Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights Thinker, and the Prejudice in Her Politics

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was the leading activist-intellectual of the nineteenth-century movement for women's rights: to education, to property and to a voice in public life, including the vote, which Americans of her time increasingly saw as a mark of citizenship. Lori D. Ginzberg, a professor of History and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, traces her life in an essay originally published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission and now on the National Park Service's site. This page retells it in new words.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Credit: Library of Congress.

From Johnstown to Seneca Falls

Elizabeth Cady was born in Johnstown, New York, into a conservative family that owned slaves and held conventional ideas about women's place. Ginzberg says that mix of privilege and exclusion shaped her thinking. Stanton later recalled that at eleven she tried to console her father, Judge Daniel Cady, after the death of his son, and he sighed that he wished she had been a boy. She got the best education open to girls, at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, but resented that it was merely "fashionable," and she turned such resentments into a broad fight against women's exclusion from men's educational, legal and political rights.

At the home of her cousin, the radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith, she met the antislavery lecturer Henry Brewster Stanton, and they married in 1840. In London, where Henry was a delegate to the World Antislavery Convention, she saw female abolitionists, Lucretia Mott among them, refused seats as delegates, while a few men, notably William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Lenox Remond, joined them in protest. Eight years later, a mother of three small boys in Seneca Falls and eager to put her mind to work, she and Mott and several friends called a convention there.

About three hundred people crowded into the Wesleyan Church in July 1848. Most were abolitionists, used to being thought the radical fringe, and woman's rights had been talked about in their circles for years. Even so, the "Declaration of Sentiments" that Stanton and Elizabeth McClintock wrote, presented and the convention adopted was extraordinary. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it declared that "All men and women are created equal" and blamed "mankind" for shutting women out of the nation's revolutionary promise. Though the vote came to seem the convention's central demand, the Declaration listed many injuries. Marriage laws made wives promise obedience, kept them from inheriting or controlling property and, in a divorce, from keeping their children. Women were barred from "all the profitable employments," silenced by religious teaching, judged by a double standard of morality, and pushed to lose confidence in their own powers.

Susan B. Anthony (left) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (right). Credit: Library of Congress.

Half a century of agitation

For the next fifty years, with Susan B. Anthony, whom she met in 1851, Stanton wrote, spoke and agitated for woman's rights, including the vote but never only the vote. In some ways her life was conventional: she was married and the mother of seven, and a housekeeper, Amelia Willard, made her public work possible. Yet she was always restless, and in 1852 she wrote a friend that she was at the boiling point and would die of intellectual repression if she could not soon use her tongue on the question.

She found it. Writing as "Sunflower," she filled The Lily with articles on the limits placed on women's freedom, published The Revolution with Anthony, and lectured across the Northern and Western states. She argued for dress reform and wore the "Bloomer costume" for two years of what she called incredible freedom. She talked to women about child-raising, marriage and, most radically, divorce. A skeptic about organized religion, she wrote the controversial Women's Bible and was censured for it by the suffrage organization she had helped found and lead. With Anthony she led the wartime Women's Loyal National League and, after the Civil War, the National Woman Suffrage Association. She disliked conventions and resisted Anthony's pleas to attend them. As white, middle-class women gradually won property rights and access to higher education, Anthony turned more and more to a constitutional amendment giving women the vote, while Stanton preferred to launch new ideas and delighted in having thrown a bombshell into the center of women's degradation.

Frederick Douglass. Credit: Library of Congress.

Prejudice and the split

Stanton's case for the vote rested on a simple idea: no one should lose the rights of a citizen because of sex. But Ginzberg writes that her appeals to universal justice were shot through with racism and class prejudice. Already in 1848 the Declaration of Sentiments complained that women lacked rights given to "the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners," and Stanton's sense of entitlement as an educated, white, native-born woman shaped her priorities.

Those prejudices became plain, and divisive, right after the Civil War. In the late 1860s many abolitionists who had long backed women's rights, among them Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass, joined the Radical Republicans in arguing that the vote was more urgent for African American men than for women. Stanton and Anthony were outraged. Calling themselves defenders of universal liberty, they still fell back on the view that some people were better fit to vote than others, and Stanton insisted that if suffrage came in stages it would be wiser and safer “to enfranchise the higher orders of womanhood than the lower orders of black and white, washed and unwashed, lettered and unlettered manhood.” When the abolitionist and women's rights coalition ended, an independent women's suffrage movement appeared in 1869, split between two competing organizations, and Stanton and Anthony led the National Woman Suffrage Association for much of the rest of their lives.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch. Credit: Library of Congress.

Stanton never settled on one demand and never slowed down. Nearing seventy-five she said she meant to tone up rather than down. In the 1880s she, Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage gathered nearly half a century of documents and edited the first volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage, partly to shape their own legacy as leaders, and in 1898 she published her autobiography, Eighty Years and More.

A contested legacy

Ginzberg calls Stanton an absolutist and a controversial figure. In her own day many thought her a dangerous radical who would turn the world upside down by demanding women's full legal, political and religious equality, while thousands who heard her lecture found her thrilling, someone who turned their frustrations into a platform for action. Anthony became the figure most tied to the vote, but to many feminists of the 1970s Stanton embodied the idea that the personal is political, in critiques of marriage, motherhood and domestic violence that went beyond legal and political equality.

Historians find her complex and often contradictory. Almost all acknowledge and regret her bigoted rhetoric, but they differ on how deep it ran in her thinking. Some see her elitism as typical of her era and class, and some see her bigotry as a strategic choice under hard political conditions. Many argue that her priorities narrowed her idea of women's rights to what white, middle-class women most wanted and largely won. For her, the vote would make women like herself, educated, native-born and white, independent citizens beside men. African American, working-class and immigrant women often saw the vote less as a symbol than as a tool their communities badly needed to advance economically, to demand protection from violence and to be heard. Ginzberg concludes that Stanton's inability to see that view as a real challenge to individualist ideals was a serious failure of her radical imagination. All would likely agree with what Stanton herself predicted: that Americans would someday ask how things could ever have been done otherwise, once women had won educational, economic, marital and political rights.

Sources

• National Park Service, “All Men and Women Are Created Equal:” The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an essay by Lori D. Ginzberg, professor of History and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, originally published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission on July 1, 2020, on its blog; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The commission's logo, the author's biography and the notes and bibliography are left out.