POLITICS
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(BBC Hulton Picture Library)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1815–1902
THE DECISION TO claim the vote changed the nature of feminism more than any other single factor. Right up to the middle of the nineteenth century the whole emphasis in feminism was on putting right existing wrongs within the accepted framework of society. None of the early feminist activists wished to overturn that society or to alter radically the framework. In fact, they were at pains to deny that any sort of revolution in the body politic was necessary. As the activists began to campaign for changes in the laws affecting women, in the education and employment and general treatment of women, they stressed again and again that all they wanted was “justice”. Nobody wanted to take from men what they had, only to share it. The fears of social revolution ending in anarchy were as strong in the feminists as in their opponents. But gradually, as so many changes were resisted, the activists began to understand that until women shared equally in the ruling of their country and in the law-making process they would never succeed in gaining true justice at all. It became no longer sufficient to sit and wait for men to grant what would after all be concessions. What right did they have to this overwhelming power they possessed? Who had given it to them and why? Logically, the most fearless feminist thinkers were led to the conclusion that all their sufferings stemmed from men controlling government in all its forms. And so, in 1848 at Seneca Falls in the State of New York, the first collective public claim was made that women should “secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”
Once this daring claim had been made the suffrage cause was embraced with astonishing passion. Everything suddenly seemed to hinge on gaining the vote. The feminists themselves were breathless with excitement at the glorious vista which opened up before them: give women the vote and the whole world would change. Women’s interests would automatically predominate, women’s problems be recognized and solved, women’s tender influence work miracles. The opponents of female suffrage believed all this would be true if anything more firmly than the feminists themselves. Certainly the world would change and they hated the thought of the consequences so much that they fought against it with absolute fury. Yet both parties were mistaken. One of the most extraordinary aspects of feminist history is how little gaining the vote mattered, even though trying to gain it mattered very much. The truth is that almost every reform that changed women’s place in society had been made, or was well on the way to being made, before the vote was won. Furthermore, society did not change dramatically because of women sharing in government. Women did not act collectively at the polls. Women’s issues did not come to the forefront of political debate. Women did not flock to enter parliaments or congresses throughout the western world. In country after country they proved unable or reluctant to enter the political arena at all. The “feminine influence” was hardly felt. Wars did not stop, the “bond of humanity between all peoples” spoken of was not recognized before all else. Paradise was not gained for feminists or anyone else.
Yet all the prodigious effort expended on giving women the vote was not wasted. The suffragists expected too much once their cause was won but they were correct all the same in thinking political status so important. The suffrage movement had immense practical benefits for feminism and even greater ideological implications. It bound women together in a clearly-defined way which no other issue had ever done. It made feminists, men as well as women, into a collective and carried them into the centre of the stage – no mean feat. But it also altered forever what feminism meant. All talk of merely wanting protection or pleading for merciful justice was finished. The idea that women should stay only within the domestic sphere was finally rejected and with it all notions of basic inferiority. By demanding political power feminists at last grew up. Their self-esteem was raised and with it their expectations. They were elated by their own courage but also frightened. “No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported,” they were warned by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.”1 Learning those laws, learning to stand truly on their own feet, was what being involved in government was supposed to mean. Winning the vote, wherever it was won, removed the last constraints on women’s potential self-fulfilment and for that reason alone it was a vital feminist victory not to be scorned simply because in the end its measurable gains seem few. Each time the vote was won the news travelled fast and wide and inspired feminists everywhere. The first women to win the vote on equal terms with men were those in the state of Wyoming in America in 1869. This was fitting for even if the whole feminist world did not look to little Wyoming for a lead it undoubtedly looked to America where the ladies of Seneca Falls had become the architects of the suffrage movement. What was surprising was that this movement had become necessary at all in this country – the one place where women had had the opportunity to arrange new terms for themselves when they arrived with their men as immigrants.
Women were a vital factor in stabilizing any colony when the new settlers came over in the seventeenth century and they were always in short supply. Of the twenty-nine who came over in the Mayflower, for example, only four were left by the end of the first year and yet they never used their position of strength to give themselves any kind of better deal in the New World. In fact, their position by the early nineteenth century had become every bit as subordinate as it had been back in England. The usual repressive laws and customs with regard to women had been transposed wholesale causing one early feminist writer to complain furiously, “the very phrases used with regard to us are abominable – ‘dead in the law,’ ‘Femme couverte’ – how I detest such language.”2 But nobody seems to have objected successfully to it being employed in the first place. Women were given the vote in some of the earlier colonies but appear not to have objected effectively when it was taken from them as new legislatures were formed after Independence. A few brave souls did indeed protest but there was no positive collective resistance. Yet many of the men themselves felt guilty. Tom Paine’s Pennsylvania Magazine carried an article urging men to “feel for the tender sex” because “even in countries where they may be most happy (they are) constrained in their desires, in the disposal of their goods, robbed of freedom and will by the laws, the slaves of opinion which rules them with absolute sway . . . surrounded on all sides by judges who are at once tyrants and their seducers . . .” These noble sentiments achieved nothing, nor had the warning of Abigail Adams who wrote in 1776 to her husband, “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
But no rebellion materialized. The ladies were after all docile for many more years until in the 1830s the formation of Anti-Slavery societies gave women the chance to challenge publicly the accepted status of women. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of a South Carolina slaveholding family, began to address large mixed public audiences, in itself an outrageously daring act, and in the course of their speeches on the rights of slaves they found themselves claiming rights for women, too. The two slaveries became linked: the negro and the woman were both in need of freedom from unjust and unnecessary servitude. Sarah Grimké wrote a series of articles on the Province of Women in which she said: “I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claims to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy.” She said that to her it was perfectly clear that “whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do it is morally right for a woman to do.” It was not so clear to Congress. At that time Congress was considering depriving women of one of the few political rights t
hey had in America – the right to petition. The numbers of petitions brought forward by the Anti-Slavery societies were so vast that in 1834 a measure was introduced in the House of Representatives forbidding the presentation of any more and it took ex-president John Quincy Adams to defend this right. “Why does it follow,” he asked, “that women are fitted for nothing but the cares of domestic life? . . . The mere departure of women from the duties of the domestic circle far from being a reproach to her is a virtue of the highest order.” Even more outspoken was his reply to the assertion that women had no right to petition because they had no right to vote. “Is it so clear,” he asked, “that they have no such right as this last?”
It was exactly this vital question which a young woman called Elizabeth Cady was beginning to ask. It took her until 1848 to formulate properly her thoughts on this subject but when she did, when she and four others proposed Resolution number nine in a Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention, she began a fight that was to last seventy-two years in America, until the final ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution (giving women the vote on equal terms with men) was made in 1920.
* * *
Elizabeth Cady was born on November 12th, 1815 in the small, prosperous New York town of Johnstown. She was the fourth in a family of six surviving children, all of whom were girls except for one, Eleazor. Her father, Daniel Cady, was a judge, elected to Congress the year she was born. He was an awesome figure to his children while they were small, feared and respected rather than liked or loved. Her mother, Margaret, although also clever and strong, had a softer side which prevented Elizabeth’s childhood from being altogether austere. She felt, all the same, that she had been denied the warmth she gave her own children later. Her parents, she recalled, “were as kind, indulgent and considerate as the Puritan ideas of those days permitted but fear, rather than love . . . predominated.”3 Nobody doubted Judge Cady’s immense authority. Most of his work as a lawyer was done at home in the large white framed family house on the corner of Market and Main Streets and his children were used to seeing clients come and go. Their image of him was of a stern figure sitting in his office surrounded by law books dispensing wisdom. He had a large number of female clients and Elizabeth described in her autobiography that she noticed that not only did these women arrive at her father’s office looking anxious and careworn but that they left it looking even more worried and often in tears. This aroused her curiosity (which was always intense). She sat near the door of the office and listened. She heard women tell her father that the farm they had brought to their marriage had been mortgaged by a drunken husband and they did not know what to do. She heard her father, to her astonishment and indignation, tell them that there was nothing they could do. Their farm, or their goods or whatever was under dispute, no longer belonged to them. They were married. What had been theirs was now their husband’s. When the women could not believe this was true Judge Cady would get down one of his law books and show them the relevant passage. It was then that they left, weeping.
The solution seemed to Elizabeth quite simple – all she needed to do was cut out and destroy the offensive passages in the books. Discovered, aged seven, with scissors in her hand and the books before her she was gently put right by her father. Cutting laws out of books would do no good, he told her. He gave her a little lecture on the true nature of law and of the process by which it could be changed. He agreed that the laws affecting women which she had seen him administer were cruel and unjust but emphasized that the law was the law even so. Elizabeth argued back with all the spirit of an intelligent and independent child but her very determination saddened her father. He was aware, even then, that she was the most remarkable of girls and it seemed to him a tragedy: if only she had been a boy what a delight he could have taken in her intellectual strength. As it was, her talents would be wasted. In 1826 his son Eleazor died, aged eighteen, and the waste seemed even more cruel. He shut himself up in his office and when Elizabeth, aged eleven, crept into the darkened room to try to comfort him he could only stroke her hair and wish aloud that she were a boy. Distressed, Elizabeth tried to analyse why boyhood was more desirable than girlhood. How could she become like a boy and console her distraught father? She decided that, essentially, boys were braver and cleverer. Very well, she would visibly demonstrate both courage and learning. She learned to ride a high-spirited horse previously only ridden by men and she learned Greek to a prize-winning standard. But although Judge Cady admired her achievements they seemed to depress him even more – what a wonderful boy Elizabeth would have made.
So his daughter gave up. She also began to query whether being a boy was so desirable anyway. Why should gender be so important? Why should it automatically dictate one’s role in life? All sorts of incidents seemed to her to illustrate the absurdity of this situation and she began to resent it. As President of the local Girls’ Club she helped to raise money to educate a young man for the priesthood and on his graduation sent him money to buy a suit, a hat and cane for the occasion of his first sermon. The young man, upon whom so much girlish effort had been expended, took as his text “But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man but to be in silence” (I. Tim. 2:12). Elizabeth promptly stood up and led her girls out of the church. She refused to stay and listen to such an insult. It proved harder to escape them at home where the students her father had working with him loved to tease her. Two, in particular, were adept at digging out the worst laws with regard to women and taunting her with them. Henry and Edward Bayard, who were living-in students of her father’s, endlessly tormented her. Henry especially was fiendish. One Christmas morning when Elizabeth danced around thrilled with a new necklace Henry said she’d better enjoy it while she could because when she got married her husband was entitled to sell it to buy himself a decent cigar. Elizabeth’s rage was all the worse because by then she knew he was right.
But at least she was not doomed to stay at home and sew, immured in the useless existence of so many of her contemporaries, simply waiting for marriage to release her into another kind of servitude. Instead, she was privileged to enjoy what amounted to the best education a girl could obtain at that time. Until she was fifteen she and her sisters, dressed in red flannel dresses and black alpaca aprons, went to Johnstown Academy with the boys of the town and then, when the boys went on to Union College where girls were not admitted Elizabeth was sent to the Troy Seminary. This progressive school had been established in 1821 by Emma Willard, an educational pioneer as original and daring as the English Misses Beale and Buss and with much the same attitudes. The Troy Seminary was no finishing school concerned with accomplishments. It provided a fairly rigorous course of study along enlightened lines. Geography, for example, involved drawing maps and did not consist of reciting names of capital cities. Both algebra and geometry had a place in the curriculum as well as arithmetic, and learning by rote was discouraged. The girls had to understand what they were doing. Elizabeth, although initially sulky at being sent there instead of to Union College with the boys, quickly understood better than most. She was exactly the kind of girl to profit from Miss Willard’s theories and was afterwards grateful for her luck. But by the time she left Troy nothing had changed in the outside world. Girls went home when their education was finished no matter how progressive that education had been. Again, Elizabeth was luckier than most. The home she returned to provided a stimulating environment, especially as one of the students, Edward Bayard, had married her elder sister Tryphenia. There was plenty of lively conversation, plenty of intellectual nourishment. All it did for Elizabeth was accentuate her desire to escape.
The only place she did manage to escape to was her cousin’s house in Peterboro, another New York State town not far away. This was the home of Gerrit Smith, a nephew of Elizabeth’s mother and a man not really approved of by Judge Cady who thought him a dangerous radical and feared his influence on Elizabeth. He was right to do so. Elizabeth loved the Gerrit Smith
household. It was much freer than the Cady establishment, much more relaxed and easy. The Gerrit Smiths were just as wealthy as the Cadys but it was an unobtrusive wealth. Everything was simpler there. Formality was absent, there was no wine or rich food, people came and went as they wished. The Gerrit Smiths were Quakers and their philosophy was God is Love. To Elizabeth, brought up in a Presbyterian house where God was Fear, this was deeply attractive. She responded to it and revelled in her opinions being sought and held in as much esteem by her cousins as any man’s. She had a real friend there too, Libby, one of the daughters of the family who was exactly her age and every bit as independently inclined. Libby was involved, as were all the Gerrit Smiths, in the anti-slavery movement. A constant stream of young men came to the house on anti-slavery business and runaway slaves were hidden there en route for Canada. Elizabeth was inspired by the idealism and found it hard to go home after each visit. On one visit she met Henry Stanton, a passionate young orator who had dedicated his life to campaigning against slavery, and she found it more difficult than ever to leave.
The only attraction at home was her brother-in-law Edward. Without realizing what was happening Elizabeth had fallen in love with him and he with her. Living as they did in the same house the situation became quite unbearable and the strain of such a relationship was hard to tolerate. Elizabeth could hardly stop seeing Edward but on the other hand, although she was sure she did love him, she could not bring herself to do what he suggested and run away with him. It was not flouting convention which worried her – on the contrary, this appealed to her – but causing her sister and her whole family agonizing pain. Nothing could be worth that, she thought. Martyrdom and self-sacrifice were alien to her nature and repugnant to her but the personal suffering of those she would wrong meant more to her than her own happiness. The temptation was great but she resisted it. But then, after three years of this unhappy struggle with her conscience, Elizabeth met Henry Stanton, who very soon proposed to her. She was under no illusions: she did not love Henry as she loved Edward, yet she was attracted to him and the attraction was strong and confusing. Was physical attraction, in fact, the same as love? Years later, when Elizabeth read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass it annoyed her that the poet seemed unable to believe that a woman could experience sexual attraction in the same way as a man – “he speaks as if the female must be forced to the creative act apparently ignorant of the great natural fact that a healthy woman has as much passion as a man, that she needs nothing stronger than the law of attraction to draw her to the male.”4
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