Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1815-1902
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnstown, NY, in
1815. She was the
daughter of Margaret Livingston and Daniel Cady, a prosperous lawyer, judge, landowner, and congressman, who lamented
his daughter's intellectual abilities being wasted in a woman. After the
death of his only son, he told his daughter, "Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy!"
In addition
to (presumably)
inadvertently giving Cady Stanton an low opinion of the status
of women, her father also illustrated for her through his legal practice the
many inequities of the law towards women. When she tried to cut
the objectionable laws out of his legal texts with a pair of scissors, he told her, "When you are grown up and able to prepare a speech, you must go down to Albany and talk to the legislators . . . And if you can persuade them to pass new laws, the old ones will be dead-letter."
And thus Cady Stanton had an early beginning to her reforming career.
Cady Stanton was given a exceptionally good education
for a woman, including Greek, Latin, and mathematics. Her advanced
education took place at Troy Female Seminary, where she was instructed in logic,
physiology and philosophy. After graduation, she joined the abolitionist
movement, and fell in love with the orator, journalist, and abolitionist Henry
Stanton. When they married, they omitted
the "obey" passage in the marriage vows. Delightfully
characteristically, they went to London for the World's Anti-Slavery Convention
as a honeymoon. Notoriously, women were denied admittance to the
convention, causing William Lloyd Garrison to boycott, and inspiring Lucretia
Mott and Cady Stanton with the resolve to hold their own convention. Eight
years later, this inspiration materialized as the famous
Seneca Falls Convention, at which the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,
a digest of the principle wrongs endured by women at the hands of
men (modeled on the Declaration of Independence), was presented. Cady
Stanton took the opportunity to call for women's suffrage, despite opposition
from fellow convention-goers. This was purportedly the first public
call
for female suffrage in the U.S., and it is characteristic of Stanton to be both
more advanced than her peers and also boldly forthcoming about her beliefs.
In 1951, Cady Stanton met Susan B. Anthony, beginning an epic partnership for the vote. The temperaments of the two women were highly complimentary, with Anthony representing the pragmatic and organizational side of the relationship, while Cady Stanton undertook the oratorical and authorial duties. Stanton said affectionately of her friend. "If there is one part of my life that gives me more intense satisfaction than another, it is my friendship of forty years' standing with Susan B. Anthony... I have had no peace for forty years, since the day we started together on the suffrage expedition . . . She has kept me on the war-path, at the point of the bayonet..." Meanwhile, she was also occupied with raising seven children, in spite of her marriage having cooled considerably.
Anthony and Cady Stanton's first major project was the
publication of a feminist newspaper, The Revolution. This was the
only feminist periodical in the country since
the sale of Amelia Bloomer's Lily. The paper covered a range of
issues, from Tammany Hall corruption to "abortion, prostitution, conditions of prisons and tenement houses, and
the plight of American Indians."
Once again, Cady Stanton's radicalism got her in trouble
with the more conservative branches of the women's movement, and after a few
years, the enterprise failed with the withdrawal of their financial
backer. Nonetheless, while in existence, the paper fulfilled a
crucial role; not the least, perhaps, being Stanton's regular biographical
sketches of professional women, demonstrating the inevitable death of the
"separate spheres" philosophy.
In 1869, Cady Stanton's more ambitious agenda for American feminism led her to create a new organization, the National Women's Suffrage Association, and break with the American Woman Suffrage Association. The latter hoped to achieve the vote on a state-by-state basis, while Stanton, who became president of the new organization, preferred to confront the issue on a national level.
Her next major project was the writing / editing of the History of Woman Suffrage with Anthony and Matilda Joclyn Gage. It was a 3-volume collection of primary texts pertaining to the fight for suffrage, and remains a boon to feminist historians.
Perhaps Cady Stanton's most controversial work (one
which apparently still provokes objections today) was the Woman's Bible
(currently available from Northeastern University Press). The project was
envisioned as a collaboration by women scholars and theologians that would
revise existing misogynist interpretations of the Bible. Although it does
contain contributions from about 30 women, it is dominated by Cady Stanton's
voice, which becomes increasingly impatient throughout the text. While
Cady Stanton initially performs close readings to uncover new feminist
interpretations of the Bible, her long-standing resentment of the role of
organized religion in women's oppression soon emerges, and her critical
voice shifts from re-interpreting the Bible to disclaiming it altogether.
It is the work's strength and weakness that it is a collaborative project, 
since
that allows for a variety of (often conflicting) points of view; but that lack
of a single guiding vision makes the work less satisfying and overly
piece-meal. Nonetheless, it contains a number of creative interpretations,
some compatible with mainstream contemporary Christianity, some still marginal
and challenging.
In addition to discomfiting modern audiences, the book was highly inflammatory in its own time, and sold like the proverbial hotcakes. It also served to isolate the extremely venerable Cady Stanton from the mainstream of the movement, which perhaps is where she preferred to be, anyway. Her final project was her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, and she died in 1902.
Cady Stanton was the engine behind much of late-19th- and early-20th-century feminism. While many suffragist focused exclusively on acquiring the vote, Stanton concerned herself with a variety of very modern-sounding feminist concerns, including the responsibilities of parenthood being shared equally by the sexes, coeducational instruction for children, and the sexual abuse of women. Her radicalism has kept her in Susan B. Anthony's shadow to this very day, but her rigorous intellect and unhesitating commitment to what she believed to be right are an example to feminists now and in the future. Her most characteristic statement of feminist philosophy can be found in her speech "Solitude of Self," which justifies the emancipation and strengthening of women in light of the ineradicable solitariness of all individuals.
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