In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (38 page)

After being turned down several times, Anthony had finally found a
publisher. She had to assume part of the costs, but was repaid by a thousand-dollar gift from a New York feminist. Stanton’s housekeeper, Amelia Willard, donated another three thousand dollars toward publication. Volume I sold for three dollars a copy. In order to assure circulation, Anthony wrote to wealthy friends asking them to purchase copies for the libraries and schools in their area. Such gifts were not always welcome. When Vassar College returned the copies that she had donated for its library, Stanton was furious.
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Congratulating themselves on the completion of the first volume, Stanton and Anthony quit work for the summer. Anthony had her boxes of papers hauled to the barn and headed for New England to recruit National members in American territory. Stanton delayed long enough to refurbish the guest rooms for Theo and his French bride and then joined Anthony in Boston. Soon Stanton was eager to return to Tenafly and writing, but Anthony procrastinated. Now it was Stanton’s turn to nag, urging Anthony to “leave these state conventions alone . . . at least until we can finish the History.”
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By the end of July 1881 Stanton’s diary records that she was “in the toils of another one thousand page volume.” She and Anthony fell into their old routine, “laughing, talking, squabbling, day in and day out.” They worked in the mornings and took a walk at noon, after which Stanton napped; then they dined at two and returned to their desks. Progress on volume 2 was cut short when Stanton had a “tedious and alarming” attack of malaria in August. Her family blamed her ill health on the
History
, but Anthony disagreed, declaring to another friend: “It is so easy to charge every ill to her labors for suffrage, while she knows and I know that it is her work for women which has kept her young and fresh and happy all these years. Mrs. Stanton has written me that during her illness she suffered more from her fear that she never would finish the
History
than from the thought of parting with all her friends.” By October, Stanton had recovered, Mrs. Gage was in residence, and Anthony joined them reluctantly. She dreaded the task, describing it as “a wilderness of work, a swamp of letters and papers almost hopeless.”
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Anthony’s anxiety about publishing volume 2 was relieved in January 1882. She was surprised and delighted to learn that she had inherited more than twenty-five thousand dollars from Eliza Jackson Eddy, the daughter of Francis Jackson, Boston reformer and earlier benefactor. Eddy’s attorney, Wendell Phillips, informed Anthony that she and Lucy Stone were to divide the estate. The only stipulation was that the money be used “for the advancement of the woman’s cause.”
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Because of delays in probate, Anthony did not receive the legacy until 1885, but the gift assured publication of the
History
. Anthony used the money to buy out the partnership
shares of Stanton and Gage and to publish and distribute subsequent volumes. Instead of selling them, Anthony sent free copies to libraries, schools, and individuals, including every member of Congress. With Ida Husted Harper, an Indiana journalist and her biographer, Anthony published volume 4. After Anthony’s death in 1906, Harper completed the record up to ratification with volumes 5 and 6.

With publication guaranteed, Stanton and Anthony hurried to complete volume 2, covering 1861 to 1876. In February 1882 Stanton’s younger daughter Harriot returned from Europe and announced plans to take her mother abroad that summer. To speed the book along, Hattie read proofs and did research. Noting the absence of any mention of Lucy Stone or the American Association, she insisted that a chapter be written on the rival organization and that photographs of Stone and Julia Ward Howe be included. Stanton finally agreed to let Harriot write that section. Then Stone refused to cooperate. In response to a request for information, Stone had sent a three-sentence biography and signed her note, “Yours with ceaseless regret that any ‘wing’ of suffragists should attempt to write the history of the other.” Without the aid of the Boston group, Hattie relied on the
Woman’s Journal
and the
Agitator
for source material. She did not refer to the 1869 schism. Her authorship of 106 pages—chapter 26 in volume 2—was acknowledged only in a footnote.
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Harriot also convinced her mother to return to Europe with her. “As the children were scattered to the four points of the compass and my husband spent the winter in the city,” Stanton recalled, she rented the Tenafly house and spent a hurried month in New York finishing the
History
.
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Mother and daughter and Anthony stayed at the Bayards’ rather than with Henry. Volume 2 was finished in May 1882, and the two Stanton women departed for France.

Stanton and her daughter shared a stateroom with “innumerable pieces of baggage, a baby carriage, rocking chair, a box of
The History of Woman Suffrage
for foreign libraries, besides the usual number of trunks and satchels, and one hamper, in which were many things that we were undecided whether to take or leave,” including a loaded pistol that went off accidentally. Stanton’s narrow berth had been widened by one foot to accomodate her bulk, but she was uncomfortable at sea. Unlike earlier crossings, she dreaded the voyage and found it a “twelve day imprisonment.”
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The women delivered the baby equipment to Stanton’s new grandchild, Lizette, and spent a month with the infant’s parents near Jacournassy, where Stanton helped Theodore edit
The Woman Question in Europe
. Then they traveled to Toulouse, where Hattie enrolled in the university to earn a master’s degree in mathematics. Barred from graduate education in the United States, many American women sought advanced degrees abroad.
Stanton accompanied Hattie to classes, taking naps in the back row. Mother and daughter boarded in a Catholic convent, where Stanton appreciated the benefits of “associative living” but missed American home cooking. “I would give five francs for a good meal of Amelia’s cooking. I bemoan the absence of butter . . . and I long for muffins and oatmeal and cream. We eat our strawberries with a fork. There is no powdered sugar. . . . If I grow thin on this diet, I shall feel fully compensated for my many culinary deprivations.”
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In September Harriot abandoned mathematics for French; in October she abandoned French for marriage. She became engaged to another student, William Henry Blatch, an Englishman whom she had met on her February ocean crossing. With Mrs. Stanton chaperoning, the couple traveled via Paris to London. They were married on Stanton’s sixty-seventh birthday by the American Unitarian minister and Stanton’s old friend, William Henry Channing. When the newlyweds took up residence on a Blatch family estate in Basingstoke, west of London, Mrs. Stanton stayed on in the city. “I am fixed . . . for the winter,” she reported to Libby Miller. “I have made many pleasant acquaintances among liberal people and am out nearly every day to tea, dinner, breakfast or lunch.”
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It had been over forty years since Stanton’s first trip to England and the Continent. She relished the recognition she now received as a celebrated reformer and suffrage leader. She traveled to Glasgow to give her first European speech, on municipal suffrage for women, and visited old friends in Edinburgh. In London she was invited to a reception honoring William Dean Howells, whose female characters she thought showed “a lamentable want of common sense.”
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She preached on “Women and the Bible”; endorsed the “bifurcated skirt,” a variation of bloomers; and advised British suffragists to demand the vote for all women rather than only unmarried women. By accident she ran into Victoria Woodhull, noting that she was now “the legal wife of an Englishman of wealth and position.”
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London’s winter fog made Mrs. Stanton cough, so she moved to Basingstoke. Hattie installed a central furnace, and Stanton filled her days with reading, napping, writing and driving. She awaited two important arrivals: Hattie’s first child and Susan B. Anthony.

Anthony made her first trip to Europe in March 1883, accompanied by Rachel Foster, a young friend of the Mott family and one of Anthony’s “nieces.” Writing Anthony that she was “on the tiptoe of expectation to meet you,” Stanton returned to London and settled into a boardinghouse with her friends.
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The three of them met with British suffragists, visited Parliament, made speeches, and hosted receptions. That summer Anthony and Foster toured Europe, and Stanton returned to Basingstoke.

Stanton’s second grandchild, Nora Stanton Blatch, was born on September
30, 1883. Stanton stayed at Basingstoke until Nora was a month old, lavishing attention on the baby and new mother. As she confided in her diary, “As I sit here beside Hattie with the baby in my arms, and realize that three generations of us are together, I appreciate more than ever what each generation can do for the next one, by making the most of itself.” She frequently said that having daughters and granddaughters gave her incentive to keep working for women’s rights for future generations. No longer responsible for diapers and pap spoons, she could dote on her grandchildren. On November 12, her sixty-eighth birthday, she parted from Hattie, “without a tear,” but her “legs trembled so that I could scarcely walk to the carriage.”
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After a week of farewell calls in London, she and Anthony sailed for home. Stanton had been in Europe eighteen months.

During this period of writing in Tenafly and touring in Europe, Stanton and Anthony had quietly refurbished their friendship. From November 1880 to the fall of 1886 they lived and worked together almost every day. They shared more of their lives than they had since the war years. After the friction and dissatisfaction of the 1870s, their initial efforts at reconciliation had been tentative. Mrs. Gage was brought into the
History
project as much as a buffer as a coauthor. Stanton fell back on her family to shield herself from Anthony, and Anthony surrounded herself with “nieces,” young women drawn from the ranks of the National Association. Both of them had alternative sources of affection and approval, but each still expected support from the other. A foundation of enduring affection sustained their political alliance. After all, wrote Stanton, they were “fastened, heart to heart, with hooks of steel in a friendship that years of confidence and affection have steadily strengthened.”
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As the two women grew older, more opinionated, and more secure, their relationship became more contentious. But they always came back together. As Stanton wrote to Anthony: “We have jogged along pretty well for forty years or more. Perhaps mid the wreck of thrones and the undoing of so many friendships, sects, parties and families, you and I deserve some credit for sticking together through all adverse winds with so few ripples on the surface.” No matter how cruel or careless one was, she expected to be forgiven by the other. “We have said worse things to each other face to face than we have ever said about each other,” Stanton admitted. “Nothing Susan could say or do could break my friendship with her and I know nothing could uproot her affection for me.”
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Stanton and Anthony addressed the subject of their friendship in the
History
. Stanton referred to them as “two sticks of a drum . . . keeping up . . . the rub-a-dub of agitation.”

In thought and sympathy we were one, and in the division of labor we exactly complemented each other. In writing we did better work together than either could alone. While she is slow and analytical in composition,
I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of thirty long years. . . . Our speeches may be considered the united product of two brains.

Refusing to acknowledge the fights and hurt feelings between them, Stanton continued:

So entirely one are we that in all our associations, ever side by side on the same platform, not one feeling of jealousy or envy has ever shadowed our lives. We have indulged freely in criticism of each other when alone, and hotly contended whenever we differed. . . . There has never been a break of one hour. To the world we always seem to agree and uniformly reflect each other.

The only accurate statement is that they always tried to agree in public. A slightly more objective source, presumably Theodore Tilton, noted: “Opposites though they be, each does not so much supplement the other’s deficiences as augment the other’s eccentricities. Thus they often stimulate each other’s aggressiveness and at the same time diminish each other’s discretion.”
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The steadfast loyalty of Stanton and Anthony to each other became part of their mutual public image. People thought of them as a team long after they had ceased to cooperate closely. For most of their lives the friendship was genuine. But the assumption of automatic agreement between them by the public, the press, and their peers added stress to periods of disagreement and made their final years more difficult.

Rather than return from England with Rachel Foster earlier in 1883, Anthony had waited to travel with Mrs. Stanton. Anthony was aware of how hard it was for her friend to part from Hattie and Nora, and how Stanton no longer enjoyed sea travel. Although Stanton was not seasick, she found the confinement of their November voyage across the North Atlantic “beyond all endurance.” Sailing into New York harbor, she was “unspeakably happy to set foot on native shores once more.”
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Upon landing, Anthony headed for Rochester, and Stanton undertook a series of visits to friends and relatives. Rather than stay in New York with Henry, she spent six weeks in Geneva with Libby Miller, accompanied by her daughter Margaret. Because the Tenafly house was still rented, Stanton opened the “family homestead” in Johnstown. She started work on volume 3 of the
History
and wrote articles for newspaper and magazine publication. She was full of energy and interest in suffrage work and even looked forward to the next National convention scheduled for February. As she declared to Anthony: “A year shut up in a community of snails has developed in me an amount of enthusiasm that is a surprise to myself. They say
people always revive just before they go out altogether; so if immediately after this performance I have symptoms of softening of the brain, you need not be surprised.” But as the date of the meeting approached, Stanton was forced to renege. “I have never wanted to be at a convention so much in my life, but I cannot.” She admitted to shortness of breath and heart trouble. “Don’t tell anybody all this; just say I have a cold.”
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