by Elaine Weiss
The willful, intellectual daughter of a prominent judge in upstate New York, Elizabeth was educated at the finest school open to women at that time—Miss Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary—and was lured away from the polite parlor world of her social set by her cousin Gerrit Smith, a firebrand abolitionist. Smith’s country manor was the scene of a perpetual house party for radical reformers and fugitive slaves (it was a station on the Underground Railroad), and Elizabeth was mesmerized by the dinner table debates over politics and religion. At cousin Gerrit’s house she was introduced to a young seminary dropout, itinerant journalist, and antislavery agent, Henry Brewster Stanton. Elizabeth was charmed by Henry’s persuasive oratory skills and his moral certainty; their honeymoon was a voyage to London to attend the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, where Henry was an American delegate. Elizabeth’s wedding journey set in motion a long chain of events that would lead—almost precisely eight decades later—to Carrie Catt’s trip to Nashville and Josephine Pearson’s mission to confront her there.
The British Parliament had already abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1834, freeing almost a million subjects from bondage, so the focus of the London conclave was on strategies to eliminate slavery in other parts of the world, especially in the United States, where 2.5 million black people were enslaved. Among the approximately fifty American delegates at the London convention were seven women, chosen to represent their Pennsylvania and Massachusetts antislavery societies, groups that not only included women as full-fledged members, but placed them in leadership roles. The American abolitionist standard-bearers, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, insisted on this highly unusual gender equality in their American Anti-Slavery Society, and the women had become adept at organizing, raising funds, and speaking their minds at public forums.
Mott, a forty-seven-year-old mother of five, led this delegation of women to London. She and the six other American women delegates were rejected by the conference organizers: it was improper for women to participate in a public meeting; it went against biblical teachings on women’s role; and it was an affront to societal norms and sensibilities. Allowing women to participate would hold the meeting up to “ridicule” in the morning papers, the men maintained. (That these same rationales—biblical views and societal custom—were routinely employed to defend the institution of slavery itself was an irony not lost on the women.)
Lucretia Mott and Wendell Phillips demanded that the “woman question” be put to the full convention, setting off a bitter debate lasting an entire day, in which 350 men postured and pontificated about women’s “proper sphere”: how she was “constitutionally unfit for public or business meetings” and how God’s law made Eve subordinate to Adam for good reason. Mott was indignant; Elizabeth Stanton was infuriated: “It was really pitiful to hear narrow-minded bigots, pretending to be teachers and leaders of men,” Stanton recalled in her memoirs. “They would have been horrified at the idea of burning the flesh of the distinguished women present with red-hot irons, but the crucifixion of their pride and self-respect, the humiliation of the spirit, seemed to them a most trifling matter.”
The convention voted overwhelmingly to deny the women delegates’ credentials and ejected them from the convention floor, relegating them to an upstairs gallery behind a bar and a cloth curtain. When William Lloyd Garrison arrived, several days late, he refused to take his own seat, instead joining his countrywomen in the gallery: “After battling so many long years, for the liberties of African slaves, I can take no part in a convention that strikes down the most sacred rights of all women,” he insisted.
Their treatment in London was a galvanizing moment, an unexpected pivot point that “stung many women into new thought and action,” Stanton remembered. Mott and Stanton decided that once they returned home they must gather like-minded women to their own meeting, to discuss and demand more equitable treatment for women.
It would be eight years before Mott and Stanton managed to call together that women’s meeting, delayed by distance, distraction, and the arrival of the first three of Stanton’s seven children. They kept in touch by letter and met whenever they could at abolition conferences, keeping the vague idea of this women’s conclave alive; but their notions took real shape over teacups one midsummer afternoon in 1848. Mrs. Mott was attending a Quaker Yearly Meeting in western New York, not far from where Stanton lived. Sitting around a mahogany table, pouring out their frustrations to one another, Stanton, Mott, and three other friends decided to finally do it: to call a convention to discuss women’s rights.
The very phrase “women’s rights” was an oxymoron, they all knew. American women possessed precious few rights under the law of the state or the nation. Elizabeth had learned this while still a girl, in her father’s law office and courtroom, where she often curled up in a corner to read and watch. It was there that she listened to women beg Judge Cady to help protect them from a drunken, abusive husband (men were not punished for beating their wives) or offer counsel on how to obtain a divorce and still keep custody of her children (fathers retained rights of custody). They sought guidance on how to possibly manage on their own—as either a single woman, divorcée, or widow—with limited rights to their own money or property or even inheritance. Judge Cady would listen sympathetically, shake his head, and patiently explain that there was little he could do, that the law offered them little protection, redress, or even legal standing. (Women could neither bring legal suit nor testify in court.)
In one girlish fit of rage, Elizabeth decided to expunge the offending laws by taking a scissors and snipping them out of her father’s law tomes. When he got wind of her silly plot, he explained that a scissors was not an effective way to change the law: when she grew up, she would simply have to convince the legislatures of men to change the laws. That must have seemed like safely far-fetched advice.
Elizabeth was now a married woman—albeit wedded to a progressive-minded man. Nevertheless, she was, in legal terms, Henry’s possession: “civilly dead,” as she summed up a married woman’s legal status. She was chattel, not unlike a slave. Henry was very often away on business or abolitionist work, leaving her alone to contend with all the chores of a growing household. They had moved from Boston to a very small town, Seneca Falls, in the Finger Lakes district of New York State, and she was at once overwhelmed with domestic duties, restless, and bored. It was the perfect time to dream of rebellion: “My experience at the World’s Antislavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences,” she recalled. “It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step. I could not see what to do or where to begin, my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.”
They swiftly created an announcement to be placed in the local papers the next day, calling for a Woman’s Rights Convention “to discuss the social, civil and religious rights of woman” to be held at the Methodist Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls.
The abolition and temperance meetings the women were used to attending always featured a “declaration” of some kind, a statement of principles and purposes, and then some resolutions to agree upon and adopt. The five women leafed through history books and abolitionist literature to find a model, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, Elizabeth picked up a copy of the most revolutionary document she knew, Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and read it aloud. This was it; it had both the eloquence and the fury they needed. She took it apart, line by line, paraphrased and substituted, and came up with her own Declaration of Sentiments, a litany of affronts to the dignity and well-being of women. The cadence was familiar:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied . . . We hold these truths to be self-eviden
t: that all men and women are created equal . . .”
Mrs. Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments was every bit as outrageous in her time as Mr. Jefferson’s had been. It brought up grievances ranging from inequitable divorce, custody and property laws to prohibitions on women’s higher education and entry into fields of medicine, law, and the ministry—and her unequal pay. It castigated the “different code of morals for men and women” as well as a male society that degrades women and keeps her subordinate by “destroying her confidence and self-respect.” But the very first set of grievances Mrs. Stanton listed was, in some ways, the most controversial:
“He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise,” and, “He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.”
Elizabeth was assigned to formulate a list of resolutions, a list of remedies and demands to emerge from the convention. A few days before the convention was to open, she read the resolutions to her husband, Henry, and he readily approved of her efforts, until she got to resolution number nine:
“Resolved: That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”
Henry was appalled. More equitable property rights, divorce laws, and access to education and the professions were one thing, but demanding the vote went too far. The vote meant making decisions for the nation, it meant power, and with all due respect to his wife, power was still the exclusive prerogative of men. If she went ahead with presenting that crazy franchise demand at the convention, Henry told Elizabeth, he would not attend. She refused to cut it; he did not show up.
Even more rattling to Elizabeth was Lucretia Mott’s reaction to the franchise resolution: “Lizzie, Thee will make us ridiculous,” the veteran reformer warned her protégée. “We must go slowly.”
One of Elizabeth’s only allies on resolution nine was a thirty-year-old black man who had recently moved to nearby Rochester to open an abolitionist newspaper. Frederick Douglass had escaped his own slavery just a decade before, but in that short time he had become the great spokesman and powerful symbol for emancipation: his autobiography was a best seller, his lectures were electrifying, his fame propelled the movement. Even more, he was, as he would describe it, an unabashed “Woman’s Rights Man,” as he saw slaves, free blacks, and women all shackled by American law and custom. Very early in his freedom he came to realize that many of the same arguments used to justify the enslavement of black people were employed to explain away women’s subjugation. He’d already had long discussions about these parallels with Elizabeth Stanton, whom he’d come to know when both he and the Stantons lived in Boston during the mid-1840s.
Douglass admired the courage and sacrifice of the abolitionist women who stood on the ramparts with him (and financially supported him), and he decided to settle in Rochester precisely because it was the home of so many female antislavery activists. Douglass published the notice of the women’s rights meeting in his newspaper, North Star, and he made the fifty-mile trip from Rochester to Seneca Falls to see it for himself.
The scene outside the Wesleyan Chapel was startling: in the hours before the meeting began, hundreds of people, both women and men, began arriving in farm wagons and buggies, on horseback and on foot; Stanton and the others had not expected this kind of turnout. The first day was intended to be a “women only” affair, but there were too many men at the door to turn away. More than three hundred people, including many young farm women, packed the chapel, listening eagerly to the spirited talks and participating in the debates, which stretched from morning till late night over the course of two days.
They heard Lucretia Mott give several “eloquent and powerful” talks and heard Elizabeth Stanton’s first major speech. They heard Stanton read aloud the Declaration of Sentiments and then discussed each paragraph; the declaration was passed unanimously by the meeting, and sixty-eight women and thirty-two men stepped forward to affix their signatures to the document.
On the second day, the resolutions were put forward, and the first eight were easily adopted. Then came resolution nine. Mott urged Stanton to withdraw it. Stanton refused. The debate over the suffrage proposal was contentious. Many saw it as a dangerous distraction from the more urgent legal, social, and economic demands, and it looked as though the resolution would go down in defeat. Stanton looked to Frederick Douglass for support. “I knew Frederick, from personal experience, was just the man for the work.”
Douglass asked for the floor, stepped forward. Woman, like the colored man, will never be taken by her brother and lifted to a position, he insisted. What she desires, she must fight for. The ballot was the guarantor of all other rights, the key to liberty, and women must be bold. His arguments, together with Stanton’s, carried the day, if just barely: resolution nine was passed by a slim majority.
Not only did Douglass turn the tide for the suffrage resolution inside the chapel, he returned home to Rochester to publish a highly sympathetic report of the proceedings at Seneca Falls in his North Star, accompanied by an editorial voicing unequivocal support for this new “grand movement”:
“In respect to political rights,” he wrote, “we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. . . . If that government only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land.” Douglass would attend almost every national women’s rights convention for the next fifty years and was one of the staunchest friends of the movement.
Word of the meeting at Seneca Falls spread, producing a torrent of outrage and ridicule. Newspapers denounced it with headlines screaming INSURRECTION OF THE WOMEN and REIGN OF PETTICOATS. Ministers, Bible in hand, delivered angry homilies about woman stepping beyond her proper sphere; those who participated in the Seneca Falls Convention faced derision in their own communities. “So pronounced was the popular voice against us, in the parlor, the press, and the pulpit,” Stanton remembered, “that most of the ladies who attended the convention and signed the Declaration, one by one, withdrew their names. . . . Our friends gave us the cold shoulder and felt themselves disgraced by the whole proceeding. If I had had the slightest premonition of all that was to follow that convention, I fear I should not have had the courage to risk it.”
In truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was rather delighted by all the ink and vitriol spilled on the convention. “That is just what I wanted,” she gleefully wrote to Lucretia. “It will start women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken.”
* * *
Lucy Stone had just graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in America to admit black students and women, and she was already sensitized to the inequalities women faced: as a teacher, she was paid half of what less experienced men earned; as a student, even at progressive Oberlin, she was denied the right to speak or debate in public. She defiantly decided to become a public orator: “I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex,” she wrote to her mother, who did not think this a wise career choice.
Lucy quickly landed a job as a speaker and organizer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, lacing her talks about emancipation with examples of women’s oppression. Her abolitionist employers did not like her mixing the two causes, worrying that the combination would dilute their primary objective or, worse, alienate audiences. “I was a woman before I was an abolitionist,” she replied tartly, but arranged to speak for the society on abolition on weekends while giving her women’s rights lectures on weekdays.
She was a gifted orator, with great persuasive powers and a voice described as a “silver bell.” She helped organize the first national women’s rights conference in 1850, h
eld in Worcester, Massachusetts, featuring a roster of illustrious abolition stars stepping up for the nascent women’s rights cause, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and a former slave who’d taken the name Sojourner Truth. Women’s rights conventions began popping up all over the country, but abolition and temperance continued to be the prime focus of dedicated reformers.
Then in 1851, Mrs. Stanton was introduced to a thirty-year-old teacher turned Anti-Slavery Society organizer named Susan Anthony from Rochester. Susan Anthony was not particularly interested in the “woman question” yet, though she had, in fact, already confronted it: as a schoolteacher she’d been paid much less than her male colleagues, and when she stood up to protest this disparity at a state teachers’ convention, she was booed down for having the temerity to speak. Anthony attended her first women’s rights convention in May 1853. This conference marked her conversion to “the Cause” and the start of her life’s work: “When she once got fairly started in the woman’s rights agitation,” a colleague noted, “she made up for lost time.”
It also marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinary partnerships in American history, a collaboration that lasted for more than half a century and changed the lives of half the nation. They were a study in contrasts: Anthony tall and prim, highly disciplined, and abstemious; Stanton plump and jovial, gregarious, and indulgent. Anthony never married; Stanton enjoyed a long but difficult marriage and a large brood of children. Susan often came to live with the Stantons to babysit, giving Elizabeth a chance to write their polemics. Anthony always referred to her colleague as “Mrs. Stanton”; Elizabeth simply called her friend “Susan.” They were collaborators and co-conspirators, confidantes and critics, clashing sisters. Stanton was “thought” and Anthony was “action.”