In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (31 page)

Where Henry Stanton stood is unclear. In his last years he returned to his early commitment to abolition and citizenship for the black man. He was offended by his wife’s rhetoric and tactics. But rather than indulge in a public break, he withdrew into the company of his older sons and political cronies in the city. He repeated the pattern of separation that had come to characterize their marriage.

Mrs. Stanton was increasingly isolated. Looking back at the postwar period, she recalled being besieged and then abandoned.

The few who insisted on the absolute right [to universal suffrage] stood firmly together under a steady fire of ridicule and reproach even from their lifelong friends most loved and honored. . . . With all these . . . friends against them . . . and most of the liberals in the press, the position of the women seemed so untenable to the majority that at times a sense of utter loneliness and desertion made the bravest of them doubt the possibility of maintaining the struggle or making themselves fairly understood. . . . Few were equal to the emergency.
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Yet Elizabeth Cady Stanton persisted.

By 1870 she had become emotionally self-sufficient. She lived apart from Henry in her own establishment in Tenafly. She entertained him as a guest and divided care for the children with him but was financially and socially independent of him. Now that her children were older, she was less involved with them. She had a full-time housekeeper and few qualms about leaving those children still at home. She no longer begged Anthony to visit,
write, or stir the puddings. She shared more of her life with Anthony than with anyone else, but she was less dependent on her for approval or encouragement than she had been earlier.

Stanton’s affectionate circle included Anthony, Mott, Miller, and the children. Her relationship with her mother and sisters had improved as well. Although she cherished this group, she was less careful of their feelings and ignored their criticism. She was willing to risk any outrageous public action or statement with impunity. She expected her female friends to support, understand, forgive, and sustain her, and on the whole they did.

In the public sphere she learned to deflect criticism. She either disdained it or turned it into an opportunity to repeat her point. When the
New York Times
charged that Mrs. Stanton was neglecting her family in order to publish the
Revolution
, she replied: “We know what not one woman in ten thousand does know, how to take care of a child, make good bread, and keep a home clean. . . . Our children . . . are healthy, rosy, happy, and well-fed. . . . Culinary abominations are never found on our table. Now let every man who wants his wife to know how to do likewise take the
Revolution
in which not only the ballot, but bread and babies will be discussed.”
⁶⁷
At the same time that she was moving out of her domestic sphere, Stanton began to use her maternal role to legitimize her public activities. She shrewdly chose to appear matronly, respectable, charming, and genial. Soon she would substitute public admiration for private affections. In the meantime she still cared about her family and friends. But most of all she cared for herself and her cause.

For Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1870 ended in anger and frustration. She had declared her feminist independence in the pages of the
Revolution
and in the organization of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Soon she found herself harassed by conservatives, embarrassed by radicals, and resented by Anthony. Her reaction was to turn her back on her troubles and forge ahead. As she declared to Anthony: “You know when I drop anything I drop it absolutely. You could not believe what a deep gulf lies between me and the past. My life since we left Kansas is to me like a long, sad dream; the experience may have its uses but I feel the chain that bound me to that incubus is broken.”
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Fed up with infighting and intrigue, Stanton wanted nothing more to do with organizations. The discord of the past five years confirmed her decision to abandon conventions. After a trial tour in 1869, she spent the next decade as a paid lecturer. Her subject was always women’s rights. She chose as her role models the abolition agents and evangelical preachers of her youth. Convinced that political action would follow public pressure, she set out to convert the country to her cause.

As much as possible, Stanton cut her ties with the past. After the
Revolution
was sold in May 1870, she refused to contribute articles to its successor. When acting editor Theodore Tilton asked her to be “spicey and brilliant on some pleasant topics,” she would not “submit my ideas to the pruning knife of youngsters.” More serious, Stanton took no responsibility for the paper’s remaining debt of ten thousand dollars. She claimed that neither she nor Parker Pillsbury, the coeditor, had the resources to pay it off because they were married and had dependents. Ironically the obligation
was legally Anthony’s, who as the unmarried partner had agreed to sign all the contracts. Stanton had the audacity to suggest that Anthony get a job or borrow from her family to meet the obligation.
²
Such unconscionable behavior is difficult to explain. Stanton had the resources to pay her share of the debt, but during this period she was feeling insecure and selfish about what money she did have. It took Anthony six years to pay it off.

Within a year of its organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association had been thwarted by elements eager to merge with the American. The National’s name had been changed to the Union Association, and Stanton had stepped aside as president to make way for a man. She found the situation “most humiliating.” She did not want reunion, but she did not want to appear to thwart it. She participated in the negotiations because she wanted to embarrass and isolate Lucy Stone. For a while she relished the fight, writing to Martha Wright: “We have had grand times in getting the National and the Equal Rights both merged with the Union movement. Boston is
awful
sore. . . . Unless Boston comes into Union she will stand alone in the cold. . . . Lucy is as hostile as ever [and] cannot be mollified.”
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In the end the merger negotiations only exacerbated the bad feelings on both sides.

The continued existence of the American Association and the influence of the
Woman’s Journal
galled Stanton. Further, the weight of conservative women within her own association alarmed her. At the January 1870 meeting of the National, a newcomer named Isabella Beecher Hooker had presented their position. With aggressive self-assertion she had urged alternatives to Stanton’s radicalism. Where Stanton desired revolution, Hooker sought respectability. Unfazed by Stanton’s opposition, Hooker volunteered to organize and underwrite the 1871 Washington convention. She planned to subordinate all extraneous issues to a decorous discussion of suffrage. Although annoyed, Stanton agreed. “She thinks she could manage the cause more discreetly, more genteely than we do, so let her take hold and try the drudgery,” Stanton explained to a colleague. “I am ready to rest.”
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Stanton found Mrs. Hooker’s self-confidence, so like her own, an unbearable Beecher family trait. Isabella Beecher Hooker was the youngest and prettiest daughter of Lyman Beecher. Her father had been head of Lane Seminary when Henry Stanton and Theodore Weld had led the student protest. Henry Ward Beecher, the minister and president of the American Woman Suffrage Association, was her half-brother; Catharine Beecher, the home economics expert and educator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous author, were her half-sisters. After attending various schools established by members of her family, Isabella married John Hooker, a Hartford
attorney, and bore four children. Their home at Nook Farm became the center of a close-knit literary and social colony, which later included Mark Twain and Mrs. Stowe.

Although exposed to the currents of feminism, Mrs. Hooker had resisted them “out of distaste for the notoriety of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.” Yet by the end of the Civil War she had converted to women’s rights. She organized the Connecticut Suffrage Association, lobbied for a married women’s property bill drafted by her husband, and helped found Stone’s New England Woman’s Suffrage Association.
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Why she sided with Stanton and Anthony rather than Stone in the 1869 schism remains an unanswered question. It may be that she preferred to be the only Beecher in the National rather than the youngest of the clan loyal to the American.

Throughout most of 1870 Mrs. Stanton kept her distance from these developments. After closing the offices of the
Revolution
, she spent the summer of 1870 in Tenafly, preparing for an autumn lecture tour. “I am very busy reading and writing my speeches,” she reported to Anthony.
⁶
She visited her mother, gave a commencement address, and watched the merger negotiations from the sidelines. After the Fifth Avenue Conference, the effort to unite the suffrage groups, collapsed in August, Stanton left for a six-week foray into the Midwest, confident that no merger would weaken the National.

Before long, Stanton’s equanimity was shaken by Hooker’s suggestion that she not attend the upcoming January 1871 meeting. She had not planned to attend, but she was insulted when asked to stay away. Stanton poured out her anger in a letter to Martha Wright.

I expressed a perfect willingness to leave the whole matter in her hands and contribute, if need be, to the expenses of the convention, but was not prepared for just such a slap in the face. . . . If Anthony wishes to thrust herself everywhere, she may, but she shall not push me, any longer. We have made the thing popular, and now let Mrs. Hooker run the machine if she chooses, but she will not run me. So long as people pay me $75 and $100 every night, to speak on my own hook, there is no need of my talking in conventions where my presence is not desired. I think her letter quite blunt and egotistic and somehow it hurts my self-respect.

To Mrs. Hooker, Stanton coolly responded that she thought the convention would be a success “as all previous ones had been.” Three days later she was still angry. “I did not express in
words
the
contempt
I felt at her cool impudence, but somehow
the spirit ran off the end of my pen
,” she declared to Mrs. Wright. “The Beecher conceit surpasses all understanding.”
⁷

Stanton was offended by Mrs. Hooker and annoyed at herself. A few months earlier Stanton had tried to woo Hooker and win her admiration
and loyalty. At Hooker’s invitation, Stanton had attended a meeting of New England women in Rhode Island. As Stanton described the occasion:

Mrs. Hooker wrote each [of us] a letter of instructions re dress, manners, and general display of all the Christian graces. I did my best to obey orders, and appeared in a black velvet dress with real lace, and the most inoffensive speech I could produce; all those passages that would shock the most conservative were ruled out, while pathetic and aesthetic passages were substituted in their place. From what my friends said, I believe I succeeded in charming everyone but myself and Anthony who said it was the weakest speech I ever made. I told her that was what it was intended to be.

The charade had not convinced the conservative women, but it satisfied Mrs. Stanton. She had appeared gracious and genteel. Even Mrs. Hooker was charmed, praising Stanton as “the truest, womanliest woman of us all.”
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But she did not invite Stanton, past president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, to its 1871 meeting.

Stanton wanted Anthony to boycott the meeting, but her friend refused. Instead Anthony insisted that Stanton attend and urged Hooker to invite her. “To my mind there never was such a suicidal letting go as has been yours these last two years,” Anthony wrote Stanton. “How you can excuse yourself is more than I can understand.” But Stanton would not budge from Tenafly. As she confided to Martha Wright, she felt she was “between two fires all the time. Some are determined to throw me overboard, and [Anthony] is equally determined that I shall stand at the masthead, no matter how pitiless the storm.”
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For the rest of her life, even after she had been returned to the presidency of the National Association, Stanton would attend women’s rights conventions only reluctantly.

The 1871 women’s rights meeting was Mrs. Hooker’s production. She had organized it, paid for it, and in the absence of either Tilton or Stanton, she presided over it. But competition for control appeared from an unexpected quarter. Victoria Woodhull, the “Bewitching Broker of Wall Street” and former tent show charlatan, had launched an effort to take over the suffrage movement. On her own, Mrs. Woodhull had presented a suffrage petition to Congress in December 1870 and had been invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in January. Her hearing was scheduled for the opening day of the National Association convention. Mrs. Hooker grudgingly interrupted the proceedings to accompany Miss Anthony to hear Woodhull’s presentation. Both women were smitten by Woodhull’s beauty and intelligence. They immediately invited her to address their convention and join them on the platform.
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Before the committee and the convention Woodhull argued that there was no need for a woman suffrage amendment. She asserted that the Four-teenth
Amendment already gave women as citizens the right to vote. She urged suffragists to register, vote, go to court, and go to jail for that right. Woodhull was repeating an argument offered by Mrs. Stanton the year before in her testimony on behalf of female suffrage in the District of Columbia. Stanton and now Woodhull claimed that all citizens of the republic, whether male or female, had equal legal rights. Well delivered and well received, Woodhull’s cogent restatement of Stanton’s case came to be known among suffragists as the “new departure.” In reading the reports of the Washington meeting, Stanton naturally found Woodhull’s remarks persuasive and flattering. For the next few years Stanton and the National pursued this tack rather than a federal amendment strategy. “With this view our manner of agitation is radically changed,” Stanton concluded in a newspaper article.
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