In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (13 page)

Then Mr. McClintock read extracts from Blackstone’s interpretation of women’s status in English common law, and Mrs. Mott offered one more resolution: “
Resolved
, That the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman of equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce.” The resolution was adopted. The McClintocks’ daughter Mary Ann and Frederick Douglass made short speeches before the meeting closed with an hour-long appeal by Mrs. Mott. When the meeting finally adjourned, members of the audience had sat through eighteen hours of discussion. Their attention may have been indicative of the quality of the rhetoric, the general interest in reform, their practice in pews, or the curiosity of the spectacle.

In its report of the event the next day, the
Seneca County Courier
observed:

This convention was novel in its character and the doctrines broached in it are startling to those who are wedded to the present usages and laws of society. The resolutions are of the kind called radical. Some of the speeches were very able—all the exercises were marked by great order and decorum. When the Declaration of Sentiments and Rights
[sic]
shall be printed and circulated, they will provoke much remark. Some will regard them with respect—others with disapprobation and contempt.

As the local paper predicted, when accounts of the meeting spread, they generated a critical response. Newspapers, as quasi-political organs, presented the case of the major parties: women were unfit for citizenship. Church leaders were equally offended by such unseemly demands and untraditional behavior. Conservative citizens rushed to defend traditional womanhood. The
Philadelphia Public Ledger and Daily Transcript
asserted that no lady would endorse voting rights. “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything. A pretty girl is equal to ten thousand men, and a mother is, next to God, all powerful. . . . The ladies of Philadelphia, therefore, under the influence of the most serious, sober second thoughts, are resolved to maintain their rights as Wives, Belles, Virgins and Mothers, and not as Women.” In the
New York Herald
, editor George Gordon Bennett was equally sarcastic, charging that the Declaration was defective because women asked only to be doctors and ministers, not soldiers, sailors, or merchants.
²⁸

Very few newspapers cheered the effort. The
North Star
, edited by Frederick Douglass, argued that there was no reason to deny women the vote because “right is of no sex.” The
Liberator
, edited by Garrison, used the appropriate headline, “Woman’s Revolution.” One of the few major papers to treat the question seriously was the
New York Tribune
, in which Horace Greeley found the demand unseemly but not unjust. “It is easy to be smart, to be droll, to be facetious in opposition to the demands of these Female Reformers; and in decrying assumptions so novel and opposed to established habits and usages, a little wit will go a great way. . . . However unwise and mistaken the demand, it is but the assertion of a natural right and as such must be conceded.”
²⁹

Although the organizers had hoped to provoke public interest, the intensely negative response surprised them. They were caricatured as sexless old maids and radical heretics and branded as different from the majority of women. They were annoyed, offended, and put on the defensive by the misrepresentations of their critics. But as Mrs. Stanton shrewdly recognized, any publication of their demands was helpful. “There is no danger of the Woman Question dying for want of notice,” she wrote to an offending editor. To Mrs. Mott she exclaimed: “Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the
Herald
. It will start women thinking, and men, too, and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken. The great fault of mankind is that it will not think.”
³⁰

To assure that newspaper readers learned both sides of the argument, Mrs. Stanton wrote replies to negative editorials. A letter to the editor of the
Rochester National Reformer
refuted the doctrine of separate spheres as applied to political rights.

If God has assigned a sphere to man and one to woman, we claim the right ourselves to judge His design in reference to us, and we accord to man the same privilege. We think that a man has quite enough to do to find out his own individual calling, without being taxed to find out also where every woman belongs. . . . There is no such thing as a sphere for sex. Every man has a different sphere, in which he may or may not shine, and it is the same with every woman, and the same woman may have a different sphere at different times.
³¹

Stanton had learned from observing Mrs. Mott that women could move from the kitchen to a pulpit to the nursery to a desk. The public and private events in Seneca Falls had helped her to extend and expand her own sphere. In addition to serving as an early indicator of the direction of Stanton’s political philosophy, the Declaration of Sentiments asserted her own equality and independence.

So far Mrs. Stanton’s ideas were much more radical than her actions. Two weeks after the Seneca Falls meeting, a second women’s rights convention was held in the Unitarian church in Rochester. Without reliable help at home, Mrs. Stanton was apprehensive about attending a meeting out of town, but she did go. So did Mott, Mrs. McClintock, several Seneca Falls signers, and many others, including Susan B. Anthony’s parents and sister Mary. The meeting was organized by Amy Post, a Quaker, abolitionist, and signer of the Declaration of Sentiments. She nominated Elizabeth McClintock as secretary and invited Mrs. Stanton to read the Declaration and to report on the salaries of household servants, a subject with which she was well acquainted. The resolution advocating suffrage was read and reintroduced in Rochester, as it would be at every successive women’s rights convention. But when Mrs. Post urged that a woman named Abigail Bush be made the presiding officer, Mrs. Stanton objected. Stanton thought that breaking the precedent of male chairmen was “a hazardous experiment” and said so. But the majority of the large audience favored Mrs. Bush, and she took the gavel. Writing to Amy Post the next month, Mrs. Stanton admitted her chagrin. “I have so often regretted my foolish conduct,” she said. “My only excuse is that woman has been so little accustomed to act in a public capacity that she does not always know what is due.”
³²
Stanton’s action may have reflected her own lack of confidence. She was still defining her own public role and had not yet risked presiding at a meeting.

The organizers of Seneca Falls were equally unsure of what direction to follow. No definite strategy had been discussed or decided upon. The women pursued several courses at once. Some continued to organize meetings. Women in Ohio and Massachusetts soon followed the Seneca Falls pattern and expanded on the idea to hold national meetings of state delegates. Others
advanced the cause less publicly. Unable to travel far from home, Mrs. Stanton wrote articles for newspapers, letters to other conventions, and private notes to friends to arouse them to action on behalf of women’s rights. In September 1848 she asked Amy Post, “What are we next to do?” In answering her own question, Stanton suggested a simultaneous petition effort in several states, organized by a paid women’s rights agent, but no agent was engaged and only sporadic petitioning was undertaken.
³³
It would be twenty years before the effort begun at Seneca Falls would mature into a national organization, and seventy-two years before it would achieve success in the Nineteenth Amendment.

Yet the Seneca Falls convention was a personal success for Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The meeting and its Declaration had legitimized her complaints. It had challenged her to outline remedies. It had coalesced her thinking in terms of the equal capabilities of men and women and their natural rights. It had put Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the vanguard of the women’s rights movement. As Lucretia Mott advised her shortly after the convention, “Thou art so wedded to this cause that thou must expect to act as pioneer in the work.”
³⁴

Most important, the Seneca Falls convention had given Stanton an opportunity to perform as a feminist reformer. She had earned the praise of people she admired. Their approval enabled her to ignore the critics and to continue as an advocate for women’s rights. Convinced of the truth and justice of her claims and confident of the acceptance of her female friends, she was not stopped by the opposition of press, pulpit, parents, or husband. “The opportunity of expressing myself fully and freely on a subject I felt so deeply about was a great relief,” she recalled in her autobiography. As one of her children later commented, the meeting “cleared her mind.”
³⁵

Stanton’s response to the discontent she suffered in Seneca Falls set a pattern for future performance. Anguish turned to anger, which fired analysis, on which she took action. Her well-trained mind was able to dissect the causes of her discontent and to extrapolate from an individual complaint to a general problem. As she gained confidence as a speaker and writer, she would address these questions and present her solutions to larger and wider audiences.

Stanton realized that the issue was broader than the difficulties of individual women in isolated households, that it related to the status of women in American society. Women were placed in a subordinate position by custom and circumstance, and women acquiesced in their subordination. But not Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As Stanton acknowledged in retrospect, sharing the experience of dependent, passive, overworked women in an isolated upstate village brought home to her the reality of inequality in the
lives of most women. Because she suffered some of these same hardships and observed others, she advanced along her feminist course.

Yet nothing had changed in her everyday existence as wife, mother, and homemaker. Indeed, as a result of the convention, Mrs. Stanton had taken on new responsiblilities without diminishing or delegating those domestic duties that had initially provoked her to act. But she had found a new source of stimulation. Feminism and her new female friends filled the gap left by the loss of her Boston social circle. Enthusiastic about her cause, she was more tolerant of household chores. In addition to child care and housekeeping, she was now occupied with writing and thinking about women’s rights. As she said at the Rochester meeting in urging women to have individual political rights: “Woman herself must do this work—for woman alone can understand the height, and the depth, the length and the breadth of her own degradation and woe. Man cannot speak for us—because he has been educated to believe that we differ from him so materially that he cannot judge of our thoughts, feelings, and opinions on his own.”
³⁶

The Seneca Falls meeting marked the formal beginning of the women’s rights movement in America and the informal beginning of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s career as a feminist leader. Yet, as the women’s movement developed during the next decade, Mrs. Stanton was not among its most visible or outspoken leaders. The momentum for subsequent meetings came from others. Stanton did not take the initiative, and she rarely accepted invitations to participate. In the fall of 1848 Lucretia Mott invited Stanton to Philadelphia to help organize a women’s rights meeting there. Stanton could not go that year, or any other.
¹
In the years following her Seneca Falls Declaration, Mrs. Stanton remained, by circumstance and choice, a small-town housewife.

Nevertheless Stanton was filled with enthusiasm for the endeavor, and she did the most that she could at the moment. She began in small ways, by writing letters to editors and to friends. She responded to requests for her presence with letters to be read in her absence. She continued to read and study and reflect and write, so that she was always a source of new ideas, ideas that enlarged the scope of the women’s movement from female suffrage to equal rights.

The challenge for Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the decade following the Seneca Falls convention was to find a way to meet the increased demands of her private and public lives. In this quest she was without a role model. No one in her acquaintance had combined mothering small children with nurturing social revolution. Lucretia Mott, Stanton’s mother, and Gerrit Smith’s wife had large household staffs or relatives to free them for community
projects. Emma Willard, a widow with only one son, boarded at the seminary she founded. Only Mott traveled as widely as Stanton might aspire to. Among women in Stanton’s age group, Angelina Grimké Weld had abandoned her reform work completely following marriage and maternity. The most active women had husbands who shared the same commitment to the same reform and few or no children.
²

Like other housewives, Stanton was in charge of the shopping, cooking, preserving, sewing, schooling, and healing. She maintained high standards of housekeeping, entertained frequent guests, and became an active citizen of Seneca Falls, when she had time. When the children were ill or when she was nursing an infant, she had to curtail her activities and lower her standards of neatness. She was pummeled by the approval and disapproval of those dear to her, by their expectations, and her own ambitions. The tensions created by her unsuccessful but ongoing efforts to combine public and private roles characterized her residence in Seneca Falls.

Stanton’s development during the two decades following the 1848 meeting parallels the organizational maturation of the first women’s movement. Throughout the 1850s the movement was undefined and leaderless. While the younger women considered Lucretia Mott their leader, Mott refused to take over. With the exception of 1857, national meetings of delegates representing local groups were held annually from 1850 to 1861. A changing ad hoc executive committee struggled with financial crises and organizational problems. Women were a small contingent of American reformers, and, like the men, they spread their energies among various reforms—temperance, prostitution, foreign missions, abolition. As the conflict over slavery came to dominate antebellum politics, many of these women and men were diverted into antislavery activities. Finally the Civil War brought an end to women’s rights meetings altogether. By the time women’s rights advocates and organizations were able to reassert their claims, in 1865, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was ready to return to prominence.