In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (10 page)

Elizabeth was pleased with the arrangement. Freed from domestic responsibilities by her family’s servants, she remembered these years as
“pleasant and profitable.” She enjoyed the company of her sisters and “read law, history, political economy, with occasional interruptions to take part in some temperance or anti-slavery excitement.” She taught a Sunday school class for black children, but resigned when her students were not allowed to participate in a church festival. She made her first speech, on temperance, to a group of women in Seneca Falls. She reported to a friend that she had infused it “with a homeopathic dose of women’s rights as I take care to do in many private conversations.”
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She corresponded regularly with the women she had met in London, writing about politics, religion, and reform, occasionally penciling a recipe for calves’ foot jelly or date bread on the envelope.

Henry’s decision to study law and live with his in-laws was criticized by his former allies. They accused him of abandoning abolition and elevating himself to law and politics. Their wives were equally forthright, needling Elizabeth either for sharing Henry’s politics or for not doing so. On abolition questions Mrs. Stanton genuinely agreed with Henry’s anti-Garrisonian position. “Slavery is a political question, created and sustained by law and must be put down by law,” she responded to Elizabeth Neall. As she explained to another correspondent, she had come to that conclusion independent of Henry.

It may be that my great love for Henry may warp my judgment in favor of some of his opinions but I claim the right to look at his actions and opinions with the same freedom and impartiality that I do at those of any other man. Well, then, as I am not yet fully converted to the doctrine of no human government, I am in favor of political action and the organization of a Third Party is the most efficient way of calling forth and directing action. So long as we are to be governed by human laws, I should be unwilling to have the making and administration of these laws left entirely to the selfish and unprincipled part of the community.
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Mrs. Stanton continued to differ with Henry on women’s rights and to admire Garrison for his “noble views” on women. She refused to attend antislavery meetings with her husband, she explained to another correspondent, “because I knew I would have no voice.” In case there was any doubt about the source of her opinions, she added, “I do in truth think and act for myself deeming that I alone am responsible for the sayings and doings of E.C.S.”
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A feminist thread runs throughout Stanton’s post-London correspondence. She was aware of and annoyed by the treatment of women. To Lucretia Mott she admitted in 1841, “The more I think on the present condition of woman, the more I am oppressed with the reality of her degradation.” It was at this time that she first insisted on being addressed by her full name, as a symbol of her individuality and independence.
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She
also established her habit of reading, analyzing, arguing, and defending her position on serious questions.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was still living at home when her first child, Daniel Cady Stanton (Neil), was born on March 2, 1842. Henry was absent on antislavery business. Two years later, in March 1844, Henry B. Stanton (Kit) was born at Judge Cady’s townhouse in Albany. Their third son, Gerrit Smith Stanton (Gat), was born in Boston on September 18, 1845. The young mother read the latest opinions on child care, experimented with her infants, and discarded outdated methods. As she recalled in her autobiography, “Though uncertain at every step of my own knowledge, I learned another lesson in self-reliance.”
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Her innovations seemed to work; the boys thrived, and she enjoyed her role. Motherhood provided Elizabeth Cady Stanton with another means through which she felt successful and in charge.

After weighing several opportunities in New York, Michigan, and Massachusetts, Henry Stanton had decided to practice law in Boston. He passed the Massachusetts bar in October 1842 and entered the office of Samuel Sewall. Henry had chosen Boston in order to challenge Garrison on his home ground. He hoped the city offered a congenial constituency for a future campaign. He was already well known among reformers, if not wholly admired. Garrisonians condemned him for pursuing politics “at the expense of principle.” Henry had been active in the Liberty party’s 1842 campaign in Massachusetts, in which it doubled its previous vote and elected several men to the legislature. He served as chairman of the party’s state central committee in 1843 and kept alert for an elective opening for himself.
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Spending so much time on politics did not reward Henry’s pocketbook. As always, he admitted he had “pressing liabilities.” In a rare reference to Elizabeth’s attitude about his chronic poverty, Henry confessed to a friend, “My wife feels very bad, and is sometimes quite gloomy with the apprehension that we shall not get through the coming year.” His colleagues assumed he was supported by her wealthy family, so Henry had to plead for repayment of debts owed him. He was forced to explain their position. “True, my father-in-law is worth some property; but he does not give his sons-in-law a dollar and will not till he dies, except to keep them from starving, thinking it better . . . to aid them indirectly by throwing business their way, and thus make them climb up as he did, by their own strength.”
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Henry struggled on, just barely making ends meet.

Whether on account of their money problems or her second pregnancy, Elizabeth Stanton spent much of 1842 and 1843 in Albany with the Cady family. The judge had installed his extended family in a townhouse in the state capital, intending to establish the husbands of his two youngest
daughters in the legal profession. The ménage included the Cady parents, three daughters, two sons-in-law, and two grandchildren. The Albany sojourns gave the middle Cady daughter an opportunity to live comfortably, share child care, and dabble in reform.

Although she always exaggerated her own role in retrospective accounts, Mrs. Stanton did lobby for the New York Married Women’s Property Act. The first bill to ensure that married women could hold title to property in their own right, introduced in 1836, had failed for lack of interest. Renewed impetus for such a reform followed economic instability, when the panic of 1837 had demonstrated to many bankrupt businessmen the danger of losing their wives’ property to their creditors. Fathers like Judge Cady, whose entire fortune would be inherited by married daughters, also had an interest in guaranteeing its safekeeping from errant sons-in-law. At first more men than women expressed an interest in the issue. When Ernestine Rose and Paulina Wright Davis circulated petitions urging reform of the old laws in 1840, only five women signed.
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Concern increased in the 1840s. During Elizabeth Stanton’s visits to Albany from 1843 to 1845, she joined other women in circulating petitions and, with her father’s blessing, lobbied members of the legislature. The bill appealed to Mrs. Stanton’s general interest in women’s rights and her personal stake in property rights. It finally passed in 1848, the first of its kind in the country.
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During their separations Henry wrote frequently, complaining that Elizabeth did not. His letters were graceful, witty, sometimes passionate, always interesting. He addressed Elizabeth with such endearments as “my lovely Lee.” Without her he felt “lonesome, cheerless, and homeless.” Typically, he “forgot to leave cash.” Henry’s tone was not always affectionate. He admitted to “coldness and unkindness.” Friends wondered among themselves what Elizabeth saw in Henry; one “personally would pick his eyes out if she were treated so badly.” Sarah Grimké found them both lacking: “Henry greatly needs a humble, holy companion, and she needs the same.”
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For six months in 1842 the Stantons and their first son had boarded in Boston with a Baptist minister who was married to a Cady relative, but Albany was a more comfortable and less expensive alternative. Finally Elizabeth’s father came to their aid, again providing housing. Soon after the birth of their second child, Judge Cady gave the couple a house in Chelsea, an area overlooking the Back Bay. In June 1844 Elizabeth and her sons moved back to Boston.

The new house was newly furnished, and Elizabeth was delighted to be head of her own household at last. What she lacked in domestic experience she made up for in enthusiasm. She “studied up everything pertaining to housekeeping and enjoyed it all.” She recorded daily expenses in a “little family book,” supervised two servants and three children, inspired the laundress to have a whiter wash than the neighbors’, filled the rooms with books and flowers, and experimented in the kitchen on the cook’s day off. She recalled that the doctrine of separate spheres prevailed. “Mr. Stanton announced to me that his business would occupy all his time, and that I must take entire charge of the housekeeping.” Rather than resent his lack of interest, she relished the responsibility. “It is a proud moment in a woman’s life to reign supreme within four walls, to be the one to whom all questions . . . are referred.”
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She was finally fulfilling her mother’s role, becoming a domestic monarch. Like motherhood, household management gave her another source of success and self-confidence.

The only drawback to domestic bliss was the servant problem. Mrs. Stanton remembered that Rose the cook, who had been “scientifically” selected by a phrenologist, burned the dinner and scalded the baby, prompting Henry to suggest that next time Elizabeth ask for references. Whenever “glaring blunders in the menu were exceedingly mortifying,” she urged Henry to cover the defects with brilliant conversation.
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Despite an unreliable kitchen staff, the Stantons entertained frequently. A list of their friends reads like a roster of reformers: Lydia Maria Child, Parker Pillsbury, Abby Kelley and Stephen Foster, Paulina Wright Davis, Samuel Sewall and his wife, Elizabeth Peabody, Maria Weston and her sisters, Oliver and Marianna Johnson, Joseph and Thankful Southwick, Frederick Douglass, Charles Hovey, Francis Jackson and his daughter, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Pierpont, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. They even exchanged dinners with the Garrisons.

It was a stimulating life for Elizabeth. “I attend all sorts and sizes of meetings and lectures,” she wrote a friend. “I consider myself in a kind of moral museum and I find that Boston affords as many curiosities in her way as does the British Museum in its.” She had the leisure to read widely, to join “conversation clubs,” and to attend lectures, sermons, concerts, antislavery bazaars, and meetings about peace, temperance, and prison reform.
She visited Brook Farm and was impressed by the experiment in community living. “All sorts of new ideas are seething,” she reported in a letter to her mother, “but I haven’t either time or place even to enumerate them, and if I did you and my good father would probably balk at most of them.”
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Despite an environment congenial to reformers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not distinguish herself in that circle. She lived in a community in which reform activity for women was expected and approved, but she participated only superficially. There is no record of leadership or even of membership in any reform society. Nor was there any shared reform activity with Henry. As the political abolitionists turned their energies to electoral strategy, women were automatically excluded.
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Throughout the 1840s Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott exchanged letters, most of them about religious subjects. On one occasion when they spent the day together in Boston, they discussed the possibility of holding a women’s rights meeting there.
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Why they did not pursue their London plan remains a question. Mrs. Mott was distracted at the time by the death of her mother, personal illness, and Quaker intrigues. Mrs. Stanton had the opportunity and interest but lacked incentive and experience. Perhaps without Mott she felt too immature to take the lead. Perhaps she was hesitant to ally with the Garrisonians on women’s rights when Henry was contesting them on abolition tactics. Perhaps the need to discuss women’s rights and wrongs seemed less imperative and less immediate in such a society than it would in another setting.

In Boston, Mrs. Stanton was more interested in religious questions than women’s rights. She was pursuing a personal, mental independence from the Calvinist influences of her childhood. Encouraged and emboldened by Mrs. Mott, she investigated theological issues. She had, she wrote, a “hungering, thirsting condition for truth.” In the 1840s Boston was the center of religious liberalism, and Theodore Parker was its leader. Among his admirers was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. To another Parker enthusiast she wrote in 1846: “I too have taken deep draughts from the same source and feel refreshed. I have heard a course of lectures from him and am now reading his discourses. . . . He finds my soul—he speaks to me or rather God (through him) to me.”
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One of Emerson’s neighbors in Concord, Theodore Parker combined Unitarianism, transcendentalism, and Christian perfectionism.
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Like the revivalists, religious liberals rejected Calvinist determinism in favor of free
will. They stressed individual responsibility for salvation and individual divinity. Parker preached God’s presence in each person and His accessibility to men and women. He refused to take Scripture literally and suggested that God was an androgynous figure. His was an optimistic, romantic, humanistic creed that credited each individual conscience with the ability to intuit God’s will. Parker’s ideas freed Mrs. Stanton from the religious superstitions and fears of her youth. In his emphasis on the individual she found tacit approval for her own position, no matter what it was. Theodore Parker’s liberal theology contributed to her self-esteem. Long before she achieved political rights or social equity, she had declared her religious independence.