In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (6 page)

Mrs. Willard was disarmingly feminine. Shrewdly, she made a conservative case for untraditional female education. When she petitioned the New York legislature in 1819 for state-sponsored teacher training schools for women, she assured its members that such a “school would differ from a school for men as women’s character and duty differed from men’s.” The thrust of her argument, in tune with the “cult of true womanhood,” was that better educated mothers would produce more virtuous citizens. She believed in “education for usefulness.” Its purpose was “to bring its subjects to the perfection of their moral, intellectual, and physical nature: in order that [women] might be the greatest possible use to themselves and others.” The legislature rejected Willard’s plan, but the factory town of Troy, southwest of Albany, levied additional taxes of four thousand dollars to establish her school there in 1821.
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While Mrs. Willard stressed traditional if enlightened domestic roles for
girl graduates, there remained a contradictory emphasis on academic achievement. Although the rationale for female education was based on maternal destiny, learning had unpredicted consequences. Emma Willard and other leaders of women’s education gave the female graduate a breadth of interests, a mind attuned to serious study, and a self-consciousness based on gender.
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These opposing pressures paralleled the confusing signals young Miss Cady had been receiving in Johnstown. She observed the contrast between a submissive, passive, and nonintellectual feminine ideal and the reality of an assertive, active, intelligent, and powerful female, personified by her mother and Emma Willard. Although Stanton purported to have been sensitive to feminist issues like the lack of women’s legal status at this early date, she had not yet made a choice of roles. Edward Bayard, Rev. Hosack, Mrs. Willard, and occasionally even her parents applauded intellectual accomplishment, but none of them outwardly encouraged any but traditional roles for women.

Family members and teachers were not the only influential adults in Elizabeth Cady’s life during this period. Equally important in her adolescence was her exposure to the preaching of Charles Grandison Finney during the Great Troy Revival of 1831. Strictly raised as a Presbyterian, Elizabeth had a gloomy view of a punitive God. Her perception was not altered by attending Episcopal services with “Black Peter,” the family retainer, and being assigned to the Negro servants’ pew. She had not formally joined a church or experienced conversion before going away to school. When carriage loads of her classmates attended the revival meetings in Troy, she went along and was spellbound. The experience, according to her recollection, “seriously influenced my character.” “[One] of those intense revival seasons . . . swept over the city and through the seminary like an epidemic, attacking in its worst form the most susceptible. Owing to my gloomy Calvinist training in the old Scotch Presbyterian Church, and my vivid imagination, I was one of the first victims.”
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Finney’s effect on the impressionable adolescent was not unusual. During the Great Revival, from 1830 to 1832, he made scores of converts wherever he preached.

Finney himself had undergone a dramatic conversion in 1821. He believed that he had seen Christ on a main street in Rochester, New York, and, like St. Paul, had wrestled with the Lord until he “could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity going through and through [him].” He immediately gave up his lucrative law practice and was ordained a minister. Finney began his first New York crusade in 1827 and was at the height of his power by 1831. He was vigorous, passionate, ruthless—the preeminent revivalist of the nineteenth century, a pivotal figure in the history of American Protestantism.
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Since the Revolution, a combination of factors had turned the population away from its earlier allegiance to organized churches. By 1820 the religious leadership was prepared to launch a conservative counterattack to win back the faithful.
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The internal debates generated by the disestablishment of the Congregational Church of Connecticut in 1818 produced changes both in theological style and substance and spawned the Second Great Awakening. Influenced by Timothy Dwight and Nathaniel Taylor, the revivalists combined traditional methods with new ones. Prayer, confession, and Scripture study were taken outside the churches into tents and fields, where itinerant preachers would convert whole communities with fiery sermons and an unrelenting schedule of revival meetings.

Revival theology was Puritanism without predestination. Evangelical preachers abandoned the concept of an “elect.” Instead they emphasized that an individual could choose to behave in such a manner that God would reward him with conversion. Each person had responsibility for the salvation of his own soul and that of others—drunks, prostitutes, sinners, and slaveholders, for example. What began as a conservative effort by church leaders to restore stability to American society and increase church attendance resulted in a popular phenomenon, a new theology, and the relocation of responsibility for sinners from the church to the community.
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Finney’s style was irresistible. Stanton remembered him as a “tall, grave-looking man,” who dressed in “unclerical gray.” He dominated the pulpit with a resonant voice and dramatic gestures, “his great eyes rolling around the congregation and his arms flying about . . . like . . . a windmill.”
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He overpowered his listeners with his compelling personality and lawyer-like presentation. Meetings were held almost daily, disrupting the ordinary routine of the Troy community. Individual sinners were prayed for by name and put under devastating pressure to confess. Women were permitted to pray in public, an affront to the adherents of St. Paul and to conservatives like Daniel Cady, who considered such a public role for women indecent.

Finney’s theology was as disturbing as his tactics. To the common people who flocked to barns, schoolhouses, and open-air meetings to hear him, Finney preached the revival doctrine of Christian perfectionism. He taught that man had free will to choose salvation and the responsibility to make that choice. He believed that every person, male or female, had to be confronted with a choice between salvation and damnation. Conversion was a reaffirmation of faith and an acceptance of an obligation to perfect oneself and one’s community. Finney’s God was just and benevolent; Finney’s sinners could choose to be saved. As he repeated over and over, “All men may be saved if they will.”
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The combination of Finney’s strenuous style, congenial theology, and revival enthusiasm overwhelmed the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Cady. Every
day for six weeks she subjected herself to his preaching, until she found herself on the “anxious bench.” Finally she confessed her sins and experienced “conversion.” The result was not reassuring. Revival sapped her self-esteem and made her feel bad instead of good. She became ill and went home to Johnstown. As she recalled in her autobiography: “Fear of judgment seized my soul. Visions of the lost haunted my dreams. Mental anguish prostrated my health. Dethronement of my reason was apprehended by friends. . . . Returning home, I often at night roused my father from his slumber to pray for me, lest I should be cast into the bottomless pit before morning.”
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Judge Cady, alarmed by Elizabeth’s condition and shocked by the disgrace of a camp meeting conversion, forbade any further discussion of religion or mention of Finney until she had regained her composure. In June 1831 she traveled to Niagara Falls with her father and the Bayards. “My brother-in-law,” she recalled, “explained . . . the nature of the delusions we had all experienced, the physical conditions, the mental processes, the church machinery by which such excitements are worked up.” Bayard assigned novels by Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Charles Dickens, the rational philosophy of George Combe, and works about phrenology. Prodded by Bayard’s good-humored skepticism, Elizabeth’s “religious superstitions gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and in proportion, as I looked at everything from a new standpoint, I grew more and more happy.” With the attention of her father and Bayard, her pleasure in the journey, and a rational explanation of her frightening experience, her “mind was restored to its normal condition” and her girlhood gaiety returned.
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Despite her prompt recovery from conversion, Finney had made an indelible impression on Elizabeth Cady. Her experience initiated a decade of religious indecision. His preaching had called into question all her Calvinist training and helped her reject it. She accepted Finney’s imperative that she had a choice to make, and in the end she chose skepticism. By encouraging her to be critical of Finney, Judge Cady and Bayard allowed her to treat theology analytically. Later she would reject religious authority of any kind. Her attack on the Bible in her old age concluded her religious quest and completed her definition of a coherent feminist ideology. The more immediate consequence of revival for her in the 1830s was to interest and involve her in the reform community.

The Great Revival created around Elizabeth Cady an environment conducive to reform. Led by men and women who had experienced revival conversions and were inspired by a commitment to perfect mankind, organizations for abolition, temperance, and Christian benevolence flourished in upstate New York. The significance of the inclusion of women as
participants in revival and reform cannot be overlooked. Revival meetings were characterized by and criticized for the presence of women praying, testifying, confessing, and converting in public. Once converted, the women could not keep silent in the churches. Nor could they avoid the requirement of service on account of sex. Revival and reform activity for women raised issues of women’s rights that would plague traditional and evangelical churches as well as the wider society for another century.

Ministers demanded that female activities be modest, unobtrusive, and “appropriate.” Few realized that any activity would move women beyond their ordinary sphere and force a redefinition of the “cult of true womanhood” to include religious benevolence and community volunteerism as newly appropriate spheres of activity for ladies. Nourished by evangelical religion, female reform societies endowed their members with a sense of identity and purpose separate from their families. The societies provided women with organizational experience and political skills. As a small number of women attempted to act out the pious ideal in tract and mission societies or in temperance or abolition crusades, it became more difficult to sustain the myth of female subordination.
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Rejection of religious authority and resentment of women’s subordinate status were the long-term results for Elizabeth Cady and other nineteenth-century women in revival and reform circles.

The remainder of Elizabeth’s education at Emma Willard’s seminary was uneventful. She graduated in 1833 and returned to Johnstown. At seventeen, she was marriageable but unmarried. Her future was uncertain, and she had no plans. Because of her family’s wealth, she was not forced to support herself by teaching, sewing, or factory work. She had only minor domestic responsibilities. For a brief period she joined a church auxiliary to finance the education of a young minister. As she recounted the story, the young women “sewed, baked, brewed and stewed things, had fairs, sociables and what not” to support the young man. When he graduated the women bought him a black broadcloth suit, high hat, and cane, and invited him to Johnstown to preach. He chose as the text of his sermon, “I suffer not a woman to speak in church.” According to Stanton, she and the other young women walked out.
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The tale is too pat to trust, but it illustrates Stanton’s disdain for the patronizing treatment of female parishioners by male ministers.

Not all of Elizabeth Cady’s activities were serious. For most of the 1830s she led the life of a belle. Vain about her curly brown hair and small feet, she was a pretty, petite, and vivacious young woman. Her letters report a whirl of parties, dances, hayrides, and horse races. She made rounds of visits to relatives. Her journal includes quotations about love from Lord Byron,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Dryden, and Scott. There are also autographs by girlfriends and an initialed inscription, “To Lib—the joyous laugh, the merry joke, the smile, the kind word.” She loved to sing and accompany herself on the piano or guitar. She talked so much that one beau teased that she could not take a drive in silence. She accepted the challenge, put a straw dummy dressed in her cloak and bonnet in the carriage, and greeted the disconcerted young man on his return.
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All her life she enjoyed practical jokes, games, dancing, and company.

Elizabeth Cady’s was a typical upper-class girlhood. Less independent than adolescent males, “young ladies” lived in an intermediate and indeterminate stage between education and marriage or employment. Elizabeth shared the extended social life and limited domestic tasks of other young women of her social rank. Aside from her conversion, she does not appear to have experienced the introspection, brooding, alienation, or rebellion that made adolescence a period of stress for some young women.
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Stanton saved a favorite photograph of herself at twenty, noting in a letter, “It looks so self-asserting and defiant that I love to look at it.” Her description of a young friend in 1855 sounds like a self-portrait from her girlhood: “Full of life, energy and fun, she sings and plays delightfully, can dance and waltz like a fairy, has exquisite taste in dress and is a genius in the culinary department. A horsewoman, she is equal to Fanny Kemble; can drive and ride a horse, leap ditches and fences, is active and brave, and knows no fear of man or beast. On foot or horse she is unsurpassed.”
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While Miss Cady continued to investigate new ideas and read omnivorously, she was hardly a sedentary blue stocking.

After the Bayards moved to Seneca Falls, west of Syracuse, in 1834, Elizabeth visited them frequently. Edward Bayard’s homeopathy practice disconcerted most of his family but increased his appeal for Elizabeth. Homeopathy emphasized the body’s natural recuperative powers. It was the most popular alternative to standard medical practice in that period. Like phrenology and the Sylvester Graham diet, it was another optimistic outgrowth of the revival-reform era. Introduced to homeopathy by Bayard, Stanton would practice and advocate it for the rest of her life.