In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (11 page)

At the time Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned thirty in Boston, she was content with her life. Her husband had begun to prosper, and she had three healthy children, a well-run house, and stimulating friends. She had undertaken a serious religious inquiry and felt comfortable with her conclusions. She enjoyed an active social life and occasionally dabbled in reform. Henry, however, was much less content. He had turned down the Liberty party’s congressional nomination in 1844 because he thought he could not win it. When he polled fifteen hundred write-in votes, he regretted that he had not made the race.
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After another unsuccessful electoral season, he began to search for a more hospitable district. He suffered chronic lung congestion in Boston and was increasingly unhappy. Finally, in 1847, Henry decided to leave Boston for Seneca Falls, New York.

The connection between Seneca Falls and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s independence is compelling. The combination of circumstances that followed her move to upstate New York converted her from high-minded housewife to feminist agitator. Discontented with the conditions of isolated housekeeping and encouraged by Lucretia Mott, Mrs. Stanton took action at last. In initiating and organizing what came to be known as the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848, Mrs. Stanton dared to try out in public the roles of feminist and reformer that she had privately admired.

Prior to 1848 Stanton had been observing and practicing different roles. The experiences of her privileged childhood, the expectations and rejections of her parents, her unusual education and extensive reading, the influence of male mentors, her exposure to revival and reform, her marriage to a political abolitionist, her introduction to female reformers, her friendship with Lucretia Mott, her grappling with patriarchy in religion and society, had all been factors in her development. Each episode allowed her to observe different behaviors and their results. Each observation enabled her to accept, reject, or modify various roles.

It must have been harder for her to anticipate what reactions some roles would evoke. In her experience female reformers had been ridiculed, condemned, disdained, ignored, and dismissed as ineffective. Yet the women themselves persevered and took pride in their contributions. Criticized by people Stanton no longer respected, these women were applauded by those she admired and by each other. The women themselves seemed to thrive, managing to combine public pursuits with more traditional occupations. They did not disintegrate under pressure. The high regard Stanton felt for
women reformers counterbalanced her father’s disapproval, Edward Bayard’s indifference, and Henry’s political opposition to women as reformers. Stanton’s reform efforts prior to 1848, on behalf of abolition, temperance, and women’s property rights, were minor. They had not been opposed by her husband, family, or friends. In the absence of opposition, the positive presence of Mrs. Mott freed Stanton to take the next step, to try out the role of feminist reformer. Stanton accepted Mott’s encouragement because what she had seen led her to believe that she could undertake the part. She recognized that she had similar talents and an equal interest, and she thought she could cope with any criticism her actions aroused.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was thirty-one years old when she moved to Seneca Falls in June 1847. She had been married for seven years and was the mother of three lively boys, then five, three, and almost two years old. Seneca Falls in the 1840s was a village of about four thousand inhabitants, six churches, four hotels, one academy, and two dozen small factories and mills. They produced cotton cloth, flour, paper, axes, leather, liquor, boats, window sashes, and water pumps. The Cayuga and Seneca Canal linked the town to the Erie Canal; the railroad connected it to Syracuse to the east and Rochester to the west.
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The decision to leave Boston for this outpost in upstate New York had been Henry’s. The reason most frequently cited was his “delicate” health: he was exhausted by Liberty party activities, suffered five-day headaches, and was plagued by lung congestion. In a letter to Gerrit Smith, Henry blamed his ill health on Boston’s “repulsive” winters and “bracing” summers; he wished to escape the severe weather in New England for the “more congenial climate in Central New York.”
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Anyone familiar with the seasons in New York’s snow belt would find it more likely that Henry was seeking a more hospitable political climate among New York abolitionists. Having suffered the chill rebuff of Boston Garrisonians, Henry needed another district.

As a political abolitionist, Henry Stanton pursued a career in elective politics. Although he devoted half of his adult life to politics, he was seldom successful. In New York he helped organize the Free Soil party in 1848. He renounced it a year later to run for the state Senate as a Democrat, and won. Reelected by only five votes in a special election in May 1851, Henry Stanton was offered the lieutenant governorship in 1852. He turned the Democrats down and never again held an elected position, but he remained active in abolition and, having switched parties again, in Republican affairs, for the rest of his life.
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Despite Judge Cady’s disapproval of Henry’s politics and his reluctance to subsidize his sons-in-law, he once again provided the young couple with a home. In a deed recorded on June 22, 1847, he gave Elizabeth and “her
heirs and assigns forever” a house and two acres at 32 Washington Street.
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It was a corner property on Locust Hill, commanding a view of the Seneca River. Judge Cady also gave the Stantons a nearby farm.
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Although the house was in Elizabeth’s name, until passage of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1848 her property was legally Henry’s.

The house had not been occupied for five years and needed wholesale repair. Stanton’s father challenged her, supposedly saying, “You believe in woman’s capacity to do and dare, now go ahead and put your house in order.” Mrs. Stanton left Henry in Boston, deposited her three children and seventeen trunks in Albany, and proceeded to Seneca Falls. Whether her recollection of her father’s remark is accurate or apocryphal, it is significant that she recalled it as a challenge to her ability as a woman, and that she felt she succeeded. She put carpenters, painters, paperhangers, and gardeners to work and supervised the addition of a kitchen and woodhouse. As she recalled later, “Having left my children with my mother, there were no impediments to a full display of my executive ability.”
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She and Henry named the house “Grasmere,” after Wordsworth’s home, which they had visited on their honeymoon. During their fifteen-year residence the house expanded with their family. As Stanton’s daughter recalled in 1923, today “only a fraction of the house still stands, changed . . . greatly [with its] wings clipped and its acres of shaded lawn and gardens cut to meet the needs of a growing neighborhood.”
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As Elizabeth confided to her cousin Libby Miller, both the Stantons had trepidations about leaving Boston. She was prepared to be “happy and contented” in the country, but she worried that Henry would be “restless” and “long for the strong excitement of city life.”
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As it turned out, she was the one who felt trapped and dislocated. In later life she always sang the praises of rural life, claiming to have spent most of her life in the country, but she preferred the city. So did Henry. After their move to Seneca Falls he traveled frequently to Albany and Washington to register patents and represent the interests of his new Seneca Falls clients. He attended political functions, savoring the gossip and male camaraderie of those gatherings. Dependent for income on his clients, the Stantons remained in Seneca Falls even after Henry had abandoned elective politics and long after Elizabeth wanted to leave.

As Henry flourished, Elizabeth floundered. Nothing in her experience as privileged daughter or pampered bride had prepared her for the role of rural housewife. She was soon voicing discontent with the isolating, demeaning, and unrewarding character of her life and that of most of her neighbors.
She was overworked and bored. Her dissatisfaction was still vivid in recollection.

[Our] residence was on the outskirts of the town, roads often very muddy and no sidewalks most of the way. Mr. Stanton was frequently from home, I had poor servants, and an increasing number of children. The novelty of housekeeping had passed away, and much that was once attractive in domestic life was now irksome. I had so many cares. . . . My duties were too numerous and varied and none sufficiently exhilarating or intellectual to bring into play my higher faculties. I suffered with mental hunger, which, like an empty stomach, is very depressing. I had books, but no stimulating companionship. Cleanliness, order, the love of the beautiful and artistic all faded away in the struggle to accomplish what was absolutely necessary from hour to hour.
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For a woman who had been sheltered by servants and stimulated by social life in Boston, the change must have been dramatic. Stanton repeatedly admitted feeling lonely, depressed, angry, and exhausted, complaints that became the refrain of her Seneca Falls residence.

In the year following her move to Seneca Falls, Stanton was a lonely homemaker. Already overwhelmed by domestic drudgery, she despaired when the children caught malaria. The time-consuming homeopathic cure prolonged her nursing chores. Only slowly did she establish a domestic routine and settle into the Seneca Falls community. She was made intimately aware of woman’s subordinate status in American society. Less able to articulate her discontent in 1848 than later, she recalled in her autobiography:

The general discontent I felt with woman’s portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic conditions into which everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measures should be taken to remedy the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular. My experience at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences. . . . It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step. I could not see what to do or where to begin—my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.
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While Stanton had so far met every challenge with resourcefulness, it is doubtful that her personal protest against woman’s lot would have resulted in the 1848 convention without the encouragement and enthusiasm of Lucretia Mott and her friends. Stanton’s nascent feminism had become an urgent commitment. But in order to turn ideology into reality, Stanton
required a female mentor. In Mrs. Mott she had an attractive, successful, respected, and appealing model.

During the summer of 1848 Lucretia Mott and her husband traveled to upstate New York to attend the yearly New York meeting of Hicksite Quakers. On Thursday, July 13, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was invited to spend the day with Mrs. Mott at the home of Jane and Richard Hunt in Waterloo, three miles west of Seneca Falls. Mrs. Mott’s sister, Martha Coffin Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock were also present. Sitting around the tea table in the sympathetic company of these women, Stanton “poured out . . . the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything,” a recollection still intense forty years later.
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Whether persuaded by passion or pragmatism, the group decided to call a “convention” to discuss women’s rights. Holding a meeting was a characteristic response among reformers; it gave them a means to state their grievance and identify sympathizers.

The five were not extraordinary women. All of them were married; all of them had children. All but Stanton were Garrisonian abolitionists and liberal Quakers. Mrs. Mott at fifty-four was the oldest; Mrs. Stanton at thirty-two was the youngest. Although Stanton and probably the others had attended various reform meetings, only Mrs. Mott had any previous experience as an organizer, delegate, or speaker. In terms of women’s rights, the “chief movers and managers” of the first women’s rights convention were all amateurs. As Stanton later summarized their situation in
The History of Woman Suffrage
, they “were neither sour old maids, childless women, nor divorced wives, as the newspapers declared them to be.” They were motivated by the insults incident to sex, but “they had not experienced the coarser forms of tyranny resulting from unjust laws, or association with immoral and unscrupulous men.” Rather, they had “souls large enough to feel the wrongs of others.”
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For Martha Coffin Wright, the 1848 event was her first involvement in reform. Mrs. Mott’s youngest sibling lived in Auburn, New York. A widow, she had married lawyer David Wright. The mother of seven children, she was noted for her warmth and humor. Mrs. Wright later became an officer of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a constant supporter of women’s rights, and an adviser to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Having been expelled from the Society of Friends for marrying out of meeting, Mrs. Wright was not a Quaker.
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Like Stanton, she had little regard for organized religion.

Less is known about Jane Hunt and Mary Ann McClintock, both of whom, like Mrs. Mott, were Hicksite activists who believed that salvation
required good works. Jane Master Hunt and her husband Richard lived in a sumptuous mansion in Waterloo, New York.
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She was his fourth wife, the mother of three children and stepmother of three more. On the 1850 census her husband listed his occupation as “farmer” and placed his net worth at forty thousand dollars. Richard Hunt owned the Waterloo Woolen Mill and “Hunt’s Block” in the commercial district and served as a bank director. According to some sources, it was he who first proposed the women’s rights meeting.