In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (35 page)

In compensation for these hardships, Mrs. Stanton had the satisfaction of being self-supporting and self-reliant—and admired. She was doing what she wanted to do and was proud of herself for doing it well. She considered herself a “pine knot . . . no standard for ordinary women.” Furthermore, she had become a celebrity. “You would laugh to see how everywhere the girls flock around me for a kiss, a curl, an autograph,” she wrote to her daughter.
⁵²

Mrs. Stanton was skilled at pleasing crowds. Her platform style was engaging, her voice was low and soothing, her manner was gracious and feminine. One observer recalled that she was a “powerful, uplifting” speaker, whose natural wit made her audiences laugh. Despite the gravity of her subject matter, the San Francisco
Chronicle
found Mrs. Stanton simply “jolly.” Another onlooker described her as “plump as a partridge.” With her rosy complexion, “unstuffy” white hair, and generous figure, “she would anywhere be taken for the mother of a governor or a president,” wrote one male admirer. Stanton’s appearance began to be compared to that of Queen Victoria or George Washington’s mother. She was perceived as maternal, dignified, and eminently respectable.
⁵³

Stanton was what she appeared to be. She was a gracious, good-humored, charming mother of seven. She was also a radical feminist. She shrewdly exploited her maternal identification to legitimize and camouflage her revolutionary vocation. On trains she offered to help with crying infants and dispensed advice on baby care and hygiene in any setting.
⁵⁴
Her most popular lectures were those on marriage and children, in which she advanced from advice on household management and baby care to a discussion of divorce reform, property rights, or birth control.

Mrs. Stanton constantly revised and updated her repertoire of lectures. In addition to her basic suffrage speech she was prepared to speak on a dozen subjects: “The Subjection of Women,” “Home Life,” “The True Republic,” “Coeducation,” “Marriage and Divorce,” “Marriage and Maternity,” “Our Girls,” “Our Boys,” “Prison Life,” “Thurlow Weed, William Seward, and Horace Greeley,” and for Sundays, “Famous Women in the Bible” and “The Bible and Women’s Rights.” Every time Mrs. Stanton gave her address on “Marriage and Divorce,” she came away “a reservoir of sorrows.” Her audience would “flock” to her to tell her about their unhappy marriages. “Slavery is nothing to those unclean marriages,” Stanton sighed, as she continued to expand on the theme that had held her attention since the 1850s.
⁵⁵

Stanton felt a special empathy for Western women. “The isolation of the lives out here strikes me most,” she wrote to Libby Miller. “Living month after month and year after year on a boundless prairie, miles from any living soul! The women suffer most.” Whenever possible, she praised the contribution of women pioneers. Attending a railroad dedication in Nebraska, she insisted that the speakers include women settlers in their praise. “Man’s trials, his fears and losses, all fell on woman with double force; yet history is silent concerning the part women performed in the frontier life of the early settlers.”
⁵⁶

Stanton’s most vehement statement of women’s rights, “The Antagonism of Sex,” was a speech she saved for special occasions, when she was feeling particularly outraged. She sought to contradict the “twaddle about the essential oneness of man and woman—a oneness that makes a woman a slave.” In her view it was nearly impossible for woman to evolve into a higher, more independent being when she was confined from “cradle to grave” by “dwarfing, crippling influences,” such as man-made customs and the “spiritual bondage” of the church. “And then some men are astonished,” she concluded, “that there is a ‘shrieking sisterhood’ [of feminists].” As Stanton confessed to Martha Wright, sometimes her anger at men was

enough to rouse one’s blood to the white heat of rebellion against every “white male” on the continent. When I think of all the wrongs that have been heaped upon womankind, I am ashamed that I am not forever in a condition of chronic wrath, stark mad, skin and bone, my eyes a fountain of tears, my lips overflowing with curses, and my hand against every man and his brother. Oh! How I do repent me of the male faces I have washed, the mittens I have knit, the pants mended, the cut fingers and broken toes
I have bound up, and then to multiply my labors for these white male popinjays by 10,000 more, and then to think of these lords and lackeys strutting. . . . oh! dear oh! dear it is too much!
⁵⁷

Usually Mrs. Stanton held her anger in check.

Stanton’s most famous address was “Our Girls.” In it she urged the next generation of women to prepare themselves for independence and self-fulfillment. “You may never be wives, mothers, or housekeepers, but you will be women,” she advised her audience. “Therefore labor for the grander and more universal fact of your existence,” meaning their individual identity. But she also warned them, “When men see a woman with brains and two hands in practical life, capable of standing alone, earning her own bread and thinking her own thoughts, conscious of the true dignity and glory of womanhood, they call her unsexed.” So popular was “Our Girls” that Stanton’s daughter claimed that her mother had earned thirty thousand dollars from that speech alone.
⁵⁸
Stanton worked hard to improve its companion piece, “Our Boys,” but it never had the same impact.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the women’s movement’s major thinker during this period. Yet other than
The Woman’s Bible
, published in 1895, she left no treatise summarizing her ideology. Only in her political speeches, lyceum lectures, newspaper editorials, and random articles did she articulate, reiterate, and expand on her theme of female autonomy. Because of the haste with which she wrote and the number of speeches she gave, they are full of repetitions and contradictions. But she always insisted that women must stand on their own before they could choose whether or not they wished to be allied with men. “In all the essential relations of life,” Stanton repeated again and again, women were alone and should learn to take care of themselves. As Stanton had challenged herself to undertake the rigors of the lyceum circuit, so must other women challenge themselves to reach their limits and achieve self-reliance.

Only occasionally did Elizabeth Cady Stanton interrupt her lecture schedule to appear at conventions of the National Association. Of the fifteen meetings held during the period 1870 to 1879, she presided at four and attended one other. Otherwise her involvement was negligible. That left Anthony in control of the National. Since the eventful Woodhull takeover meeting, Anthony had served as president. With Woodhull in retreat, Hooker in retirement, and Stanton out of town, Anthony became dominant. She thrived on the organizational details and earned the loyalty of the younger members.

Stanton had come away from her last Washington convention in 1872 “nauseated” by meetings. As she exploded to Martha Wright:

Two days full of speaking and resolving and dreading lest some one should make fools of us all, rehearsing the same old arguments in the same old way, must this be endured to the end of our heresy? I endured untold crucifixion at Washington. I suppose as I sat there I looked patient and submissive, but I could have boxed that Mary Walker’s ears with a vengeance. Now this is for your ears only, don’t read it to [your husband] or write it to [Lucretia], for as I usually preserve the exterior of a saint there is no use of everybody knowing how like a fallen angel I often feel.
⁵⁹

Her frustration at such conventions confirmed her decision to abandon them.

In the aftermath of the Beecher-Tilton scandal, Anthony had decided that the suffragists needed to improve their reputation. She believed that the nation’s Centennial in 1876 provided an opportunity to present women’s rights in a patriotic setting. What was needed was a new Declaration of Women’s Rights. To prepare one Anthony needed Stanton’s cooperation. In order to assure it, Anthony dispatched Matilda Joslyn Gage, vicepresident of the National and an author, to woo Stanton to Philadelphia.
⁶⁰
Acting as Anthony’s emissary, Gage entreated Stanton to come.

Stanton was not enthusiastic about Anthony’s plan. Although still robust at age sixty-one, she offered her health and age as excuses, urging that younger women take over. Stanton may well have recognized that none of the others had the ability to produce the needed document, or Anthony would not have asked her. The opportunity to share such a historic occasion with Lucretia Mott finally moved her to accept, but she delayed her arrival in Philadelphia until late June. By then, Anthony admitted to her diary, she was “glad enough to see her and feel [her] strength come in.” Six weeks earlier Anthony had paid off “the last dollar” of the
Revolution
debt.
⁶¹

The highlight of the Centennial was an international exhibit in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. It was opened in May by a beleaguered President Grant, with an ode, a march, a prayer, and a hymn commissioned for the occasion. At the conclusion of the ceremonies, the president pulled a switch to activate an enormous Corliss steam engine, the sole source of power for the eight thousand machines in the main exhibit. Almost everything made in the United States was on display, from safety pins to caskets to false teeth, from the unfinished Statue of Liberty to the newly invented telephone.

Legions of women organized by Mrs. E. D. Gillespie formed the Women’s Centennial Committee. By selling stock at local bazaars and concerts, the women had raised the money to pay for the exhibition. In return for their efforts, they were promised a display area in the Main Building. But shortly before the opening they were told there was no room for them. To everyone’s amazement, the women then raised enough additional cash to
erect a separate, ornate Women’s Building. It featured its own steam engine, driving machines operated by skilled women. One of the machines printed a women’s rights newspaper.
⁶²

The Centennial headquarters of the National Woman Suffrage Association was outside the Centennial Park, on Chestnut Street. Every day Mrs. Mott rode in from the country with a picnic lunch to be eaten while the women assembled to lay their plans. Earlier in the summer the National had sent memorials to the Democratic and Republican conventions, urging them to grant woman suffrage during the centennial year. Working with Mrs. Gage, Stanton produced the new declaration. Perhaps because it was a joint effort or because Stanton lacked interest, the document was not up to her standard for either ideas or rhetoric.
⁶³

Nonetheless, Anthony intended to interrupt the Fourth of July ceremonies to present it. When her request for a part in the program and fifty seats on the platform was turned down, she decided to crash the event anyway. Armed with five press passes from her brother’s Kansas newspaper, Anthony and four other women marched into Independence Hall as the band played. The women advanced on the startled chairman and presented him with a parchment copy of their Declaration. Then they filed rapidly out of the hall, distributing copies as they went. Once outside, Anthony mounted a bandstand and read the Declaration to unsuspecting onlookers. She was shielded from the hot sun by Mrs. Gage’s open umbrella. Then the five women hurried back to report to a meeting organized by Mott and Stanton at the First Unitarian Church. Stanton claimed to have been so angry at the rebuff of the women by the officials of the Centennial that she refused to participate in Anthony’s gesture of protest. Stanton’s inability to move fast in hot weather and her pique at Anthony may also have been considerations. It was unlike Stanton to avoid the limelight.

Although the press was full of the escapade, Stanton was not satisfied that the strategy had been successful. The women had attracted ridicule as well as attention. They had reminded the nation of its historic commitment to equal rights, but they had accomplished nothing tangible for women’s rights. Stanton returned to Tenafly to recover from these activities and to think about what should be done. She refused to attend another meeting to commemorate another anniversary of Seneca Falls. Sending a letter in her place, a discouraged Stanton concluded, “As I sum up the indignities toward women, as illustrated by recent judicial decisions—denied the right to vote, denied the right to practice in the Supreme Court, denied jury trial—I feel the degradation of sex more bitterly than I did on that July 19, 1848.”
⁶⁴
Spurred by discontent, Stanton decided to attend the next convention and run again for president of the National.

With the loss of Anthony’s voting rights case and the Supreme Court
decision in
Minor
v.
Happersett
, Stanton recognized that the suffragists must abandon their new departure strategy. Congressional inaction and court rulings had undercut any possibility of interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment as a means of granting women the vote. The suffragists were forced to fall back on a federal amendment strategy. Because there was so little support for woman suffrage in the Congress, the women were doomed to a long-term, time-consuming, costly, difficult, frustrating task, and almost five more decades of defeat.

With the return of her usual optimism, Stanton regarded the primary focus on a federal suffrage amendment as opening a new era in the movement. She and Anthony attended the 1877 meeting of the National together. The association resolved to collect petition signatures favoring a federal amendment and turned the task over to Anthony. When they had gathered ten thousand signatures from twenty-six states, she presented them to the Senate. That body found them uproariously funny; one newspaper reported that “the entire Senate presented the appearance of a laughing school practicing sidesplitting.”
⁶⁵
The petitions were rescued from obscurity by the courtesy of Sen. Aaron Sargeant of California, whom Stanton and Anthony had first met in California in 1871. He subsequently introduced a woman suffrage amendment.