In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (40 page)

The unexpected shock, grief, and regret that characterized Stanton’s reaction to Henry’s death subsided in subsequent months. After spending the winter in Basingstoke in bed, she roused herself to visit Theodore in Paris in the spring. There she sat for a bust by Paul Bartlett and a portrait by Anna Klumpke, the protégé of Rosa Bonheur. Stanton was “quite pleased with the result,” she reported to her son Bob. “I sit in a large ruby-colored chair, dressed in black satin and black lace around the throat and hands. Nothing white in the picture but my head and hands. My right hand rests in my lap, my left on the arm of the chair holding my gold spectacles. A little table on my left contains one volume of the Woman Suffrage history and two pamphlets.” Theodore hosted weekly Wednesday afternoon receptions for his mother and guided her through the city’s museums and gardens. Stanton exhibited her usual curiosity and humor. She was impressed by the easy companionship of French men and women, who “mixed freely in business and amusements.”
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In October, Stanton returned to England. She resumed her routine of reading and writing, admitting in her diary, “This is the first time in my life that I have had uninterrupted leisure for reading, free from all care of home, servants, and children.” She read works by John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, J. P. F. Richter, Auguste Comte, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy. Of
Anna Karenina
she remarked, “I do not like it much as all the women are disappointed and unhappy; and well they may be, as they look to men, and not to themselves, for their chief joy.”
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The first anniversary of Henry’s death passed without comment. Stanton was ready to think about returning to the United States and the suffrage crusade.

Widowhood legitimized Stanton’s long-sought independence from marriage, husband, and family. She had lived separately and supported herself
financially prior to his death, but few people knew it and fewer would have approved of her behavior. As a widow, her independence was considered admirable. Her reputation as a reformer, unrelated to Henry, was enhanced by the public respect due to widows. Widowhood for her meant status without responsibilities. For many women less self-reliant then Stanton, widowhood was the only time in their lives that they were legally free from the domination of fathers or husbands; for many it was a painful and difficult transition. But Stanton, in her quest for individual independence, had unconsciously prepared herself for widowhood. For her, widowhood was characterized by personal satisfaction, public accomplishment, and undiminished militance.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a defiant old lady. The beginning of the 1890s coincided with the onset of Stanton’s old age. One could date her maturity from her sixty-fifth birthday or her retirement from the lyceum in 1880; from the marriage of her youngest child, in this case Harriot, in 1882; or from her widowhood in 1887. During the 1880s and 1890s Stanton had to contend with the symptoms of aging: physical ailments, retirement, financial insecurity, death of friends, family estrangement, and generational conflict.
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But these factors did not define or dominate her old age. Soon to be immobilized by obesity and blindness, she was restrained only by physical infirmity. She had survived her husband, outlived most of her enemies, and exhausted her allies. Her mind remained alert, her mood optimistic, and her manner combative.

In a period of anticipated and actual dependence for most older people, Stanton became increasingly independent. Personally, she had established the kind of “associative household” she had long advocated and enjoyed her “matriarchy.” Professionally, she supported herself by writing, completing her autobiography and
The Woman’s Bible
in addition to numerous speeches, articles, and newspaper columns. Politically, she remained aloof from the merger of the rival factions in the suffrage movement, finally breaking with the younger leaders over their timid tactics. Philosophically, she synthesized her feminist ideology in “The Solitude of Self” speech and culminated her attack on patriarchal institutions by condemning traditional Biblical scholarship. Psychologically, she shed the last vestiges of dependence. She moved beyond her last confidante, Susan B. Anthony, and came to rely wholly on her own judgment and values.

As an old woman, Stanton came into her own. She was honored as a feminist foremother and as a grandmother. She was self-supporting and self-sustaining. Physically crippled, she was otherwise unfettered. Throughout her life Stanton had admired and identified “queenly” women; now she had become the kind of woman she had defined as her ideal: a self sovereign, a queen.
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While Stanton had been in Europe following Henry’s death, she had missed the first Senate vote on the proposed federal woman suffrage amendment, in January 1887. In a lengthy floor debate one senator declared that females were not physically strong enough to be citizens; another announced the opposition of two hundred preachers and the president of Harvard. Frances Willard, head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), joined with the suffragists and presented two hundred thousand signatures of women who had petitioned for the vote. The final tally was 16 yeas (all Republicans), 34 nays (24 Democrats, 10 Republicans), and 26 abstentions. From abroad Stanton concluded, “Of one thing men may be assured . . . that the next generation will not argue the question of woman’s rights with the infinite patience we have displayed for half a century.” By the winter of 1888 Stanton was eager to rejoin the fray, writing Anthony that she was “thoroughly rested now and full of fight and fire, ready to travel and speak from Maine to Florida.”
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She promised to return in time for the international meeting planned for March, but, faced with another ocean crossing, Stanton lost her nerve and tried to back out on her promise.

Anthony was so angry that she delayed before replying. The theme of the pending meeting was the fortieth anniversary of Seneca Falls. Anthony had contacted all the signers of the Declaration she could locate, urging them to come, and now the principal organizer threatened to back out. “I wrote the most terrific letter to Mrs. Stanton,” Anthony recorded in her diary. “It will start every white hair on her head.” Anthony urged Libby Miller to write Stanton as well. “
Very evil fates will persecute
her if she dares to be absent,” Anthony warned. “She will never be forgiven by me or any of our Association, if she fails to come.” Chastened, Mrs. Stanton cabled curtly, “I am coming,” but then delayed her departure.
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Stanton arrived in the middle of the Great Blizzard of ’88. When she finally reached Washington, Anthony was alarmed to learn that she had no speech prepared for the occasion. According to an often repeated suffrage anecdote, Anthony handed Stanton pen and paper, locked her in her room at the Riggs House, kept a guard at the door, and allowed no visitors. Mrs. Stanton emerged three days later, “ready with her usual magnificent address.”
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Stanton and Anthony had conceived the idea of an international meeting
during their European junket in 1883. They hoped to create a “universal sisterhood” of women’s rights advocates. Anthony convinced the National Association to organize and finance an International Council of Women, and an estimated twelve thousand dollars was raised to pay the expenses of all the delegates. Anthony shrewdly used the council to accomplish several of her own ends. She wanted to take advantage of her new European contacts to enlarge and legitimize the scope of women’s rights; she wanted to honor Mrs. Stanton by commemorating Seneca Falls; and she wanted to create a coalition with other women’s groups around an uncontroversial subject.

In planning the meeting Anthony called on the American Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the two powerful and prestigious rivals of the National, to participate in the preparation and the program. Fifty-three other national organizations represented “every department of woman’s work.” Literary clubs; art leagues; temperance, missionary, peace, and social purity societies; labor unions; charitable, professional, educational, and industrial groups all joined the suffrage associations in a massive show of unity. In addition, delegates from England, France, Norway, Finland, Denmark, India, and Canada attended.

Anthony presided with an autocratic parliamentary will over half of the sixteen sessions. Tactfully, she made sure that the other leaders had equally prominent roles. It was the first time in twenty years that Anthony and Lucy Stone had appeared on the same platform or that members of the organized suffrage movement had cooperated or met together. When Anthony joined Julia Ward Howe and Frances Willard in crediting Stone with her own conversion to women’s rights, Stanton was speechless. But throughout the week-long meeting she remained publicly gracious and serene.
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The program of the International Council of Women was elaborate. It opened and ended with religious services conducted by five female ministers. Mrs. Stanton was greeted with a standing ovation. Her opening speech, on Monday, March 25, emphasized the similarities among women of different classes and different countries: “Through suffering,” women had the key to understanding each other. Women shared the bondage of their sex, whether they were “housed in golden cages with every want supplied, or wandering in the dreary deserts of life, friendless and forsaken.”
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Stanton also presided at the “pioneers” meeting of eight men and thirty-six women who had attended the 1848 convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Other sessions were devoted to discussions of philanthropy, temperance, industry, the professions, women’s organizations, political and legal conditions, and social purity, each led by a female expert
in the field. Stanton most enjoyed the part of the program in which the common claim that a woman’s brain was inferior in size and quality was refuted. She had always believed that her own brain was large and superior.
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Following the International Council sessions, Stanton addressed a Senate hearing on suffrage. She made a plea for legal recognition of human equality. Frances Willard of the WCTU, Julia Ward Howe of the American Association, and six foreign women also testified. Stanton was pleased that the emphasis on lobbying for a sixteenth amendment had not been neglected in the midst of the International Council. She believed that legislative hearings educated the public and modified the prejudices of lawmakers. Many of the committee members met “strongminded women” for the first time, and did not find them “such a bad lot after all,” as one Congressman had remarked to her.
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She also appreciated the significance of suffragists being feted at the White House and honored with receptions and dinners.

Stanton was satisfied that the International Council had been a success, but she was alarmed by signs of Anthony’s alignment with conservative women. Anthony was convinced that suffrage had to have more support among larger groups of middle-class women. To win that support, suffrage must appear as respectable a cause as temperance or benevolence. Anthony, influenced by the younger suffragists within the National, now sought to narrow the Association’s agenda in order to enlarge its constituency.

Anthony had already forged an alliance with Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the largest organization of women in the country. In return, suffragists quietly supported prohibition and Sunday closing laws, used “righteousness” as a rationale for voting, and earned the opposition of the liquor lobby. Similarly, Anthony had made overtures to the American Woman Suffrage Association. Settlement of the Eddy estate had reopened her correspondence with Wendell Phillips and other Bostonians, and the International Council brought them together in a joint enterprise. Next Anthony and others created a National Council of Women as an umbrella organization under which the rival factions might meet. Now that the National Woman Suffrage Association had become respectable and conciliatory, in effect reversing the stand taken in 1869, there was no reason not to close ranks with the American.

A suffrage-first, conservative strategy and a religious alliance were anathema to Stanton. She believed that the vote was only one of many reforms required for female independence. “Miss Anthony has one idea and she has no patience with anyone who has two,” Stanton later complained to Clara Colby. “I cannot . . . sing suffrage evermore; I am deeply interested in all the questions of the day.” In her diary she declared, “I get more
radical as I get older, while [Anthony] seems to grow more conservative.”
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Stanton disapproved of Anthony’s strategy and tactics. But rather than directly challenge Anthony, who had the support of more than the majority of National members, Stanton removed herself from the merger negotiations. Unable to win, she chose not to fight that battle; but she did not surrender.

Stanton spent the eighteen months between her return from Europe in March 1888 and the National-American merger in February 1890 visiting her family. She needed a place to stay, and she wanted to restore her relationship with her children and siblings. After Henry died she had sold the Tenafly house. For the next five years she had had no permanent residence and traveled from relative to relative. After two months at the Riggs House in Washington for the International Council, Stanton spent June in New York City. There she saw her sons Henry and Bob and her sisters Tryphena Bayard and Harriet Eaton. Stanton spent the summer in upstate New York with Libby Miller and then went west. She visited suffrage colleagues in Ohio and moved on to Iowa to see her son Gerrit and her sister Margaret McMartin. From there she went to Omaha to spend the winter with her daughter Margaret Lawrence. In the spring of 1889, when Margaret had to take her husband to San Diego for his health, Neil escorted his mother back to New York. She spent the summer on Long Island with Gerrit, who had moved east as well. Her son Henry had given her a phaeton, “as low and easy as a cradle,” for her daily drives. Anthony came to visit, and the two reformers went to Coney Island to preach women’s rights to two hundred women at one of the big summer hotels. That fall Margaret Lawrence came east to consider graduate school, and Harriot Blatch arrived from England to spend the winter earning a master’s degree from Vassar. Stanton visited friends in the city and then went to Geneva for several more months with Libby Miller.
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