In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (34 page)

Offended Susan—Come right down and pull my ears. I shall not attempt a defense. Of course I admit that I made an awful blunder in not keeping silent so far as you were concerned on this terrible Beecher-Tilton scandal. The whole odium of this
scandalum magnatum
has . . . been rolled on our suffrage movement as unjustly as cunningly; hence I feel obliged just now to make extra efforts to keep our ship off the rocks. . . . We must not let the cause of woman go down in the smash. It is innocent.
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After Beecher was pronounced innocent by the church committee, Stanton published her own account of the case. Her article was reprinted by the
Chicago Tribune
and received wide circulation. In it she moved from the specifics of the Beecher-Tilton case to an analysis of the social problem it raised and on to a defense of divorce.
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Stanton was the only public figure bold enough to criticize the two verdicts.

The tensions created by the
Revolution
debt, the question of Stanton’s convention attendance, the California trip, the Woodhull relationship, the Beecher-Tilton scandal, and their rivalry on the hustings and within the National scarred the Stanton-Anthony friendship. Anthony tied herself more closely to the National, took over its development in Stanton’s absence, and became more critical of her friend. She found that Stanton’s salvos on every subject hurt the group and its goal of suffrage. Anthony resented Stanton’s popularity and her unwillingness to accept any responsibility for the day-to-day jobs. In their newly competitive relationship Stanton had
her grievances, too. She thought that Anthony had been “pushing” her too much and failed to appreciate the value of her agitation. In the aftermath of the Beecher-Tilton affair, the two old friends saw less of each other, corresponded irregularly, and kept their distance until tempers cooled.

The Beecher-Tilton scandal also marked the end of Stanton’s involvement with notorious trials. Although she still used current events to illustrate her lectures on women’s rights, she became more circumspect. Throughout this period she had been at the center of several major trials: the Hester Vaughan trial for infanticide in 1869, the McFarland-Richardson case of 1870, the Laura Fair incident in San Francisco in 1871, and the Beecher-Tilton trials in 1872–75. In each instance, Stanton rushed to the defense of the women involved, whether defendant, plaintiff, or victim.

Hester Vaughan was a twenty-year-old woman, deserted by her husband, who had become a servant in a Philadelphia household. She had been seduced, become pregnant, and was dismissed. Destitute, she delivered the baby alone in an unheated garret and collapsed. Twenty-four hours later mother and child were discovered. The baby was dead, and Vaughan was charged with infanticide. Tried without counsel, forbidden to testify, she was found guilty and sentenced to hang. Week after week Stanton wrote about the case in the
Revolution
. She and Anthony held a public protest meeting attended by one thousand women. They demanded a pardon for Vaughan, an end to the double standard of morality, the right of women to serve as jurors, and the admission of women to law schools. Elizabeth Smith Miller led a delegation of women to call on the governor of Pennsylvania, and eventually Vaughan was pardoned. According to Stanton, Vaughan’s trial by a jury of men, the prohibition on her taking the stand in her own defense, and the assumption of her guilt illustrated the indignity and injustice of women’s legal status.
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The McFarland-Richardson case combined murder and divorce. In 1869 a brutal and dissolute character named Daniel McFarland had been divorced by his wife, Abby Sage, an actress and writer. When his ex-wife was courted by a well-known newspaperman, Albert Richardson, McFarland shot the suitor in the offices of the
Tribune
. On his deathbed Richardson married Mrs. McFarland, with Henry Ward Beecher officiating and Horace Greeley acting as witness. Despite the facts of the case, the press condemned the divorced woman. McFarland was acquitted of the murder on a plea of temporary insanity and subsequently awarded custody of the couple’s young son. Again Stanton editorialized and Anthony organized. Three thousand people heard Stanton defend divorce and condemn artificial morality. She shocked her audience by declaring:

I rejoice over every slave that escapes from a discordant marriage. With the education and elevation of woman we shall have a mighty sundering
of unholy ties that hold men and women together who loathe and despise each other. Such marriages are a crime against both the individual and the state, the source of discord, disease, death, of weakness, imbecility, deformity and depravity. . . . This wholesale shooting of wives’ paramours should be stopped. . . . Suppose women should decide to shoot their husbands’ mistresses, what a wholesale slaughter of innocents we should have!
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Stanton advocated divorce reform and criticized the double sexual standard again during the murder trial of the prostitute Laura Fair in 1871. Finding that “women respond to this divorce speech as they never did to suffrage,” Stanton expanded on it as a lyceum lecture, addressing it only to audiences of women.
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The publicity of three murder trials, added to the notoriety of the Beecher-Tilton affair, linked Stanton and suffrage with scandal. Although she claimed not to be bothered by this libel, she became more careful in her friendships and associations. As a captive of her lyceum schedule she had less opportunity to make trouble. She welcomed the chance to escape from infighting and ill-humor.

As a result of the Vaughan and Fair trials Stanton reaffirmed her interest in the “social purity” crusade, as the effort to end prostitution was called. Although most of her sexual attitudes seem modern compared to the Victorian standard, she did believe that the undisciplined sexual appetite of men forced a double standard on society and that sexual energy was not renewable and should not be squandered. She credited women with a healthy sexual interest and praised Walt Whitman for addressing female sensuality in his poetry. She believed that men and women, preferably husbands and wives, could enjoy intercourse for procreation and pleasure. But women, in or out of marriage, needed to be protected from coarse, drunk, brutal men. In 1853 she sponsored a female physiology lecture in Seneca Falls and urged that drunkenness be made grounds for divorce. In 1860 she warned against the sexual abuse of wives. In 1867 she and Anthony blocked a move to legalize prostitution in New York because the bill benefited only the clients. In 1873 she advised her son Theodore, then at Cornell, to “dwell on the importance of keeping the sensuous nature ever under control of the spiritual. The ordinary young girls are not worth your thought or attention. Better exercise with dumb-bells than visit them.”
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As always Stanton relied on education for elevation.

In the course of the 1870s Stanton’s life developed a pattern. Every January, usually before the annual January meeting of the National, she left for a five-month lecture tour. She returned to Tenafly for the summer, when the children gathered. After revising her lectures and sending the
youngest offspring back to school in the fall, she returned to the circuit for three more months, until Christmas. She was away from home eight months a year for ten years.

Stanton’s lyceum experience epitomized her own independence. After years of staying at home, she now traveled widely. She had become a public person, a professional reformer, a newspaper editor, an organization president, a paid lecturer, and a minor celebrity. For her the lyceum was a great adventure, and she enjoyed it. She was acting out the role of the reformers she had observed from 1830 until the Civil War. Whether consciously or not, she was engaging in an activity similar to that of her father as a circuit judge and Henry as an abolition agent.

The postwar lyceum phenomenon was the inspiration of James Redpath, a former war correspondent and abolitionist who established the first commercially successful lecture bureau. The lyceum brought entertainment and education to small communities throughout the country but mostly in the West, where libraries and theaters were scarce. The lyceum followed the railroad and became enormously popular. Among the orators engaged by Redpath were Julia Ward Howe, Henry Beecher, and various generals, journalists, authors, and politicians. The bureaus engaged the speakers, arranged their itineraries, and promoted the tours. The speakers were paid between one and two hundred dollars per appearance, from which they had to deduct their expenses and a 10 percent commission for the organizers. Mrs. Stanton joined the New York Bureau in November 1869. In the first three months of her new career, she bragged to Gerrit Smith that she had earned “$2000 above all expenses . . . besides stirring up women generally to rebellion.”
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The remark reflected Stanton’s double motivation in joining the lyceum—income and influence.

Stanton always claimed that she needed the income earned by her lectures to provide for her family and, specifically, to pay for the college educations of her children. Her financial status in 1870 is uncertain. Some of her inheritance from her father had been lost through Henry’s poor investment strategy, and some of it had paid for the Tenafly house. Henry’s income had diminished after 1864, and the couple’s expenses increased. Maintaining two households and educating six children may have strained their joint resources.

The six youngest children all attended college, but Stanton’s earnings paid for only two tuitions, those of Theodore and Bob at Cornell. Henry and Gerrit had completed their training before Stanton began lecturing, and her sister Harriet Eaton paid for Margaret and Harriot to attend Vassar. Mrs. Stanton would have preferred them to attend Swarthmore, a coeducational Quaker college, but she accepted the gift. The fact that she retired from the lyceum about the time Bob finished college might support her claim
that she paid the younger sons’ tuitions. Her frequent references to the need for economy and her refusal to help Anthony with the
Revolution
debt indicate that she may indeed have had limited resources or felt insecure even with those she had.
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But she had inherited property from her mother in 1871 and was a popular, well-paid lecturer. Throughout this period she engaged a housekeeper and other servants and dressed stylishly. Rather than admit her desire to be free of family responsibility, she offered economic need as the rationale for her separations from her adolescent children. In reality, she had learned to put herself first.

Stanton had long believed that “radical reform must start in our homes, in our nurseries, in ourselves,” rather than in conventions. She used the same rationale to go lecturing that she had used to stay home. Now Stanton wanted to take women’s rights into the homes and lives of the American people. She thrived in her self-made role as agitator and propagandist. As she had declared in the final issue of the
Revolution
, she intended to spend her future “teaching woman her duties to herself.”
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She began by enhancing her own independence, by becoming physically and financially independent.

A typical lyceum tour might take Stanton to three dozen cities and small towns in six weeks, then back to Chicago or St. Louis or New York to start again. She crossed the Mississippi several times each season. She usually spoke once a day and twice on Sundays. When she had an afternoon free, she liked to meet alone with the women of a community. Speaking at night, she traveled by day or through the night. In a letter written to her daughter Margaret in 1872, Stanton described her routine.

Imagine me today sitting in a small, comfortable room in the railroad hotel about a half mile from this little Minnesota town where I do not know a soul. But as everybody is polite and attentive, I suppose they all know me. I spoke last evening [in Iowa] and in order to reach here . . . I was obliged to leave at midnight. So after my lecture I had an oyster supper, packed up my finery, and all ready to start, took a short nap on the sofa. I was called at two, but as the horses were sick and I was the only guest going . . . westward, I was toted, I and my baggage, in a little cart drawn by a mule through a fearful snow storm, the wind cutting like particles of glass. Having arrived safely at the depot, a good natured overgrown boy deposited me and mine beside a redhot stove. Learning . . . that the train was two hours behind, I rolled my cloak up for a pillow, lay down on the bench, and went to sleep. . . . In due time I was awakened . . . tickets bought, valise checked and I transferred to a sleeping car, where . . . I at once “flopped” asleep again, without even taking my bonnet off. At eight, I was roused . . . for this place, where, it being Sunday, the train lies over. So I ordered a fire, washed my face, ate breakfast, undressed regularly, went to bed and slept soundly until one, when I arose, took a sponge bath, had dinner, read all the papers I could procure and now sit down
to answer your letter. . . . You ask if it is not lonely traveling as I do. It is indeed . . . but you see, dearest, [having Hattie with me] would double my expenses, and as I am so desirous of making money for the household, I must practice economy in some direction. And above all considerations of loneliness and fatigue, I feel that I am doing an immense amount of good in rousing women to thought and inspiring them with new hope and self-respect, that I am making the path smoother for you and Hattie and all the other dear girls.
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The lyceum was a vigorous undertaking for a woman in her late fifties. Travel through the West was still undependable, sometimes arduous, occasionally fraught with hardship. One winter when heavy snows closed the railroads, Mrs. Stanton hired a sleigh. Bundled in furs, she traveled forty to fifty miles a day in subzero cold to keep her engagements. On another occasion, when her Mississippi ferry was stranded on ice for hours, she entertained the passengers with selections from her speeches. When the trains were running, she often traveled all night. She had to put up with foul weather, unreliable transportation, irregular meals, uncomfortable hotels, and a demanding itinerary. Wherever she was on the lyceum circuit, she cultivated her knack for falling asleep anywhere.
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