Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  Up to 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had always been convinced that eventually reason would prevail and women would be given their rights. After 1868, when the 14th Amendment was finally ratified, she lost that faith (although never the greater faith that women would in the end secure the vote even if it was not handed to them). She became tougher and cynical. She saw that the time was over for developing and expounding civilized arguments. “There are no new arguments to be made . . . our work today is to apply ourselves to those so familiar to all,”42 she commented, but agreed that it was important to keep them at the forefront of people’s minds. To that end she and Susan began a newspaper, the Revolution, with George Train, financier, speculator and a decided eccentric, as their backer. They produced a wholly Woman’s Rights paper with the stirring banner “Principles, not policy; justice, not favor; men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” Elizabeth hoped she was helping to inaugurate a new era and when a friend soothed her disappointment over the 14th Amendment’s failure to include women with the assurance that in another twenty years the vote would certainly be theirs she replied, “Twenty years! Why, every white male in the nation will be tied to an apron string by that time while all the poets and philosophers will be writing essays on the sphere of man.”43 There was a new urgency about her work and instead of being disheartened she was more determined than ever. She was also more able as well as willing to devote her prodigious energies to working for the vote. For the first time, the prospect of leaving home for weeks at a time was considered. She had seven children by then but the youngest, Robert, born in 1859, was nearly ten and more than capable of being left in the care of a housekeeper and his father. There were no babies to tear at her heart strings, no small children barely tottering about to give her nightmares if she did not supervise them herself.

  For the next twelve years, 1868 to 1880, Elizabeth Cady Stanton intermittently travelled the country lecturing on woman’s rights issues. “It makes me shudder,” she wrote when this period of her life was over, “to think of my weary lecture tours from Maine to Texas . . .”44 Her father was appalled at the vulgarity of this “tramping about” and Henry objected but she was past caring what either thought. Nothing was going to stop her. Off she went to California, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Nebraska, becoming more and more radical as she went. Although she asserted, “I do not believe there was ever a woman who esteemed it such a privilege to stay at home,”45 she proved herself curiously suited to the life. When male lecturers pronounced themselves unable to fulfil engagements because of weather conditions she gloried in getting through the snow and ice. She slept in cabins and huts, on floors and porches, in carriages and trains. She revelled, too, in the barracking of the lecture hall and was quick and witty in response. One small, skinny man once shouted out didn’t she think his wife was doing more good bearing him eight children than anything she might do otherwise and Elizabeth retorted to the delight of the crowd, “I have met few men worth repeating eight times.”46 But she learned, all the same, to beware of men like that questioner when she was distributing leaflets and never offered one to “a man with a small head and high heels on his boots, with his chin in the air, because I know in the nature of things that he will be jealous of superior women.”47 She knew arousing jealousy was no way in which to proceed. It was even more a waste of time to offer a leaflet to a woman whose mouth had “the prunes and prisms expression for I know she will say ‘I have all the rights I want.’”48 Again, antagonism was not to be desired. She learned to be forbearing and not to let opposition rile her. She learned too to snatch time off when she could and not to fuss if plans were upset. And although she swore frequently that she felt “like a squeezed sponge” she clearly thrived on her exacting itinerary (as well as making a good deal of money which she used to put her two daughters through college).

  Everywhere she went Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw more and more the true circumstances of women’s lives. She saw that they were hard and understood better than most Woman’s Rights leaders the burdens women endured. The birth of her last two children had to a great extent changed her own outlook on maternity. Even childbirth itself, once spoken of by her so lyrically, had come to take on a new and dreaded aspect. She was forty-one when Harriet was born in 1856 and forty-four when she had her last child, Robert. She wrote after Robert’s birth, “My labour was long and severe . . . I am through the siege once more.”49 There were no more boasts of bouncing up and writing letters minutes after “that beautiful, natural act.” She loved all her children passionately but saw how too many could drain a woman of energy and pull her down, especially if she was not protected, as Elizabeth knew herself to be, by the benefits of money. She also knew that not even money could protect a mother from guilt about neglecting her children if she did anything for herself. She could write with anguish, “I feel guilty when I have a sick child,” and also, “once in a while, in thinking what I might have done for my children, I feel suddenly depressed . . .”50 It was hard to impress upon audiences containing women who were much more aware of these problems than she was that they must not allow themselves to be subjugated by husbands or children, that they must assert themselves and retain their individuality. In spite of all her work and her fame she was never sure that she was doing so herself. But she held firmly to her extremist views and continued to believe that obtaining the vote would change everything. Women would not only get rights but adopt different attitudes and be treated differently – a wonderful circle of beneficial effects would be started.

  There was still, after another ten years, no sign of it. The Seneca Falls Convention had been in 1848; by 1858 the signs that female suffrage would be granted were there; then came the Civil War and by 1868 no woman in the United States of America yet had the vote. Furthermore, although the ranks of those agitating for female suffrage swelled all the time, there was dissension among them.

  Elizabeth and Susan began to think it was time they should have their own organization, formed specifically to achieve woman’s suffrage, instead of merely being a part of the all-embracing Equal Rights Association. In May 1869, tired of being what they called betrayed by men, the National Woman Suffrage Association was set up for women only. Naturally, there were many who up to then had supported Elizabeth and Susan who now decided they did not like this development and could not join the new Association. One of them was Lucy Stone, herself by then almost as powerful as Elizabeth and Susan. In the following November she set up the American Suffrage Association. For the next twenty years the two rival associations operated independently, which seemed a ridiculous waste of resources. The ASA concentrated on practical work for the franchise and nothing else: they wanted suffrage to be a straightforward, “clean” issue not tarnished by controversial other questions like the divorce question. They also wanted to work for suffrage at state level, converting each state legislature as it went along. The NWSA, on the other hand, had no desire to separate suffrage from other issues affecting women. Indeed, Elizabeth herself thought this attitude cowardly. She wanted to engage battle on every front and not only win the vote but have a programme of reform ready for when it was won. “It is puerile,” she said scornfully, “to say ‘no matter how we use the ballot the right is ours.’”51 Nor did she have any intention of working away humbly at state level. It was all part of the plot to try to make female suffrage tame and respectable when in her opinion it could never be that and ought not to try. “Society as organised today under the man power is one grand rape of womanhood,”52 thundered Elizabeth. It was exactly language like that which alienated those who joined the ASA. When, in addition to this kind of provocative statement, Elizabeth also started attacking religion and claiming that “bibles, prayerbooks, catechisms and encyclical letters” were all simply instruments used to oppress women, even her own followers shuddered. The vote would never be won by such attacks.

  It seemed, by the mid-seventies, that it would never be won anyway. The women of
Wyoming had thrilled everyone involved in the Woman’s Rights movement by gaining their vote in 1869, followed by those in Utah in 1870, but there were special reasons why they had been able to manage such a victory in those far off, outlying Western Frontier territories. Elsewhere, campaign after campaign failed even when hopes ran high. The History of Woman Suffrage records how the Woman’s Rights ladies felt as they watched the new voters, enfranchised by the 14th and 15th Amendments, go to the polls. “It was a sight to be remembered to behold women crowned with honour standing at the polls to see the freed slave go by and vote, and the newly naturalized fellow citizen, and the blind, the paralytic, the boy of 21 with his newly fledged vote, the drunken man . . . the man who read his paper upside down.” Everyone, it seemed, except women. It disgusted Elizabeth Cady Stanton. More and more it seemed to her that in allowing this state of affairs the constitution had been violated. It began, after all, with the words “We, the people of the United States of America . . .” Were women not people? Why should women even need a special amendment to enable them to vote? Why did those words not secure this right to them? But a test case introduced into the Supreme Court arguing this failed in 1875. A special amendment was after all going to be necessary.

  By this time Elizabeth Cady Stanton was sixty years old, white-haired and stout but mentally as alert and sharp as ever. Her family were all grown-up and her relationship with Henry cordial but no longer close. In many ways, she was at the height of her powers, freed at last from those domestic ties – which even when they had loosened still bound her until Robert went to college – and hardened by experience. She was ready for one more mighty attempt on Congress when, in 1878, a committee was appointed to receive a deputation from the NWSA asking for a i6th Amendment. Excitement ran high; this time enough senators had promised support. But Elizabeth said she had never, ever, been so humiliated as she stood before the committee pleading the woman’s cause. Her anger grew greater every minute as “standing before a committee of men many years my juniors, all comfortably seated in armchairs, I pleaded for rights they all enjoyed though in no respect my seniors, denied me on the shallow grounds of sex. But this humiliation I had often felt before. The peculiarly aggravating feature of the present occasion was the studied inattention and contempt of the chairman, Senator Wadleigh of New Hampshire . . . He . . . took special pains not to listen. He alternately looked over some manuscripts and newspapers before him then jumped up to open or close a door or window. He stretched, yawned, gazed at the ceiling, cut his nails, sharpened his pencil, changing his occupation and position every two minutes, effectually preventing the establishment of the faintest magnetic current between the speakers and the committee. It was with difficulty I restrained the impulse more than once to hurl my manuscript at his head.”53 The petition for a 16th Amendment was of course rejected. More humiliation followed. In 1882 both Houses appointed Select Committees on Woman’s Suffrage which reported favourably but no bill resulted. In all the vital votings after debates senators always let the women down. It was not until 1887 that an actual bill struggled onto the floor and it was promptly defeated by thirty-four to sixteen votes with twenty-six abstaining. Was there really any point in going on?

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton never doubted that there was. She realized it was all taking too long – “we reach the women too late with the new gospel and then it requires great labour to plant the seed”54 – but she never doubted for one moment the final outcome. When Colorado carried woman’s suffrage in 1893 she wrote, “My soul rejoices, but how slowly the world moves.”55 She was seventy-eight years old but although her eyes grew dimmer her intellectual vision grew brighter. She never despaired. There was a kind of exhilaration present during her old age which continued to inspire as well as amaze all with whom she came into contact. It did not matter that “our movement is belated and like all things too long postponed now gets on everyone’s nerves.”56 The thing to do was what she herself did: she rose above the dreariness and tedium and kept plugging away against all the vested interests deliberately scheming to stave off the inevitable. They would not be able to stop progress forever – the dam simply could not hold. To her joy, there was a whole new generation of women, twice as vociferous as she and Susan had been, clamouring to carry on the work. In 1890 the two rival suffrage organizations had been re-united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association and Elizabeth had become president but in 1892 she felt she could safely take a back seat and she resigned. The movement, with the younger Susan at its head, could manage without her. Coming up to succeed her was Carrie Chapman Catt – there were no worries that without Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan Anthony leadership would vanish. Their active contribution was finished.

  Elizabeth enjoyed old age as few are able to do. Unlike the majority of early active feminist leaders she had never complained of constant ill-health or threatened imminent death. Tiredness was her only problem and even then none of her correspondence or diaries breathe quite the same sense of exhaustion as the others’. Her weight, which others thought excessive, never troubled her nor does it seem to have caused her any of the health problems that might have been expected – she really was fat and happy, with a great love of food. In France she once complained she missed muffins, cream, butter and powdered sugar, all items of which an eleven stone elderly lady of only five feet three inches ought to have been glad to be deprived. But, as she wrote on her eighty-eighth birthday, “I enjoy life more and more.”57 Her one regret was that she had not married a dentist because her teeth were paining her. Henry had died in 1887. They had never come to any official parting of the ways nor had they openly had liaisons with anyone else but his death was no tragic event in Elizabeth’s life in spite of forty-seven years of marriage. She heard of his death while she was in England staying with her daughter Harriet at Basingstoke and was quiet for a while and generally sad but by no means distraught. Henry had faded in her life long ago – it was her children who preoccupied her, especially her two daughters and her fourth son, Theodore, and her grandchildren – Nora, Harriet’s daughter, was her great delight. Nora came to America to go to Cornell to study architecture and engineering and stayed with her grandmother in her apartment on West 94th Street in New York. She was one of those younger volunteers who read to Elizabeth when cataracts deprived her of this greatest of pleasures.

  But as well as the love and support of her family Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s last years were illuminated by her strong sense of universal sisterhood. She never felt lost or lonely, never felt isolated or cut off even when technically she was for short periods. On the contrary, she had a highly developed spiritual feeling of companionship. “Through suffering we have learned the open sesame to the hearts of each other,” she wrote. “There is a language of universal significance . . . by which with a sigh or a tear, a gesture . . . we know the experiences of each other in the varied forms of slavery.”58 That was more important to her in her declining years than anything else. Until she was too old to travel she also loved to visit other countries and immediately became aware that her feelings of identification with all other women because they were women were not flights of fancy. In both France and England she felt “at one” with others and she loved it. Whether she was having breakfast with Josephine Butler or tea with Elizabeth Blackwell she would feel excited, too, by an additional sense of common destiny: they had all been born to start things off, to fight for all women. There was nothing vain or egocentric about this feeling of being chosen – she was no megalomaniac – but rather a humility and deep happiness. Her life meant something. It was not conceit to say so. There seemed no harm in relishing her own fame because she had earned it and because it meant something significant had been achieved for her. cause. It did not seem to her a tragedy that she was not going to live to see women enfranchised – she accepted this philosophically, saying, “I should feel that I had not lived in vain if faith of mine could roll off the soul of woman that dark cloud, that nightmare, that false belief th
at all her weaknesses and disabilities are natural . . .”59 And it had. The vote, which she had absolute faith would come, would be the culmination of all her efforts, and the efforts of all the hundreds of others who had joined her after her brave stand at Seneca Falls, and at last women would move forward to take their true place in society. She died on 26 October, 1902 quite confident.

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  “I wish you and I had been beautiful,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Susan Anthony in 1864, “then we could have carried all men with us to heights divine and entrenched them on principle.”60 Even as a joke this carries the unmistakable stamp of her particular brand of feminism. She was always proud to be a woman and she enjoyed her womanhood. The only time she ever wanted to be male was when she was a child for her father’s sake and she came, very quickly, to pity him for his misguided reverence for the importance of gender. Throughout her career Judge Cady continued to upbraid his daughter for behaving in an unwomanly fashion but she continued to resist his efforts to make her conform to any feminine stereotype. It often pained her deeply to do so. “I cannot tell you how deep the iron entered my soul,” she commented after one such battle. “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.”61 She herself valued her own femininity highly and never thought of it as being in the least diminished by anything she wrote, said or did. Nor did she feel any shame in exploiting it where and when it was useful, although her attitude was in fact dangerous for feminism. On the one hand, Elizabeth Cady Stanton denied the existence of any weakness in woman which might prohibit them from sharing fully in the governing of their country but on the other hand she urged women to stress this very weakness to use against men.