In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2 page)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s life was characterized by controversy. From the unusual academic and athletic achievements of her adolescence to her demand for female suffrage in 1848, to her declaration of a feminist ideology of independence, to her agitation for radical social change, to her attack on the Bible, her actions and attitudes provoked debate and dissension. Her politics, her prejudices, her rhetoric, her associates, her attire, even her childraising practices alarmed many. Her behavior outraged the socially conservative element of the population, including her father. Eventually it offended her liberal allies as well, including her husband and her successors in the suffrage movement. Although she appeared to be a respectable matron, Stanton was accurately perceived to be a revolutionary—not a suitable role for a nineteenth-century woman.
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Having a revolutionary as an ally was a source of embarrassment to Stanton’s colleagues. In the late 1860s Stanton’s angry opposition to a reconstruction program that enfranchised black men but excluded black and white women created a schism in the ranks of suffragists. It resulted in the creation of rival organizations, the National and the American Woman Suffrage associations. The National Association, founded by Stanton, had a broad platform that addressed other women’s issues in addition to demanding a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. It was based in New York City and briefly defended by its own newspaper, the
Revolution
. The American Association, founded by Lucy Stone, her husband Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, limited itself to suffrage. It focused
on state referenda activity and allowed men to be members and officers. Boston based and socially conservative, the American published the
Woman’s Journal
for fifty years. Even after the two groups merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890, Mrs. Stanton continued to irritate the conservative faction. Refusing “to sing suffrage evermore,” she advocated unions for women workers, divorce reform, and birth control.
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Two weeks after the public celebration of her eightieth birthday, Stanton published
The Woman’s Bible
, an attack on traditional church teachings about the status of women.

Suffragists feared that Stanton’s radical feminism and religious heresy would damn their chances for success. The concerns of NAWSA’s leadership were not unfounded. As late as 1920 antisuffrage forces were recalling Stanton’s allegedly antichurch, antifamily, prolabor stance.
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To avoid the Stanton stigma, the younger women intentionally isolated and ignored her. In an effort to appear respectable and politically acceptable, they censured Stanton and canonized Susan B. Anthony. They provided “Aunt Susan” with a permanent seat on the executive committee, a secretary, and an annuity. After her death they turned her home into a shrine and named the Nineteenth Amendment after her, despite the fact that Stanton had proposed woman suffrage three years before she had met Anthony. Later generations, unaware of Stanton’s role, put Anthony on a stamp and a coin. As a result, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both notable and notorious in her own life, is better known as Susan B. Anthony’s sidekick than as the instigator and ideologue of the first women’s movement.

The substitution of Anthony for Stanton was a conscious strategy. In July 1923, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Stanton’s Seneca Falls suffrage resolution, Alice Paul led the National Woman’s party to the site to introduce the Equal Rights Amendment. The ceremony was planned and the program printed without any reference to Stanton. Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Blatch, insisted on paying tribute to her mother. She was the only speaker to mention Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The event concluded with a motorcade to nearby Rochester to lay a wreath at the Anthony memorial.
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Fifty-four years later, in November 1977, when the national meeting to observe International Women’s Year convened in Houston, Texas, it opened with the arrival of a torch that had been carried, by female runners, from Seneca Falls. Seated on the dais was Susan B. Anthony’s grandniece and namesake. The heroine of Seneca Falls, Stanton herself, had been lost to history.

Efforts to reconstruct Stanton’s life have been handicapped by the muddled state of the sources. Primary sources include letters, a diary, an autobiography and unpublished fragments, a political history,
The Woman’s Bible
, speeches, articles, and newspaper columns. The correspondence of
colleagues and family, newspaper reports, and the archives of the National and National American Woman Suffrage associations are also available. However, as Anthony frequently complained, Stanton was never very systematic about her record keeping. Research is further hampered by Stanton’s handwriting. In her haste, she left many letters unfinished. One printer found her script so illegible that a speech about “males” became a diatribe against “mules.”
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After Stanton’s death in 1902, two of her children, Harriot Blatch and Theodore Stanton, began to collect her papers for publication. The planned work finally appeared in two volumes in 1922 as
Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences
. In an effort to whitewash their mother into respectability, they had rewritten her letters, destroyed her diary, and altered her autobiography. Having wreaked havoc with the primary sources, they then destroyed some of the documents. Those that remain are scattered. The most important collections are at the Library of Congress, Douglass College, and Vassar College.

The letters exist in various versions in various places. After the children had collected as many of the originals as they could locate, they each typed copies with carbons. The majority of the letters, with deletions, are included in the 1922 published collection. Harriot Blatch’s originals and copies were divided between two sets of scrapbooks. One set was given to the Library of Congress in 1927. She gave the other to Vassar College in 1928, on the occasion of her fiftieth class reunion. After Theodore Stanton’s death in 1925, his copies were left to Rutgers University and later deposited at Douglass College. This collection is more complete in content and scope than any other.

Family members recall that after the copies were made and the scrapbooks prepared, Mrs. Blatch burned the remnants.
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But some additional letters must have survived because in 1939 she made them available to Alma Lutz, another Vassar alumna.
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An officer of the National Woman’s party, Miss Lutz was writing a biography of Stanton and collaborating on an autobiography of Mrs. Blatch.
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Published without footnotes, these books quote materials not found elsewhere. Any Stanton biographer must compare the texts of the various copies of every letter to determine which most closely resemble the original in content and intention.
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Stanton’s children also tampered with their mother’s autobiography. In the 1922 version they deleted whole sections of the original, altered others,
and added approximately fifty pages. They purged any reference to marital friction, domestic discord, or political conflict.
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Until 1971 the children’s version was the only one available. Originally
Eighty Years and More
promised to be “the story of my private life as the wife of an earnest reformer, as an enthusiastic housekeeper, . . . and as the mother of seven children,” but it was hardly introspective.
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Even without the editorial interference of offspring, Stanton’s autobiography is a suspect document. As a source, it is self-serving and often inaccurate. Like her maternal public image, Stanton self-consciously constructed an appealing autobiography, portraying herself as benign, amusing, undaunted, heroic, and praiseworthy. She admitted to no character flaws and few enemies. She omitted almost any mention of her mother, ignored her husband, misdated events, confused incidents, and forgot scandals.

Fortunately the records of Stanton’s public life are more reliable. The first four volumes of the six-part opus,
The History of Woman Suffrage
, record her suffrage work and reprint her speeches.
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The
History
is invaluable as an in-house record, unintentionally revealing both in what it includes and what it omits. It is essentially a cut-and-paste collection of meeting minutes, speech texts, newspaper clippings, and collegial recollections, lacking index, order, or analysis.

If potential biographers were undaunted by the difficulty of the search for evidence, they may have been deterred by the length and breadth of Stanton’s life. She was active in reform politics for more than sixty years and had an opinion on every subject from bicycle riding for women (pro) to museum admission charges (con). As Theodore Tilton, an admiring journalist and her first biographer, observed in 1897, her life had many dimensions: “I have known you for more than forty years in more than forty characters — suffragist — journalist — lecturer — historian — traveler — prophetess — mater-familias — housekeeper — patriot — nurse — baby-tender — cook — milliner — lobbyist — parliamentarian — statistician — legislator — philosopher — tea-pourer — storyteller — satirist — kite-flyer—chessplayer . . . [and] theologian.”
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Rather than grapple with such a long life and large personality, most historians have abandoned Stanton to journalists and writers of “juveniles.” There is no thorough or documented “life and times” of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The few scholars who are interested in her have limited their inquiries to an abbreviated life or have chosen to emphasize only one era or activity.
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This biography intends to complete the factual record—to recall Stanton’s contributions to women’s rights, to investigate the nature of her collaboration with Anthony, to integrate her public and private lives. It will describe and analyze the steps Stanton took to forge her own independent self; it will examine her private feminist identity and her public
feminist ideology; and it will suggest a hypothesis about what motivated her to behave as outrageously and courageously as she did.

It is typical of biographers to assume that subjects move from birth to death in a logical sequence, like characters in
Pilgrim’s Progress
, following a course, advancing a cause, growing in grace. Not all lives have such a cohesive factor, but Stanton’s did. What unifies Stanton’s life is a feminist ethic of independence. She adopted this ethic first in every phase of her own life and then articulated it as an ideology of autonomy for other women. As Stanton matured, she rebelled against the restrictions on female activity that confronted her in every sphere. Her success in these conflicts caused her to value her feminist theories. She tried them out in her own behavior and then advocated them in print and speeches, urging independence for all women.

Rather than submit to what she believed to be outdated traditions, Stanton chose an alternative if less acceptable course. Caught up in a period of tumultuous social change, she sought to change the lives of American women. Denied a college education because she was female, she studied law informally and read voraciously. Influenced by the egalitarian preaching of the revival period, she undertook her own salvation through reform. Provoked by the political conservatism and arrogance of most churches, she created a theology based on an affectionate, androgynous God. Forbidden by her family to undertake reform activity, she married an abolitionist hero and became a militant reformer. Outraged by antifemale bias among liberal males, she challenged their leadership. Confined on all sides by male-imposed limits, she questioned the authority of paternal institutions. In the process she made herself physically, emotionally, intellectually, and financially independent, and sought to guarantee her legal and political equality as well.

Such “self-sovereignty” was the essence of Stanton’s feminist theory. She summarized it in “The Solitude of Self,” her last major speech, presented in January 1892 to two congressional committees and the annual meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She defined the “solitude of self” as the “individuality of each human soul,” in both divine and democratic terms. Stanton argued that women must be treated as individuals without regard for the “incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter.” In reality women, like men, had only themselves to rely upon. She conceded that few women were ready for “self-dependence” because they had been overprotected by a patriarchal society. In order to achieve “self-dependence,” women had to be emancipated from “all forms of bondage, . . . custom, dependence and superstition,” both physical and psychological.
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Having freed herself from external and internal restraints, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton was unlike most of nineteenth-century American womanhood. She was not typical of white, middle-class, educated, married, Northern women, nor was she representative of female reformers. She was an uncommon woman. She had the intelligence, energy, vision, and courage to be a heroic character, and she was. She marshaled her superior qualities in a daily battle against entrenched institutions that denied women their social, economic, and legal independence. She was defeated again and again and again, but she continued the struggle with passionate impatience.

A compelling orator, a bold strategist, an unyielding opponent, and a generous ally, Stanton was a dynamic leader. After Stanton’s death, journalist Ida Husted Harper extolled her as the principal philosopher, publicist, and politician of the first women’s movement: “If the intellect of Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been possessed by a man, he would have had a seat on the Supreme Bench or in the Senate of the United States, but our country has no rewards for its great women.”
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a great woman, and this is unabashedly a “great woman” biography. With the recognition in recent years that populations also contain soldiers, slaves, and shopkeepers, some of whom are women, the “great man” theories of history and the biographies they generated have fallen out of fashion. “Great woman” history, on the other hand, was rarely written.
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But without adequate documentation of prominent women, the record is incomplete and comparisons are impossible. Not until the careers of America’s first generation of feminists have been examined will scholars be able to generalize about these distinguished individuals. Such biographies will serve, in Barbara Tuchman’s phrase, as a “prism” through which to view the political and social history of the last century in a new light.
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Fortunately the rebirth of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and the renaissance of women’s history provide an opportunity for this generation to recover its foremothers from the nineteenth century. The most important of these was Elizabeth Cady Stanton.