In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (16 page)

Oh, Susan! Susan! Susan! You must manage to spend a week with me before the Rochester [Woman’s State Temperance] Convention, for I am afraid I cannot attend it; I have so much care with all these boys on my hands. But I will write a letter. How much I do long to be free from
housekeeping and children, so as to have some time to read and think and write. But it may be well for me to understand all the trials of woman’s lot, that I may more eloquently proclaim them when the time comes.
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Anthony came, and the alliance was sealed.

The Stanton-Anthony affiliation was mutually beneficial. In the beginning Stanton provided the ideas, rhetoric, and strategy; Anthony delivered the speeches, circulated petitions, and rented the halls. Anthony prodded and Stanton produced. Each woman sustained the other. Assuming the role of older mentor, Stanton advised Anthony on how to improve her public speaking and how to handle hecklers (“be good natured and remain cool.”)
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When Stanton was overwhelmed with public and private demands, Anthony installed herself in Seneca Falls, supervised the children, and “stirred the puddings” while Stanton wrote without interruption at the dining room table. One of the children’s earliest recollections was “the tableau of Mother and Susan seated by a large table covered with books and papers, always talking about the Constitution.” According to Henry Stanton, Susan stirred the puddings, Elizabeth stirred up Susan, and then Susan “stirs up the world!” Or as Mrs. Stanton put it, “I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them.”
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Stanton could admit to Anthony her frustration at not being more active. Ironically, it was Anthony’s demands for more speeches and tracts that increased the pressure on Stanton to expand her public role, and it was Anthony’s freedom to travel that intensified Stanton’s discontent with staying at home. Stanton was dependent on Anthony as her primary liaison with women’s rights activity; Anthony was dependent on Stanton for ideas and philosophic substance. At the same time, Anthony was an outlet for the discontent she helped to engender in Stanton.

Like many female friends in nineteenth-century America, the two women developed a deep affection for one another. Stanton suffered “the rough angles of disappointment” when Anthony was long absent. “I long to see you Susan,” Stanton confessed in 1853. “If I had you with me about once a week to rouse my self esteem it would be most beneficial.” The feeling was mutual. When Anthony was depressed by their lack of success or public prejudice or her spinster state, she appealed to Stanton. “How I do long to be with you this very minute—to have one look into your very soul and one sound of your soul-stirring voice.” Such florid rhetoric and romantic prose were typical of letters between women in the nineteenth century.
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Female friendships were important to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Raised among sisters who had been close companions but were now separated by physical distance or political difference, Stanton created a sisterhood of friends among female reformers. Her extended group of friends included
Martha Wright; Abby Kelley Foster; Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a minor New York literary figure; and Mary Grove Nichols, author of
Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology
(1842), who effused, “I like you vastly.”
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They encouraged each other in the work they had undertaken and exchanged candid, confidential letters. Stanton’s most important friends—Elizabeth Smith Miller, Lucretia Mott, and Susan Anthony—became an alternate source of approval and affection for her, eventually replacing Henry in the same way that he had supplanted her father and Edward Bayard. Female friendship in the nineteenth century provided these women with an enhanced sense of self, based on the supportive bonds of sisterhood.

Stanton’s best friend was her oldest friend and cousin, Gerrit Smith’s only daughter, Elizabeth Smith Miller. The two women still called each other “Julius” (Miller) and “Johnson” (Stanton) in their letters. Despite occasional disagreements between themselves or their male relatives, they confided troubles and shared triumphs. Seven years younger than her Cady cousin, Elizabeth Smith was equally high spirited. She had also been well educated at home, at a manual labor school, and at a Friends’ school in Philadelphia. Shortly after her twentieth birthday in 1842, she married Charles Dudley Miller of Utica. Her husband gave up his New York City law practice to manage the Smith family affairs. The couple lived first at Peterboro, in Washington during her father’s congressional term, and later in Geneva, New York, where they built a mansion in 1869. The Millers had four children—three sons and a daughter. Best known for her advocacy of dress reform, Elizabeth Smith Miller was an ardent supporter of women’s rights. She and her husband signed the call for the 1850 Worcester convention and for sixty years supported the cause financially. Her philanthropy also included black schools and indigent women. In 1875 Mrs. Miller published a cookbook and housekeeping manual,
In the Kitchen
.
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Stanton gave it as a gift to all new brides, including her daughters. It was to Miller that Stanton turned for advice about servants, children, and bonnets, for financial support of pet projects, and for feminist encouragement.
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With Miller, Stanton was at her most candid and self-critical.

Stanton’s relationship with Lucretia Mott was different from her friendships with Anthony and Miller. With them she was usually the dominant party and never less than equal. She saw them often and confided in them without hesitation. With Mrs. Mott, however, Stanton was deferential. She was the novitiate, Mott the mother superior. Admiration rather than intimacy characterized their relationship. Mott was the acknowledged leader of the new women’s movement and regarded among all reformers as an equal to the male leaders of the abolition societies. She was older, wiser, and universally respected. She and Stanton had few opportunities to see each other. Sometimes during Mott’s summer pilgrimages to Martha
Wright’s home there would be one visit. In 1853 Mrs. Mott went to Seneca Falls to inspect baby Margaret.
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They corresponded regularly but less often than each wrote to others. Mott more than anyone else might reproach Elizabeth or criticize Henry. Stanton did not always accept Mott’s counsel or criticism, but she never disagreed with it in public. Whenever she needed to legitimize an action, she sought the older woman’s approval.

Mott remained Stanton’s inspiration throughout this period. First, Mott had encouraged Stanton’s religious inquiry and feminist independence in London in 1840. Then she had urged Stanton to be more active in reform and had cooperated in the Seneca Falls initiative in 1848. Throughout the 1850s Mott repeated invitations to Stanton to attend and preside at the women’s rights conventions. When Stanton could not free herself from domestic bonds, Mott approved the small steps she did undertake and praised her writing on behalf of the cause. In Mott, Stanton found a model for intellectual independence, religious skepticism, tart rhetoric, untraditional childbirths, self-nurture, and female friendship.
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The arrival of Susan B. Anthony stirred Mrs. Stanton to increased public activity. Soon after being introduced, they met with Lucy Stone to discuss plans for a progressive women’s college.
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The next year the two attended the Woman’s State Temperance Society meeting in Rochester. Having been turned out of a Sons of Temperance meeting earlier in 1852 for attempting to speak, Anthony organized a women’s session. Stanton wrote the keynote address, and Anthony persuaded her to deliver it herself. It was her first public speech since 1848. She was four months pregnant with her fifth child and wearing bloomers. She left the children home with Amelia.

Stanton’s statement indicated advances in her thinking about marriage. She urged that drunkenness be made grounds for divorce. Her underlying theme was that women must be allowed to control their own lives and bodies. “Let no woman remain in the relation of wife with the confirmed drunkard,” she declared. “Let no drunkard be the father of her children.” She concluded with an attack on churches, demanding that funds used to educate young male ministers or to convert the heathen or to build “gorgeous temples” be directed to care for the hungry at home and “for young men and women thrown alone upon the world.”
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Following her 1852 address, the Woman’s State Temperance Society elected Elizabeth Cady Stanton president and Susan Anthony secretary. This was the first example of a pattern of officeholding that became standard for them, with Mrs. Stanton at the podium and Miss Anthony in the executive role behind the scenes. It was also Stanton’s first leadership position. Because of her attack on domestic and clerical patriarchy, the group was ruthlessly criticized. The
Troy Journal
, for example, was aghast that the women had dared to convene themselves without a man present.
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Stanton transformed the temperance society into a forum for feminism. The two causes were closely linked and would be until after the passage of suffrage and the repeal of prohibition in the twentieth century.
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The physical abuse and financial insecurity suffered by wives at the hands of drunken husbands were raised as vivid examples of why women needed access to legal protections. Interest in temperance increased in New York after a law strictly licensing liquor outlets was revoked in 1850. Active temperance societies not only preached abstinence, they also lobbied for legislation enforcing prohibition, dry districts, Sunday closings, and individual property rights for wives, so that women could earn and keep incomes separate from wastrel husbands.

Because excessive drinking was at that time a male problem with sobering consequences for women, temperance societies were much more popular than women’s rights groups. For several years in the early 1850s Stanton used a temperance journal and a temperance society as vehicles for espousing women’s rights. She attended temperance rather than women’s rights meetings, because they were convenient to her, advanced her interest in converting advocates from one cause to another, and compatible with Anthony’s interests. The connection between Anthony and temperance would reassert itself in the future of the women’s movement.

State temperance leaders were not pleased with Mrs. Stanton’s belligerence. At the next statewide meeting, in 1853, the men packed the house with conservative women. The majority then amended the society’s constitution to allow men to be officers of the female society, to rename it the People’s League, and to limit its activities. They defeated Mrs. Stanton’s bid for reelection but allowed her to stand for vice-president. She refused, and Miss Anthony resigned as secretary. Because she had more genuine temperance ties than Stanton, Anthony was “plunged in grief.” In contrast, Stanton was relieved. “I accomplished at Rochester all I desired by having the divorce question brought up and so eloquently supported. Now, Susan, I do beg of you to let the past be past, and to waste no powder on the Woman’s State Temperance Society. We have other and bigger fish to fry.”
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In the meantime Stanton had reiterated her feminist views in a letter to the Third National Women’s Rights Convention, in September 1852. Although the meeting took place in nearby Syracuse, Mrs. Stanton, pregnant again, sent a letter to be read by Anthony. Stanton’s statement was vigorous. The author of the Seneca Falls suffrage resolution declared that the franchise was only a first step in an ongoing revolution toward full social equality. She proposed that women property owners refuse to pay taxes as long as they could not vote, that women seek coeducational opportunities for their children and themselves, and that the clergy be recognized as
women’s “most violent enemies—those most opposed to any change in woman’s position.” Stanton concluded that women should direct their attention to “the education, elevation and enfranchisement of their own sex.”
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One month after Anthony delivered Stanton’s speech, Stanton delivered her fifth child and first daughter. The baby was born on October 20, 1852. Stanton was jubilant. Triumphantly she flew a white flag. She exulted to Lucretia Mott: “I am at length the happy mother of a daughter. Rejoice with me all Womanhood, for lo! a champion of the cause is born. I have dedicated her to this work from the beginning. May she . . . leave her impress on the world for goodness and truth.” To Libby Miller she bragged about the ease of her delivery.

The fact of my having a daughter you already know but the particulars I must give you. Well, on Tuesday night I walked nearly three miles, shopped and made five calls—then I came home, slept well all night, and on Wednesday morning at six I awoke with a little pain which I well understood. I jumped up, bathed and dressed myself, hurried the breakfast, eating none myself of course, got the house and all things in order working bravely between the pains. I neither sat down nor laid down until half past nine when I gave up all my vocations and avocations secular and domestic and devoted myself wholly to the one matter then brought more especially before my mind. At ten o’clock the whole work was completed, the nurse and Amelia alone officiating. I had no doctor and Henry was in Syracuse. I laid down about fifteen minutes and never had so speedy and easy a time before, although this is the largest child I ever had, weighing 12 pounds clothes on. She is very large and plump and her head is covered with black curly hair and how I do rejoice in her.

She continued:

When the baby was 24 hours old I got up, bathed and dressed, sponge bath and sitz bath, put on a wet bandage, ate my breakfast, walked on the piazza, and then the day being beautiful I took a ride of three miles on the plank road, then I came home, rested an hour or so and then read the newspapers and wrote a long letter to Mama. . . . The short dress I wore until the last. It is grand for such an occasion and I love it more than ever.
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