In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (37 page)

After publishing
The Woman Question in Europe
(1883), Theodore became the Paris correspondent for
Harper’s, Appleton’s
, the Associated Press, and the
New York Tribune
. His mother tried to promote his career by bringing him to the attention of Joseph Pulitzer.
¹³
Theo was a member of the International Jury of the Paris Exhibition in 1889. Returning to the
United States in the 1890s to be near his mother, he became a lecturer in French history and politics at Hobart College in Geneva, New York. After his mother’s death he returned to Paris, where he served as a volunteer in the American Ambulance Hospital during World War I. He came home to America for the last time to work with his sister Harriot on publication of two volumes of his mother’s letters, diary, and autobiography. When he died in 1925, he was at Rutgers University preparing to open a library as a memorial to his mother.
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Stanton’s first daughter, Margaret Livingston Stanton Lawrence, became a professor of physical education at Columbia Teachers College. A large baby at birth, Maggie was a natural athlete whose skills were encouraged by her mother. After graduating from Vassar in 1876, Margaret planned to marry. To prepare her, Stanton put her in charge of the Tenafly household, advising her to:

Devote the month of May to reading the cook book and getting all the practical knowledge of the kitchen that you can. It will be a pleasant change from books. Learn a few simple things, such as how to make bread, tea, coffee, cake, and how to cook vegetables. See how washing, starching, ironing and everything of that kind is done. Master the sewing machine. Then you will know how to direct every sort of household work. Every man and woman should have these acquirements.

As a wedding gift, Stanton gave her daughter an inscribed copy of Libby Miller’s cookbook.
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Margaret married Frank E. Lawrence of Omaha, Nebraska, on October 2, 1878, under the “old familiar oaks” at Tenafly. The couple settled first in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and later moved to California.

Margaret had no children. She described herself as a “bright young woman,” with “no remarkable genius” but “some practical talent in the ordinary affairs of life.” She added that she had “sufficient aesthetic taste to dress well, decorate my house with fall leaves and golden rod, and supply my table with appetizing food.” After her husband died in 1890, Maggie moved to New York City and lived with her Aunt Tryphena while she studied “gyms.” On completion of her training she taught at Teachers College and lived with her mother and brother Bob. Although she considered herself “a lukewarm suffrage saint,” she organized an Elizabeth Cady Stanton Birthday Centennial in November 1915 in Seneca Falls and worked for suffrage in New York State.
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It was Stanton’s second daughter, Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, who inherited “the real spirit of the reformer,” according to her mother. Harriot became an active suffragist in both England and the United States and was an officer of the Women’s Political Union and the National Woman’s party. Even as a youngster she had shown feminist tendencies. When her father ordered her to come down from a high tree limb, Hattie remembered
replying, “Tell Bob—he’s three years younger and one branch higher!”
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After being educated in private preparatory schools, she graduated with honors from Vassar in 1878 and spent another year at the Boston School of Oratory.

Until her marriage in 1882 to an English businessman, William Henry Blatch, Harriot traveled in Europe, attended a French university, and worked with her mother. She returned to the United States after a twenty-year residence in England to enroll her daughter Nora at Cornell. After her husband went bankrupt and died in an automobile accident, Harriot stayed in America. She lobbied for suffrage and women’s rights in Washington and Albany. During World War I she headed the Food Administration Speakers Bureau and wrote a book,
Mobilizing Woman Power
. In 1926 she was a candidate for the United States Senate. Unable to get along with Carrie Chapman Catt, one of her mother’s successors as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Blatch joined the rival National Woman’s party. She took on the role of defender of her mother’s reputation, creating archives and preserving her memory. Five feet, five inches tall, with a crown of white hair, she resembled her mother and remained an active feminist until she died at age eighty-four in 1940.
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Stanton’s last child and youngest son, Robert Livingston Stanton, remained a bachelor and lived with his mother most of his life. Slightly crippled as a youngster, he nonetheless followed his older brothers to Cornell and Columbia Law School. The family skeptic, he never married, joking that experience had taught him that marriage was “an immoral custom.” He became assistant corporation counsel for the City of New York. At the time of his death from pneumonia in February 1920, his friends had been trying to get him appointed to his grandfather’s seat on the New York Supreme Court. Bob played the violin, chess, and whist; collected stamps; and shared his mother’s zest for games.
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The second entry in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s diary in November 1880 recorded the death of Lucretia Mott. Unable to attend the Quaker memorial in Philadelphia, Stanton spent the day thinking, reading, and writing about her mentor. “I have vowed again,” she wrote in her diary, “as I have so many times, that I shall in the future try to imitate her noble example.”
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Mott had provided Stanton with an example of a reformer, a feminist, an orator, an independent thinker, a wife, a mother, a matriarch, and a public figure. Mott’s mask of Quaker serenity and modesty, disguising a quick temper and tart tongue, taught Stanton to develop an attractive public manner. Mott’s enormous energy and concomitant instinct for self-preservation and pampering encouraged Stanton to follow a parallel pattern. Mott was an efficient housewife and a devoted mother; Stanton also aspired
to be both. Mott was courageous, outspoken, and independent; so was Stanton. As a result of modeling herself on her older mentor and of her own mature disposition, Stanton shared many of these characteristics, although she lacked Mott’s humility and pacific tendencies. Unable to match Mott in everything, Stanton in her old age became more tolerant of her own shortcomings and more self-confident in her own identity.

In order to honor Lucretia Mott, Stanton attended the next convention of the National Association in January 1881. A memorial to Mrs. Mott, the meeting was attended by the First Lady, Lucy Webb Hayes (known as “Lemonade Lucy” for her stand on temperance), members of the Supreme Court, and congressmen. A choir of ex-slaves provided the hymns. Stanton gave the eulogy. She recalled the impact that Mrs. Mott had had on her life. To her, Mott had been “like an added sun in the heavens, . . . a woman who had sufficient confidence in herself to frame and hold an opinion in the face of opposition, a woman who understood the deep significance of life, to whom I could talk freely,” remembered Stanton. “My longings were answered at last.”
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Stanton would never forget that Mott had led her to religious integrity and feminist independence.

When she was alive, Mrs. Mott had frequently urged that Stanton write a history of the women’s movement. Stanton undertook the work in earnest two weeks after Mott died. She had first conceived the project following the 1848 meeting and had returned to it in her frustration in the 1850s. Finally the events of the nation’s Centennial convinced Stanton that someone must document the accomplishments of American women. In 1876 Stanton signed partnership papers with Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage “for the purpose of preparing and editing a history of the woman suffrage movement.” Stanton and Gage agreed to “write, collect, select and arrange material” and Anthony agreed to “secure publication.” All three names would appear on the title page; all three women would share the copyright and divide the profits.
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Like Stanton and Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage was from upstate New York.
*
She was the well-educated daughter of a Cicero physician, the wife of a wealthy Fayetteville merchant, the fashionably dressed mother of four children. Active in women’s rights since the 1852 Syracuse meeting, she had been a charter member of the National Association and a contributor to the
Revolution
. Too soft-spoken to be an effective speaker, she was a skilled organizer and writer. She had tried to vote in 1872, served as president of the National in 1875, edited the
National Citizen and Ballot Box
, and headed the New York Association. Her work on the
History
was cut short by her husband’s death in 1884.
²³

In November 1880 the three women gathered in Tenafly to begin work. Mrs. Stanton had given up the lyceum and was delighted not to be “wandering on those western prairies.”
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Anthony’s mother had died the previous spring, so she was free to leave Rochester and move into her own room in Stanton’s house. Mrs. Gage still had family obligations but came for a month at a time when she could.

They began by collecting documents. They gathered personal reminiscences, biographical sketches, photographs, state reports, copies of speeches and resolutions, excerpts from the
Congressional Record
, newspaper clippings, and miscellany. They solicited source material from individuals and state organizations. Stanton and Anthony also combed their own files. At her father’s suggestion Anthony had kept clippings about the women’s movement since 1855, but they were scattered throughout her family’s Rochester home. In contrast to her well-ordered image, Miss Anthony, according to Stanton, “could never keep her papers in order. In search of any particular document, she roots out every drawer and pigeon hole.”
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Unlike Anthony, Stanton had saved few items other than copies of speeches. Every time she had moved, she had thrown things out. Now she had to rely on her memory, which all agreed was inaccurate.

Stanton was in her element and enjoyed the work immensely. Anthony, assigned to the drudgery of details and anxious about publication prospects, hated it. “I am just sick to death of it,” she complained to a younger friend within a month of starting. “I had rather wash or whitewash or do any possible hard work than sit here and go digging into dusty records of the past—that is, rather
make
history than write it.” Stanton’s children began to resent the
History
, too. As daughter Margaret admitted, “We all feel towards these volumes as a family of children would to some favorite adopted child, that filled their places in a mother’s heart.”
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With Mrs. Gage needed at home, Stanton and Anthony did most of the work. Much of it was the manual labor of making copies; they chose not to employ a stenographer. Margaret provided a picture of the two of them at work.

As our house faces the south the sunshine streams in all day. In the center of a large room, 20 by 22, with an immense bay window, hard wood floor and open fire, beside a substantial office desk with innumerable drawers and doors, filled with documents,—there
vis-a-vis
sit our historians, surrounded with manuscripts and letters. . . . In the center of their desk are two ink stands and two bottles of mucilage, to say nothing of diverse pens, pencils, scissors, knives, etc., etc. As these famous women
grow intense in working up some thrilling quotation, . . . I have seen them again and again dip their pens in the mucilage and their brushes in the ink. . . . It is as good as a comedy to watch these souls from day to day. They start off pretty well in the morning, fresh and amiable. They write page after page with alacrity, they laugh and talk, poke the fire by turn, and admire the flowers on their desk. . . . Everything is harmonious for a season, but after straining their eyes over the most illegible, disorderly manuscripts, . . . suddenly the whole sky is overspread with dark and threatening clouds, and from the adjoining room I hear a hot dispute about something. The dictionary, the encyclopedia,
The Woman’s Journal, Our Herald, The National Citizen, The Revolution, The Woman’s Tribune
, . . . are overhauled, tossed about in an emphatic manner for some date, fact, or some point of law or constitution. Susan is punctilious on dates, mother on philosophy, but each contends as stoutly in the other’s domain as if equally strong on all points. Sometimes these disputes run so high that down go the pens, one sails out of one door and one out the other, walking in opposite directions around the estate, and just as I have made up my mind that this beautiful friendship of forty years has at last terminated, I see them walking down the hill, arm in arm. . . . When they return they go straight to work where they left off, as if nothing had ever happened. . . . The one that was unquestionably right assumes it, and the other silently concedes the fact. They never explain, nor apologize, nor shed tears, nor make up, as other people do.
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One dispute they could not resolve concerned Stanton’s claim that state legislatures were the final authority on suffrage. She believed as the Supreme Court had held in the
Minor
case that states had the power to enfranchise women. Anthony challenged her claim, reminding Stanton of the overriding authority of the Constitution. The argument was important as it related to political strategy for the National: would it pursue a state-by-state referendum strategy or fight only for congressional action on a federal amendment. Unable to agree, they continued the battle in letters. “You have not made me take your position,” wrote Stanton, “I repudiate it from the bottom of my soul.” She charged that Anthony was being autocratic. “Beware, Susan, lest as you become respectable, you become conservative.” They never did resolve their differences.
²⁸

The first volume of the
History
was completed within six months and appeared in May 1881. In 878 pages, it brought them up to 1860. Stanton wrote all the material except three chapters by Mrs. Gage. Anthony searched for documents and illustrations, copied the manuscript, and proofread their product. To critics who charged that a history of woman suffrage could not be written before it had been accomplished, Stanton defended their approach: “The United States has not completed its grand experiment of equality . . . and yet [George] Bancroft has been writing our history for forty years.”
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