In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (36 page)

In order for Stanton to return to a leadership position in the National Association, Anthony had to agree to step down from the presidency. They exchanged offices: Stanton became president and Anthony took over the executive committee. Anthony remained the power behind the scenes; Stanton became the figurehead. Stanton did not challenge Anthony’s actual authority within the organization. She realized that Anthony had the allegiance and affection of the majority of members, who had voted for Stanton at Anthony’s direction. Stanton wanted the podium back as a pulpit. Anthony, recognizing Stanton’s superior gift for oratory and inspiration, agreed. The situation satisfied both women. Their cooperation marked the beginning of a partial restoration of their friendship.

As the new president of the National, Stanton took on the planning of the 1878 Washington convention. For the first time since the organization of the National, Anthony was absent. Stanton’s agenda emphasized federal action. Stanton persuaded Aaron Sargeant, the California Republican, to introduce in the Senate a new version of a proposed sixteenth amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Following the National meeting Sargeant arranged for Stanton to testify before the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections. The senators were not attentive to her remarks on “National Protections for National Citizens.” While the white-haired Stanton stood before them, they lounged and smoked
and talked. She was offended by their rudeness but pleased that they agreed to two of her lesser demands. The women were granted the use of a meeting room in the Capitol, and the suffrage amendment was assigned to a new Committee on Woman Suffrage.
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Eight days later Stanton left for another five-month tour of the West. After a summer of family festivities and a trip to Rochester to mark another anniversary of Seneca Falls with Lucretia Mott, she was back on the circuit. In November 1878 she told Anthony that she could not attend the upcoming National convention. “You must not ask me to give up a single possible engagement for women,” she explained. “With . . . my usual heavy family expenses during the summer, it will take all I can make to come out even by the first of June.”
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At age sixty-three, Stanton was ready to retire from the lyceum circuit. Her exhaustion and exasperation are apparent in a letter to Libby Miller written from Missouri in March 1879.

Dear Julius: I have been wandering, wandering ever since we parted; up early and late, sleepy and disgusted with my profession, as there is no rest from the time the season begins until it ends. Two months more containing 61 days still stretch their long length before me. I must pack and unpack my trunk 61 times, pull out the black silk train and don it, curl my hair, and pin on the illusion puffing around my spacious throat, 61 more times, rehearse “Our Boys,” “Our Girls,” or “Home Life” 61 times, eat 183 more miserable meals, sleep on cotton sheets with these detestable things called “comforters” (tormentors would be a more fitting name) over me 61 more nights, shake hands with 61 more committees, smile, look intelligent and interested in everyone who approaches me, while I feel like a squeezed sponge, affect a little spring and briskness in my gait on landing in each new town to avoid making an impression that I am 70, when in reality I feel more like crawling than walking. With her best foot forward, Johnson.

The tour was interrupted when an omnibus in which she was riding overturned. Once rescued, Mrs. Stanton was able to walk but she suffered from lameness and a sore back for several more weeks. Before resuming her schedule, she recuperated at her son Gerrit’s home in Iowa. She begged Anthony to substitute for her at a suffrage meeting in St. Louis: “I feel as if one more ounce of responsibility would kill me,” she complained. “I am sick, tired, [and] jaded beyond description.”
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In the end Stanton attended the meeting and completed her tour. But when she contracted pneumonia, in the fall of 1879, she decided to retire from the lyceum and undertake a more sedentary occupation. After ten years of practicing independent behavior, she looked forward to maintaining that status in her old age.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not retire when she resigned from the lyceum circuit. Reminded of her mortality by the omnibus accident and her bout of pneumonia, she was spurred to greater productivity. Always energetic, she no longer squandered her resources. She insisted that her remaining energy be spent in ways she found either profitable or pleasant. She approached projects with a now-or-never zest, giving priority in the new decade to completion of the
History of Woman Suffrage
, a massive compendium on women’s rights in America. She devoted more time to her family, came to terms with Henry, restored her friendship with Anthony, made two long trips to Europe, began writing regularly for newspaper and magazine publication, used the National Association to test new tenets of her ideology, began to investigate women and theology, and still found time for reading, music, games, and naps.

Stanton entered old age combative, keen witted, self centered, and uninhibited. She had always looked forward to her “prime,” when she was past fifty. The women she had identified as “queens” earlier in her life—her mother, Emma Willard, and Lucretia Mott—had all been older women. She had observed and admired them. Whether married or widowed, they ruled their own worlds. They were independent and influential. Now Stanton was ready to become an imperial old lady.

On the lyceum circuit Stanton had escaped her domestic bondage, enhanced her self-esteem, and established her physical and financial independence. Now she sought independence at home. With her children grown and Henry living separately, she could practice self-reliance and self-indulgence in comfort. As she wrote privately in late 1880:

I have fully made up my mind not to budge this autumn one inch outside my premises. I am so happy at the thought of staying at home that nothing that [anyone] could offer would be so charming as to cause me to change my mind. I do not believe there ever was a woman who esteemed it such a privilege to stay at home. It is often said that if women are given a taste of public life, they will never be satisfied with home, but I think experience shows that all men and women who have been much in the outside world are only too glad to retire.
¹

Stanton at sixty-five may have viewed her resignation from the lyceum as a retirement, but the pace of her activities did not diminish.

As soon as Anthony heard that Stanton had recovered her strength, she began to pester her for speeches. “Since [Mrs. Stanton] has been to the dinner table,” wrote Anthony, “I infer she is well enough to work up the thunder and lightning [for the national conventions].” Anthony had called for members of the National Woman Suffrage Association to converge on the sites of the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions to demand suffrage. Stanton agreed to work on the necessary statements, but she was not sanguine about the outcome. She despaired of the Democrats and thought “we had sat on a limb of the Republican tree singing ‘suffrage if you please’ like so many insignificant humming-birds quite long enough.”
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Nor was Stanton interested in remaining president of the National. “Do not let my name come up for consideration,” she directed Anthony prior to the 1881 meeting, “as I
positively decline
. My work in conventions is at an end, they are distasteful to me.” But she admitted to another colleague that “when [Susan] is at hand, she always dragoons me into what she considers my duty, so I never venture to say what I will or will not do.”
³
Stanton preferred to devote all her vitality to writing, and she tried to convince Anthony to join her.

Mrs. Stanton did arouse herself enough to try to vote in November 1880. She and Anthony, who had come to Tenafly to work on the
History
, presented themselves at the local polling place. Stanton explained to the inspectors why she should be allowed to vote: she was three times the legal voting age, she had been a resident of Tenafly for twelve years, she had paid the real estate and poll taxes, she was a property owner, she could read and write, and her legal representative (Henry) was absent. Unmoved by her litany, the men would not let her put her ballot in the box, so she hurled it at them. “The whole town was agape with my act,” she bragged, well satisfied with herself.
⁴

That November Mrs. Stanton marked her birthday by starting a diary. Her first entry began with a quotation from Robert Browning and a description of herself. “Grow old along with me; The best is yet to be. Today I am sixty-five years old, am perfectly well, am a moderate eater, sleep well,
and am generally happy. My philosophy is to live one day at a time; neither to waste my forces in apprehension of evils to come, nor regrets for the blunders of the past.” Stanton’s remarks about her eating habits indicate that the diary presented only her view of reality rather than a factual account. Although she kept the diary locked, it was clear from the outset that Stanton intended it to be read by her children. Writing to Hattie and Theodore she explained, “When I have passed away, you children [will] have a better knowledge of some of the things I have thought and done during the final years of my life.”
⁵

It was important to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she convince her children of the significance of her work. She wanted them to understand why a mother would sacrifice time with her children to pursue women’s rights. Although she had been absent from their lives for almost a decade and had chafed against her maternal bonds when they were younger, she sought their approval of herself and her work. She wanted to reassure them of her devotion and affection. Stanton believed that parents had a duty to give their children intelligence, health, sound values, money, and enough education “to render life something more than one ceaseless struggle for necessaries.”
⁶
Stanton reassured herself that she had done all she could and that the children were well launched.
*

Although all the children were over twenty-one in 1880, several of them still lived at home, whether in Tenafly with their mother or in New York with their father. Rarely were they all together. Stanton described one atypical gathering to Anthony; only Gat was missing from her family portait. “At the present writing Maggie and Bob are playing delightfully on piano and violin; Theodore is out taking his evening walk; Hattie is reading Hallam’s
Middle Ages
, and Kit, Grote’s
History of Greece
; the “Governor” [Henry] and Neil are smoking and talking on the piazza; Amelia and Nanny [the housekeeper and maid] sewing in the basement; Julian is munching oats in the barn; and Bruno barking at some passerby.”
⁷
Stanton enjoyed the lively company of her adult children.

Her firstborn and favorite son, Daniel Cady Stanton (Neil), was thirty-eight years old in 1880. The completion of reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana had ended his career as a “carpetbag” politician. He returned north in the late 1870s and supported himself on the cash he brought with him. There is no other record of Neil’s employment. For a while he lived at Tenafly, where, according to his mother, “he likes to have the house to himself and me. If he can have me there to read to him in the evenings he asks nothing more.” At some point he moved to Iowa, married, and had a daughter; he divorced his wife before 1887.
He died in 1891, at age forty-eight, the only Stanton child to predecease his mother. Elizabeth was heartbroken. For months afterward she dreamed of seeing him walking on the piazza.
⁸
He left his entire estate to his mother rather than to his former wife or daughter.
⁹

Henry B. Stanton, Jr., practiced law with his father in New York. They lived and worked together in a townhouse on Tenth Avenue. After his father died, young Henry lived in a hotel until 1892, when he married a widow named Mary O’Shea. He was forty-eight; they had no children. In 1873 he had applied to be a territorial judge but had been turned down, despite, or perhaps on account of, a letter from his mother to the attorney general. He finally made a fortune as an attorney for the Northern Pacific Railroad. A veteran of the Civil War and a graduate of Columbia Law School, he belonged to the Union League Club, the Saint Nicholas Society, the Sons of the Mayflower, and a yacht club. He died a year after his mother, in 1903.
¹⁰

Stanton’s third son, Gerrit Smith Stanton, received his law degree from Columbia the same year as his older brother. Although he claimed in his alumni record to have volunteered in the Civil War, his service had consisted of guarding his parents and Horace Greeley during the 1863 draft riots. After the war he had moved to a farm near Beaman, Iowa, where he and his wife, Augusta Hazelton, adopted a daughter. Over their sofa, facing each other, hung portraits of his mother and Susan B. Anthony. After serving as mayor of Woodbine, Iowa, Gerrit returned east in the 1890s. He became a successful real estate speculator on Long Island and died in 1927.
¹¹

Also trained as a lawyer, Theodore Weld Stanton turned to journalism and reform. It pleased his mother that he was “heart and soul . . . interested in my work.” Too young to serve in the war, Theodore had attended the City College of New York, graduated from Cornell, attended the Sorbonne, and earned an M.A. from Cornell in 1876. After a brief engagement to the daughter of Cornell president and United States ambassador to Germany Andrew Dickinson White, he married a Frenchwoman, Marguerite Berry, in 1881. Stanton was pleased that her athletic, attractive daughter-in-law had “strong bones and sound teeth.”
¹²
The couple presented Stanton with her first grandchild, Elizabeth Cady Stanton II, called Lizette, in 1882. Theodore and his wife had two other children who survived infancy, Robert and Helene.