In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (18 page)

In the two years following Stanton’s appearance in Albany, pressures on her mounted on all sides. Admirers urged a wider public role; detractors demanded that she retire. Paulina Davis repeated her earlier suggestion that Stanton become a paid lecturer on women’s rights. Lucy Stone continued to correspond with her at length about the divorce issue. Mott urged her to attend national meetings. Anthony increased her requests for speeches,
tracts, and appearances. Unsure of what direction to take and discouraged by family opposition, Stanton stayed home.

Stanton’s father was vehement in his opposition to her plan to increase her public activity. Recently retired from the state Supreme Court, Judge Cady was offended and embarrassed by the notoriety of her public appearances. He criticized her harshly. Following one confrontation with her father in 1855, Stanton reported to Anthony:

I passed through a terrible scourging when last at my father’s. I cannot tell you how deeply the iron entered my soul. I never felt more keenly the degradation of my sex. To think that all in me of which my father would have felt a proper pride had I been a man is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman. That thought has stung me to a fierce decision—to speak as soon as I can do myself credit. I wish that I were as free as you and I would stump the state in a twinkling. But I am not. . . . The pressure on me just now is too great. Henry sides with my friends who oppose me in all that is dearest to my heart. They are not willing that I would write even on the woman question. But I will both write and speak.
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Family legend insists that Judge Cady carried through on his threat to disinherit his daughter if she continued her public activity, as she did, although in a much more circumscribed manner. At the time Stanton told Libby Miller that her father had said, “Your first lecture will be a very expensive one.” To which she replied, “I intend that it shall be very profitable.” Whether or not Judge Cady changed his will at the time cannot be determined. The will in effect when he died in 1859 did include Elizabeth as an heir.
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Henry’s opposition to Stanton’s proposed absences and public activities is not hard to fathom. Having been pressured by Judge Cady into giving up the nomination for lieutenant governor in order to meet his family and financial obligations, Henry resented his wife’s desire to move beyond her domestic sphere and do the kind of reform work he had done. While he appreciated her talents and usually applauded her achievements, he wished she would spend more time with the children and less with her colleagues. From her point of view, his position was unjustified. The children were well cared for. In his absence she acted as both mother and father to them and had come to rely on female friends for adult company. On her rare excursions out of Seneca Falls, she usually took the youngest children with her. He resented her desire for more independence; she resented his independence. She longed for time and space for herself, and she coveted what she perceived as his freedom to do what he wanted.

For the present, Stanton was too uncertain about her future direction and too worn down by domestic cares to do more. Her efforts to combine
public affairs and maternity had failed. She could not move beyond her domestic sphere while the children were small and while she was still having babies. As she apologized to Anthony in the mid-1850s, “My whole soul is in the work, but my hands belong to my family.”
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton sacrificed public ambitions to private affections during her last years in Seneca Falls. For a short period in the early 1850s she had successfully combined reform work and domestic duties. From the beginning of her friendship with Anthony until the speech to the New York legislature in 1854, Stanton had slowly increased her involvement with the women’s movement. Then, faced with her father’s opposition, Henry’s resistance, and two more children, Stanton surrendered to the bonds of affection and responsibility that confined her. She chose to stay home, read, write, and mind the children, but she chafed at the delay and resented the restrictions. At the same time, she accepted them and comforted herself with visions of a productive, public period after her children were grown.

Once again Stanton was without a useful role model. No single person was doing what she wanted to do, so she had no one to observe and learn from. Instead she could copy and adopt different specific behaviors from different people. In her public life she had borrowed strategy and rhetoric primarily from the abolitionists. In her private life she had accepted the maternal expectations of mid-nineteenth-century America. She was putting family first, but she applied some untraditional approaches to traditional tasks. Angelina Grimké Weld, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and many other reform women retired into maternity at various times in their careers. In anticipating a period of independence to follow child care, Stanton was following a course set by her mother and Mrs. Mott. Margaret Cady had recovered from her grief over dead sons and returned to an active life in the community in her late middle age. Lucretia Mott managed an extended family and a variety of public works with great efficiency and
energy. Further, none of the people important to Stanton disapproved of her decision to stay home with her children—except Anthony, who was outnumbered, and discounted because she was not married.

After 1854 Stanton began to refuse public invitations. She did not even accept social invitations, explaining to Libby Miller, “If you knew how impatient I feel in my domestic bondage and how aggravating a thing an invitation is, so far from ever tempting me to step beyond the garden gate, you would point out all the joys, privileges, advantages and blessings that pertain to the wife, mother, nurse and cook.”
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Throughout this period Stanton channeled more and more of her energy into writing. She seized her pen at every opportunity, writing journal articles, lectures, newspaper columns, and letters.

Since 1849 she had been a regular contributor to the
Lily
and remained one until the Bloomers moved to Ohio in 1853. From then until 1856 Stanton wrote monthly essays for the
Una
, “a paper devoted to the Elevation of Women.” The journal was edited and funded by Paulina Wright Davis. One of Stanton’s pieces, “I Have All the Rights I Want,” was widely reprinted. It was a scathing attack on the women who opposed equal rights and suffrage. Stanton disdained the women “with bare arms and neck” who joined in midnight revels with drunken men and then criticized the “want of delicacy in those who assemble in woman’s conventions to talk with sober men . . . on great questions of Human Rights.”
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When the
Lily
was sold and the
Una
folded for lack of subscribers, Stanton began to send articles to city newspapers, including the
New York Tribune
. Editor Horace Greeley encouraged her and printed her pieces regularly. At first she asked Henry for editorial advice but then rebelled at his revisions. “Husbands are too critical,” she declared to Anthony. “I am vexed.” Stanton saw in writing a means to sharpen and spread her ideas on women’s rights. “If I were a man and not pinned here, how I would hie to New York . . . and become one of the
Tribune
corps of regular writers,” she wrote to Anthony.
³

It was during this period that Stanton recalled an earlier interest in writing a history of the women’s movement. Lucretia Mott fostered her plan and advised her on the work’s scope. “In thy coming work thou must do thy self justice,” wrote Mott. “Remember the first convention originated with thee.”
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But Stanton did not have time for such an undertaking; it would be twenty-five years before she began
The History of Woman Suffrage
.

Approaching her fortieth birthday in 1855, Stanton undoubtedly anticipated the end of her childbearing years. In spite of the objections of her male relatives, she still planned to travel the women’s rights circuit as soon as Margaret was weaned and walking. She could joke to Anthony in February of that year, “As soon as you all begin to ask too much of me, I shall
have a baby!” She added, “Now be careful; do not provoke me to that step.”
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Or perhaps Stanton was serious and chose to become pregnant again to avoid further family conflict about her assuming a public career.

Childbirth for women over forty was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, and Stanton took no steps to avoid it. Before 1848 Stanton had had no reason to limit the size of her family. Both she and Henry had come from large families, and until 1851 they had no reason to practice birth control. The first three boys were born between 1842 and 1845. Then there were no births and no record of miscarriages until 1851, when a fourth son was born. Stanton was coping well with the demands on her time then, and Henry was happy in elective office. Henry’s decision not to run for reelection diminished their income. Her participation in reform increased their expenses and lessened her interest in housework. Yet they had a fifth child in 1852, perhaps in an attempt to fulfill her well-known desire to have a daughter.

Stanton’s two late pregnancies appear to have been unplanned and unexpected, although she had made no attempt at prevention. In a diary entry much later in life Stanton implied that she had been too ignorant to use any birth control during the late 1850s, but it is hard to believe her claim.
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For whatever reason she chose not to prevent these pregnancies. The result was lack of control over her reproductive life, a sense of subordination, renewed outrage at the institution of marriage, increased resentment of Henry, a delay in her public career, and two more children.

Harriot Eaton Stanton was born January 20, 1856. Stanton greeted her sixth child and second daughter with less enthusiasm than earlier offspring. Her mixed feelings were apparent in a letter to Anthony, announcing the birth. “I have got out the sixth edition of my admirable work, another female child is born into the world! . . . I am very happy that the terrible ordeal is past and that the result is another daughter. But I feel disappointed and sad at the same time at this grievous interruption of my plans. I might have been born an orator before spring, you acting as midwife. . . . My whole thought for the present must center on bread and babies.”
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Stanton may have been saying what Anthony wanted to hear, but other evidence confirms her growing discontent and impatience.

It was unusual for Stanton to suffer the “agonizing pain” of childbirth and even more unusual for her to admit it. “Oh how my soul died within me, as I approached that dreadful, never-to-be-forgotten ordeal,” she confessed to Libby Miller. “The deed was done and here I am in the land of the living.” Stanton was no longer congratulating herself on maternal triumphs. She felt angry and trapped. Within a month of the birth of her second daughter she complained to Anthony: “Imagine me, day in and day out, watching, bathing, nursing and promenading the precious contents of
a little crib in the corner of my room. I pace up and down these two chambers like a caged lion, longing to bring nursing and housekeeping cares to a close. I have other work at hand.”
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But whatever feminist occupation she might undertake in the future, Stanton recognized that she would first have to contend with her domestic responsibilities and her family’s opposition.

Another undercurrent of discord in the Stanton marriage in the 1850s was Henry’s shifting political allegiance. Since 1840 Elizabeth had remained a political abolitionist. Had she been able to vote she would have supported the Liberty, Free Soil, and Barnburner parties. To stop gossip when Henry switched to the Democrats, she claimed to be an “unterrified Democrat” as well.
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But like his former allies and most of her current friends, she was troubled by evidence of his political opportunism. Having given up elective politics, Henry hoped to get an appointed position. To that end, he shifted his support from one likely winner to another.

Following his attendance at the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore in 1852, Henry had campaigned for the national ticket. The former abolitionist hero supported Franklin Pierce and a platform that endorsed the gag rule in the House of Representatives, the war with Mexico, the Compromise of 1850, and the Fugitive Slave Law. His opportunism shocked his old allies, some of whom considered Henry a political prostitute. “Poor Stanton! How art thou fallen!” chastised a
National Era
editorial. Seemingly unembarrassed by such criticism, Stanton backed the Democratic ticket enthusiastically. He gave major speeches in Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo and claimed credit when the Democrats carried New York. He expected his loyalty to be rewarded with an appointment in the Pierce administration, “a first rate consulship,” the post of solicitor of the treasury, or United States district attorney.
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But the New York quota was filled without his name on the list. Ironically, his nomination had been opposed by Democrats suspicious of his abolitionist leanings.

Angry at his treatment by the Pierce administration and increasingly sensitive to criticism from former friends, Henry began to disentangle himself from the Democrats. He attended the state party convention in September 1853, but withdrew his name as a candidate for attorney general. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 by a Democratic Congress provided Henry with an excuse for bolting the party. The act, which opened Kansas and Nebraska for settlers, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and allowed settlers to determine whether the territories would be slave or free states, infuriated antislavery Whigs and Democrats like Henry. These partisans began to hold “fusion” conventions, out of which came the Republican party.
¹¹

As Henry explained to Charles Sumner, he hesitated only until the new party became a reality and then joined with a convert’s zeal, again.
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Henry gave his first Republican speech in Rochester, in September 1855. In it he confessed his error in remaining recently silent on the slavery issue. He blamed his lapse on a “constitutional distaste for perpetual controversy,” an odd apology from an old abolition agent.
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In the last week before the legislative elections that fall, Henry gave the same speech once a day in each county in western New York. He helped pull the state party out of “utter chaos,” he reported to his old employer and political mentor Thurlow Weed. Henry’s return to the principles of his youth pleased his wife. “I am rejoiced to say that Henry is heart and soul in the Republican movement and is faithfully stumping the state once more,” she recounted to Anthony.
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