woe!
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