In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (15 page)

At first the boys were homesick, and Elizabeth missed them as well. She wrote them frequently, closing her funny, affectionate letters, “a thousand kisses.” Henry also wrote regularly, praising their progress, correcting their grammar, commenting on current events, preaching the standard virtues,
and enclosing their allowance—sixty cents for Neil, forty cents for Kit. “Don’t spend it for candy, tobacco or segars,” he admonished, only half joking.
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Elizabeth admitted her inability to manage the boys, but she blamed it on the demands of the new babies rather than a flawed philosophy of child raising. With the exception of Neil, who remained a scoundrel—and her pet—his whole life, Stanton’s children responded positively to her experiments in child raising. Based on her reading of Andrew Combe’s book on child care and her own common sense, Stanton had abandoned many practices then accepted in America. She refused to allow her infants to be swaddled tightly and insisted that they be given water to drink, daily baths, fresh air, and sunshine. It was sometimes difficult to find servants who would carry out her edicts, so her caretaking chores increased. As she reported to Cousin Lib: “My baby [Theo] is very good and grows finely. I continue to be his wet as well as his dry nurse. It is easier to look after him myself than to train an ignorant girl to do so. I have invented a variety of ways to keep him quiet—that is, ways for him to keep himself quiet.”
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Stanton was an affectionate, attentive, and demonstrative mother, always ready to join in games and songs. She welcomed neighborhood children, offering cake and milk, or, if the pantry was bare, “the grape arbor and the pump.” She initiated a committee to improve the schools in Seneca Falls and organized a coeducational gymnasium for the older children. She encouraged independence and self-reliance in her offspring. In a letter to James Birney’s wife she discussed her philosophy of child care.

You say the baby wants to climb up stairs. Of course she does; nature wants another set of muscles brought into play. You must teach her how to go up and down with safety, how to take hold of the banisters. If you take very little pains, she will be delighted with her achievement. Most people try to fence off stairs and make children afraid of going up and down; then they are sure to fall. We must inspire them with confidence in themselves and show them how to do what they desire.
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Stanton’s innovations in child care carried over into family health care. She and Henry had abandoned vegetarianism, added meat and butter to the menus, and on occasion drank wine. Skeptical of medical authorities, she continued to practice homeopathy. Sometime after Neil was born, perhaps during his birth, his shoulder had been dislocated. The two doctors Stanton consulted set it in restrictive bandages. The new mother’s common sense dictated different treatment. So, as she told Henry, “with my usual conceit I removed [the bandages] . . . and turned surgeon myself.” She designed a less confining sling and the shoulder healed. Previously encouraged by Edward Bayard to distrust “scientific quacks,” she refused to be intimidated by masculine medical authority. With Elizabeth’s home remedies
the children survived malaria, whooping cough, mumps, and broken limbs, but she always worried. The only times she asked Henry to come home were when a child was sick.
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Her remedies were famous in the neighborhood, and she was frequently called upon to serve as nurse or midwife. Henry’s health improved with his political prospects; he was ill only following defeats.

With the exception of the difficulties of her last pregnancy and slow recovery in 1859, Mrs. Stanton enjoyed robust good health. Photographs from this period show her plump and vivacious, if sometimes a little haggard. One neighbor described her as “a handsome woman, with a most attractive face, winning smile and cordial manner, which instinctively won confidence.” She enjoyed cooking and eating. Exercise included chasing the boys, cleaning, walking two miles before breakfast, and horseback riding. As she humorously reported to Libby Miller in 1853, she was thriving and would probably

remain here to suffer and struggle for about half a century longer—barring accidents and God being willing. That is to say, it appears that my machinery is capable of running a long time. Of course, I may burst my boiler screaming to boys to come out of the cherry trees and to stop throwing stones, or explode from accumulated steam of a moral kind that I dare not let off, or be hung for breaking the pate of some stupid Hibernian for burning my meat or pudding on some company occasion. My babies, the boys and the Irish girls, as well as the generally unsettled condition of the moral, religious and political world, are enough to fret the pieces of the best constructed machinery.
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All of her relatives lived a long time, so Stanton’s expectations of longevity were realistic.

Removal of the two older troublemakers and the addition of a housekeeper created temporary tranquillity at 32 Washington Street in 1852. Amelia Willard had joined their household in August 1851. A Quaker from Michigan, unrelated to Emma Willard, she stayed for thirty years. As Theodore Stanton would recall as an adult, Willard was his mother’s “maid, cook, nurse, serving woman, housekeeper, and confidante.” Stanton appreciated her good fortune, concluding in her autobiography, “But for this noble, self-sacrificing woman, much of my public work would have been quite impossible.” Stanton described their peaceful domestic routine to her absent sons: “The boys are upstairs in bed and asleep. I sit in the dining room alone; Father has gone down to town to get the mail; and Amelia is in the kitchen mixing bread.”
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As a middle-class matron, Stanton had the resources to find solutions to her domestic problems. When necessary, Amelia was aided by servant girls recruited from Seneca Falls’ immigrant Irish. Mrs. Stanton invariably found
them inadequate, untrained, and unreliable. When worse came to worst, another boy was sent to boarding school or she escaped to Johnstown to be pampered by her parents. On several occasions during the 1850s, usually when one or more of the children were seriously ill, she boarded up the house and went to the Cadys for four to eight weeks at a time.
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Unable to afford the luxuries of her youth on Henry’s income, Elizabeth accepted her mother’s hospitality and the ministrations of family servants. While Stanton frequently disdained “ladies of fashion in bare-shouldered ballgowns,” she enjoyed upper-class comforts. She liked to be taken care of. She had learned from her mother and Mrs. Mott to be good to herself. She liked to eat, rest, and dress well. She did not always have enough money for luxuries; she spent the resources she had first on servants, books, clothes, and lessons for the children, considering them necessities.

Mrs. Stanton’s adoption of the bloomer costume in early 1851 was another attempt to make housekeeping easier and safer, as well as to protest “woman’s clothes prison.” The outfit consisted of long pants worn under a knee-length full skirt. It was created by Stanton’s cousin, Libby Smith Miller, who arrived in Seneca Falls wearing “the shorts” in the winter of 1851. Mrs. Stanton, eight months pregnant with Theodore, immediately adopted an unsashed version of the outfit. She loved its practicality. It allowed her to climb stairs with her hands free to carry both a baby and a candle. Still enthusiastic two years later, she wrote its designer: “This dress makes it easier to do all these things—running from cradle to writing desk, from kitchen to drawing room, singing lullabies at one moment in the nursery and dear old Tom Moore’s ditties the next moment on the piano stool. If I had long skirts, how could I accomplish all this?”
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Soon her housekeeper, neighbors, and friends were wearing the outfit. It was called the “Turkish dress” until Amelia Bloomer published a sketch of it in the
Lily
in June 1852. She was besieged with requests for its pattern, which she printed in her newspaper. Circulation soared, and the outfit came to be known as the “bloomers.”

Typically, Mrs. Stanton moved quickly from accepting the practicality of the short dress to advocating dress reform as a tenet in her feminist philosophy. She made the connection between the freedom of movement allowed by the bloomers and the movement to free women from other traditional constraints. She argued that custom had designed women’s clothes to appeal to male passion rather than female necessity. Dependent on men for social status and financial support, women needed to be attractive and ornamental. Wearing five yards of skirt, plus hoops, petticoats, and corsets pleased men but kept women from moving easily, breathing comfortably, or engaging in healthy exercise. “Every vital organ is somewhat displaced by whale bone corsets,” Stanton complained, and stopped wearing hers.
Hems dragged in muddy streets promoted disease and increased the time required to care for one’s wardrobe. Because it was less time consuming, Stanton also favored short hair, although she was vain enough to insist on curls for herself. By adopting the bloomer style and advertising its convenience, Stanton hoped to set an example that would be widely copied. She urged that the outfit be made of “the richest materials, not gaudy, but . . . tasteful.” She even had a short white ballgown made for dancing in Albany.
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The outfit suffered from design flaws, however. It was poorly proportioned and difficult to sit in, showing more pant leg than was considered proper. Its seeming immodesty undermined its popular appeal. Even Libby Miller found it awkward and uncouth. Stanton reported that her dress was “subject to the severest animadversions.” Her father refused at first to invite her to Johnstown, and her sons begged her not to visit them at school “in costume.” Henry did not oppose her wearing the bloomers, but he teased her about exposing her limbs to public scrutiny. He did not flinch when she wore the long pants throughout the special election campaign. Indeed, her costume became an election issue. “Some good Democrats said they would not vote for a man whose wife wore the Bloomers,” Stanton reported to Libby Miller. Street urchins threw stones and “hissed and sung and screamed ‘Breeches!’”
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Such opposition at first made Mrs. Stanton more stubborn, but she was surprised by its persistence. “How long will the heathen rage?” she wondered to Libby Miller. She worried that the controversy over dress would distract the public from other demands on behalf of women’s rights, but she did not think the dress reformers could retreat. “Had I counted the cost of the short dress,” she confessed, “I would never have put it on; however, I’ll never take it off for now it involves a principle of freedom.” Three months later she was drawing a parallel between the dilemma of the dress reformers and Aesop’s fox, who, having cut off his tail, then tried to convince the other foxes to do likewise. “We can have no peace . . . until we cut off the great national petticoat.” After two years of incessant ridicule, Mrs. Stanton stopped wearing the bloomers in public and urged other converts to “put down their hems” as well. Stanton continued to wear the short dress at home and to promote dress reform in public, but less urgently. Mrs. Miller wore a more graceful, ankle-length version of the dress for seven years; Mrs. Bloomer wore hers for eight. As Stanton concluded, “Such is the tyranny of custom, that to escape constant observation, criticism, ridicule, persecution, [and] mobs, one after another went back to the old slavery and sacrificed freedom to repose.”
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton was wearing bloomers on the day she was introduced to Susan B. Anthony, one spring evening in March 1851. En route
to a temperance meeting, Miss Anthony was in Seneca Falls as the house guest of Amelia Bloomer. Although Mrs. Stanton typically confused the date, she vividly recalled the event.

How well I remember the day! George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison having announced an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls, Miss Anthony came to attend it. These gentlemen were my guests. Walking home after the adjournment, we met Mrs. Bloomer and Miss Anthony, on the corner of the street, waiting to greet us. There she stood, with her good earnest face and genial smile, dressed in gray delaine, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why I did not at once invite her home with me to dinner I do not know. She accuses me of that neglect, and has never forgiven me.
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So began a friendship that endured for fifty years.

Susan Anthony had heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton before they met. Her parents and sister Mary had attended the Rochester women’s rights meeting in August 1848, at which Mrs. Stanton had read the Declaration of Sentiments. Like many other female reformers, Anthony was initially more interested in temperance and abolition, yet her curiosity about women’s rights had been aroused.

The descendant of a long line of Quakers, Susan Brownell Anthony was not unfamiliar with the tenets of female equality. Her father, Daniel Anthony, a cotton mill owner in Adams, Massachusetts, had married out of meeting but raised his children as Hicksite Quakers. Born February 15, 1820, Susan was the second of eight children. Surviving near bankruptcy following the panic of 1837, the Anthony family resorted to farming in upstate New York. An uncle had taken control of Mrs. Anthony’s property to protect it from her husband’s creditors. To supplement their income, Susan Anthony became a teacher, earning one-fourth of what male teachers were paid. In 1849 she resigned as head of the female department of the Canajoharie Academy. When her father succeeded in the insurance business, Anthony took over management of the family farm near Rochester and joined several local reform groups.
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Such experiences prepared her for a career as a feminist advocate, but until she met Stanton, Anthony had had no direction or inspiration.

Stanton saw in Anthony a bright, energetic, available recruit. Unmarried and unattractive, on account of a bad eye, Anthony had fewer domestic duties to keep her from public activity.
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Stanton promptly enlisted Anthony and began to impose on her.