In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (43 page)

To remind NAWSA members, Stanton sent unwelcome letters to every meeting from 1893 to 1902. Anthony insisted they be read, even on such controversial subjects as “Educated Suffrage.” In that speech Stanton urged that suffrage be limited to the educated classes, whether male or female. Delivered in Atlanta, the speech led to charges of racism and xenophobia. Stanton’s genuine belief in the benefits of education was both democratic
and elitist. She saw education as a social equalizer and safeguard against the prejudices of immigrants and nativists alike; she expected education to improve and elevate the lower classes. In order to achieve that end, she endorsed a five-day work week, free adult education classes on weekends, and free admission to concerts and museums. But it is also true that America’s foremost feminist held paternalistic views about blacks, immigrants, workers, and Cubans.
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Retirement from NAWSA was one more step toward independence for Stanton. After 1892 she was free to do as she chose. Ironically, she was limited only by her enormous physical bulk. Her legs could no longer support her weight; any activity was difficult. “I cannot clamber up and down platforms, mount long staircases into halls and hotels, be squeezed in the crush at receptions, and do all the other things public life involves,” she wrote in her diary.
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The trouble was compounded by a second fall in late 1894. After that she required two canes, an elevator, an extrawide bed, and eventually a maid to help her bathe and dress.

Immobility determined Stanton’s daily routine. Unable to walk very far, she sat in a specially designed low chair. Her amusements were sedentary. Her days included reading and writing, playing the piano, receiving callers, doing occasional mending, and gambling with Bob, “all this interspersed with delicious little naps.” She amused reporters by making her famous orange cake while sitting at the dining room table. She was honored at luncheons and dinners. She remained an engaging conversationalist and even attracted young male admirers. Despite the “hard work of getting in and out of vehicles,” she took daily drives in Central Park.
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Stanton seldom traveled beyond her family circle. She spent most of the year in the city and divided the summers between Geneva or Peterboro with Libby Miller and Long Island with her children, “sitting on the piazza drinking lemonade and beer.”
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After 1897 she was confined to her apartment. Four of her children lived nearby; the two Europeans came for extended stays and eventually returned to be near her in her old age. From 1898 to 1902 her granddaughter Nora Blatch lived with her during vacations from Cornell.

Despite physical infirmities, Stanton’s mind remained acute. As Anthony confided to Stanton’s cousin, “It is too cruel that such mental powers must be hampered by such a
clumsy body
.” Nor did Anthony let Stanton rest. Stanton joked that Anthony must have “got wind” of her mending Bob’s socks, for she came to ask for yet another speech. She wrote for Anthony for every occasion: letters, speeches, convention calls, resolutions, and eulogies. In the summer of 1892 she wrote Anthony’s remarks to the national party conventions. For the Columbia Exposition of 1893 she wrote five speeches for Anthony to deliver, plus one to be read on her own behalf
at a reunion of Emma Willard alumnae visiting Chicago. Stanton’s authorship of these speeches was either directly acknowledged or widely assumed. Anthony once remarked that she would never be able to publish a collection of her own speeches, because they had all been written by Stanton.
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Stanton seldom delivered her own speeches any more. In June 1892 she attended a reunion at Emma Willard and dedicated the Gurley Memorial Building, the gift of Mrs. Russell Sage. She also spoke at informal “parlor meetings.” But although Theodore and Margaret went to the Chicago Exposition, Stanton did not think she could withstand the heat and crowds. Yet in 1897 she addressed a picnic gathering of one thousand for an hour and a half. Though her legs and eyes were weak, “my voice seems to hold its own,” she observed in her diary.
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Most of Stanton’s energy was spent thinking and writing. Ever since 1848 writing about women’s rights had been both a career and a crusade for her. She did not abandon either in old age. Indeed, age had made her an expert on many subjects in addition to American feminism. What advice was not solicited by reporters she volunteered. Her articles appeared in the
Arena
, the
Critic, Forum
, the
Nation, North American Review
, and the
Westminster Review
, among others. The
Omaha Republican
syndicated her column on women, one of the first in the country. Clara Colby’s
Woman’s Tribune
serialized her reminiscences, which she expanded into an autobiography,
Eighty Years and More
, in 1898.

Published after the uproar caused by
The Woman’s Bible
, Stanton’s autobiography was her apologia. Although she claimed to be writing only the private history of a public woman whose reform career had been documented in
The History of Woman Suffrage
, her autobiography had a political purpose. Stanton was self-consciously reinforcing the image she had created of herself as benign, nurturing, good humored, smart, respectable, and self-reliant. She did not depict incidents in which she might appear to be radical, arrogant, heretical, demanding, self-centered, or difficult to live with. For a supposedly intimate account, the book seldom mentions her mother, husband, or children. It downplays personal and political conflicts. Both Judge Cady and Henry Stanton are portrayed as sympathetic and supportive; the schism of 1869 and the censure of 1896 are omitted.

Although most of the principals were already dead, Stanton chose to present her life as a series of minor challenges, easily overcome by her enterprise and intelligence. The book lacked the introspection of her best speeches and the candor of her correspondence. She refused to admit the obstacles she struggled to overcome to become an independent women, a self-defined self sovereign. Perhaps she chose to appear more commonplace in an effort to have more in common with her readers, to convert them by
an ordinary example rather than to inspire them with extraordinary accomplishments. As she asserted in the preface, she was just a “wife, . . . an enthusiastic housekeeper . . . and the mother of seven children.”

Every subject interested Stanton, from the Spanish-American War to Sunday closing laws and bicycle riding. She espoused coeducation; the admission of women to graduate schools; sensible clothing for women; clean streets; more parks and playgrounds for the children of the poor; free concerts, lectures, dance halls, billiard rooms, and bowling alleys for young people; free reading and smoking rooms for adults; an end to capital punishment; rehabilitation programs in prisons; better cooking; more scientific care of babies and children; free kindergartens; better housing for the poor; and broader participation by women in every aspect of society. She was a prolific and popular writer.

Stanton wrote for propaganda and profit. Her income from writing enabled her to be financially independent of her children. Economy had been one of the factors in her decision to share an apartment with Bob and Margaret. She had a comfortable income from lifetime trust funds established by her son and her sister as well as the profit from the sale of the Tenafly house. These she supplemented with writing fees. As she got older, her children provided more and more support. Bob and Henry assumed the cost of publishing her longer works and paid for the added staff needed for her care.
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Unlike Anthony, Stanton had not been provided with an annuity by the National American Association.

Anthony found it increasingly difficult to dictate Stanton’s subject matter. Rather than issue a collection of her old speeches, as Anthony had suggested, Stanton preferred to tackle new and controversial topics. She did join Anthony in 1894 to lobby another constitutional convention for statewide suffrage in New York. They used tactics similar to those they had employed in 1867. Stanton wrote letters and speeches, Anthony spoke in sixty counties, and Carrie Chapman Catt and Lillie Devereux Blake campaigned intensely in the cities. The suffragists collected half a million petition signatures, but the outlook was bleak. “What a set of jackasses we have at Albany this winter,” exclaimed Mrs. Stanton. “I have written several of them, they simply bray in return.” The question of woman suffrage lost by a two-to-one margin. “I feel sad and disappointed at such contemptuous treatment by so ordinary a body of men,” wrote Stanton in her diary. She blamed the defeat directly on the opposition of the liquor lobby and indirectly on the influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. But she was not long discouraged. “I never forget that we are sowing winter wheat, which the coming spring will see sprout, and other hands than ours will reap and enjoy.”
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In 1895 Stanton and Anthony both celebrated milestones: Stanton turned eighty and Anthony seventy-five. In an era that honored its elders with public receptions, gifts, and testimonials, both women were elaborately feted. In February the National Council of Women sponsored a birthday banquet for Anthony. Her “girls” presented an annuity of eight hundred dollars, and Stanton sent a speech. In return Anthony wanted to recognize Mrs. Stanton, but she had difficulty finding an organizational sponsor. The National American Association had been characteristically reluctant to salute its first president, provoking yet another blast from the feisty old lady. Anthony and Theodore Stanton finally planned a November event under the aegis of the National Council.

In a lavish display the Metropolitan Opera House was rented and festooned with flowers. Carnations spelled out Stanton’s name, and roses banked her chair. Spectators crowded the hall and the sidewalks. More flowers, gifts, and messages flooded her apartment. A letter from a well-known editor was typical of the tributes she received. “Every woman who seeks the legal custody of her children; who finds the door of a college or university open to her; who administers a post-office or a public library; who enters upon a career of medicine, law or theology; who teaches school or tills a farm or keeps a shop or rides a bicycle—every such woman owes her liberty largely to yourself and to your earliest and bravest co-workers.” Propped up by canes, Stanton could not stand long enough to deliver her speech. With unfamiliar modesty, she attributed the public demonstrations “to the great idea I represent—the enfranchisement of women.” Her address was read for her. It stirred up trouble by criticizing the religious traditions and superstitions that subordinated women. Anthony was annoyed “that she did not rest her case after describing the wonderful advances made in state, church, society and home, instead of going on to single out the church and declare it to be especially slow in accepting the doctrine of equality of women.”
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Stanton was touched by the birthday tribute. Henry’s nephew, another Robert Stanton, described her behavior the next day in her apartment, filled with “hundreds of roses.” “Aunt Lib came in. . . . Seating herself at the piano [she] began to play and sing, one after another of the . . . old, old songs of her youth, in a voice and manner so beautiful, so sad and to me, knowing her history as I did, so pathetic, that I was spell bound. Not a word was spoken. She seemed to be far away from us and the throngs that greeted her with so much enthusiasm the night before, and was living over again the days of her youth, seeing life as it was to her sixty or seventy years ago. She finally stopped singing, not from exhaustion but as if she were overcome with emotion and the memories of her youth and turning on her seat, with an expression of sadness on her face, and moistened eyes,
said, ‘Bob, life is a great mystery.’ That was all.”
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Stanton may have been sobered as much by future prospects as by memories of the past. In one final act of defiance, she was about to risk all the respect and admiration she had been shown on her birthday.

Two weeks later Elizabeth Cady Stanton published
The Woman’s Bible
. It was her most audacious and outrageous act of independence. In the guise of Biblical scholarship and interpretation she attacked the use of Scripture to condemn women to a secondary status. She had long believed that “the chief obstacle in the way of woman’s elevation today is the degrading position assigned her in the religion of all countries—an afterthought in creation, the origin of sin, cursed by God, marriage for her a condition of servitude, maternity a degradation, unfit to minister at the altar and in some churches even to sing in the choir. Such is her position in the Bible and religion.”
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For Stanton, as a member of the supposedly inferior female caste, to dare to criticize church authority was considered at best disrespectful, at worst, heretical.

Stanton’s interest in the subject was lifelong. Ever since her adolescent rebellion against Presbyterian gloom and evangelical revival she had pursued religious questions and perused religious texts. Encouraged by Edward Bayard, Lucretia Mott, and Theordore Parker, Stanton gained confidence in her own rational interpretation of the Scriptures. After her marriage she stopped going to church regularly, except to enjoy the music, but she regularly studied religious subjects. She believed in an androgynous Creator, who combined the best character traits of men and women. She even addressed her mealtime grace to “Mother and Father God.” Her moral code was strict, but she adhered to few other religious tenets. She was “reconciled to rest with many debatable questions relegated to the unknown.”
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Stanton’s antipathy to traditional church teachings is understandable. Throughout her career as a reformer most churches had been hostile to the causes she championed. The Bible had been interpreted to favor intemperance, slavery, capital punishment, and the subjection of women. Whenever women attempted to move beyond their “divinely ordained sphere” of domesticity, churchmen charged them with blasphemy and cited the Bible as justification. Whenever women tried to argue the case for equality, they were reminded of St. Paul’s admonition that they remain silent. Whatever advances women tried to make—in education or employment or political rights—were held to contradict the will and the word of God as revealed in the Scriptures and interpreted by ministers.