In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (14 page)

It was more than two years after the 1848 meeting before Mrs. Stanton began to feel the strain of competing public and private roles. The anger and isolation that had provoked her participation in the first women’s rights convention had been dissipated once she had expressed it in the demands of the Declaration of Sentiments. Having vented her frustration and voiced her protest, she regained her equanimity. As she later reflected in her autobiography, “With these new duties and interests, and a broader outlook on human life, my petty domestic annoyances gradually took a subordinate place,”
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at least temporarily.

In addition to maintaining a wide-ranging correspondence, Stanton began to write anonymous articles for reform journals. One of these was
published by her neighbor, Amelia Bloomer.
*
Mrs. Bloomer was the deputy postmaster of Seneca Falls, having been appointed by her husband, the postmaster and editor of the
Courier
. Her six-page monthly magazine, the
Lily
, first issued in January 1849, was a temperance organ.
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Under the pseudonym “Sunflower,” Stanton’s first entry appeared a few months later. The piece, called “Henry Neil and His Mother,” was an imaginary conversation between a mother and son on the evils of drink. By January 1850 “Sunflower” was a regular byline. Soon after, Mrs. Stanton was signing her own initials to articles such as “Why Women Must Vote” and “Lowell Girls.” Stanton’s pithy entries poked fun at what she called the “foibles and false traditions” that subordinated women. She was exploring ways to promote women’s rights. These small steps ended her intellectual isolation, enhanced her self-confidence, prepared her for larger roles, and laid the groundwork for the growth of a women’s rights movement.

When the Stantons celebrated their tenth anniversary in May 1850, they were both quite content. Elizabeth was satisfied with her domestic arrangements and the development of her three sons. She was engaged intellectually by women’s rights questions and sustained by her correspondence with other feminists. Henry, ever handsome and charming, had been home for more than six months in 1849, a period longer than any in the coming decade. He reported to Gerrit Smith that he was busy gardening and grafting fruit trees for the two-acre orchard they had planted behind the house.
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Henry had acquired more legal clients and had reissued the essays written on their European trip as
Sketches of Reforms
(1849). The work was favorably reviewed but accrued few profits.

Henry was also pleased with his political prospects. The same issue of the
Courier
that had reported on the Seneca Falls meeting carried the announcement that Henry B. Stanton had been chosen as a delegate to the New York Free Soil Convention.
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Following the defeat of the Free Soil ticket, Henry changed parties for a third time and joined his fourth party. In the fall of 1849 he ran for the state Senate as a Democrat. He won his first election and began a two-year term. Even as a freshman member of the minority party, Henry distinguished himself. He was viewed as a politician of promise, if not principle, and was invited to address college commencements. He delighted in the intrigue and cronyism of Albany’s cloakrooms, and his three-hundred-dollar Senate salary, added to legal fees and royalties, provided a comfortable income. But the couple’s mutual satisfaction
would not survive the pressures of abolition politics and additional pregnancies.

Because efforts on behalf of suffrage and women’s rights were still local and unorganized, Mrs. Stanton had no position and no assignments. The public criticism aroused by the Seneca Falls and Rochester meetings and the interest generated by the Free Soil election of 1848 temporarily distracted women’s rights advocates and their allies. There was a delay before similar meetings were called in other places. The next was held almost two years later, in April 1850 in Salem, Ohio. Mrs. Stanton sent a letter to be read at the opening session.
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That same spring an American Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston closed with an announcement that those interested in having a women’s rights convention meet in the lobby. Nine female abolitionists gathered, among them Lucy Stone, a recent graduate of Oberlin; Abby Kelley Foster, one of the first women lecturers; Paulina Wright Davis, a wealthy reformer; and Harriot Hunt, a self-educated doctor. These women formed a committee of correspondence and issued a call for a meeting to be held in Worcester, Massachusetts, on October 23, 1850. The call was signed by eighty-nine sponsors from six states, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Henry B. Stanton.
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Over a thousand people attended the Worcester meeting. Mrs. Stanton, several months pregnant with her fourth child, intended to go but declined. Her letter to the convention outlined goals and set the agenda. She was appointed to the Central Committee, the Education Committee, and the Committee of Civil and Political Functions. The convention decided to collect suffrage petitions to present to eight state legislatures and put Mrs. Stanton in charge of western New York.
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After that, each “national” convention held during the 1850s opened with a letter written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Mrs. Stanton did not attend a national women’s rights meeting until 1860. The discipline of the three older boys and the nurture of the four children she bore in the 1850s hampered her ability to travel and limited her participation in public life. But when she became pregnant in 1850, she did not anticipate that additional children would create conflicts for her. She apparently did nothing to prevent the pregnancies.

Stanton’s later writings are ambivalent on the subject of birth control. Some indicate that she was ignorant of contemporary methods of contraception; others indicate that she was aware and approved of birth control, but did not practice it. During the early 1850s Elizabeth and Henry Stanton were still passionately attracted to each other and saw no reason to limit intercourse, although Stanton’s refusal to vow to “obey” Henry at
her marriage was assumed to mean that she might refuse if she chose. Their seven children were born over a seventeen-year span, on the average of one baby every two and a half years. When Henry was home for any period of time and if she was not breastfeeding, she became pregnant. Nor was she inhibited by the fear or pain of childbirth, which she rarely admitted. Rather, in contrast to her mother’s constant, incapacitating confinements, Stanton reveled in her ability to bear children naturally and easily, usually assisted only by a midwife or female friend. Compared to her mother’s eleven live births and possible miscarriages, Stanton produced a small family.

On February 10, 1851, Theodore Weld Stanton was born. To announce his arrival, his mother hung out a red flag; had he been a girl, the flag would have been white. Stanton had hoped for a daughter and was consoled by a humorous note from a neighbor: “Mrs. Stanton will please accept a bottle of temperance wine and drink to better luck next time.” As Stanton reported the next day to her cousin Libby Miller:

Laugh in your turn. I have actually got my fourth son! Yes, Theodore Stanton, after two long mighty flourishes of his royal crown, bounded upon the stage of life with great ease—comparatively!! He weighs 10½ pounds. I was sick but a few hours, and did not lie down until half an hour before he was born, but worked round as hard as I could all night to do the last things. At seven o’clock Sunday morning he was born. This morning I got up, bathed myself in cold water, and have sat by the table writing several letters.

“I am regarded as a perfect wonder,” she boasted to Henry, who was in Albany. “Many people are actually impatiently waiting for me to die in order to make their theories good.” She did have to postpone a trip to Albany to present the suffrage petitions she had collected. “Tell [your friends] they have one more year to live, as I shall not be there to annihilate them this season.”
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Nursing baby Theo, and then another baby, would delay her Albany appearance several seasons.

Henry was unable to come home to inspect his fourth son because of the press of state Senate business. The week Theodore was born, Henry had been caught in “a violent flareup” over the choice of a new United States senator. As a Democratic convert and a former Whig with third party and abolition ties, Henry was a pivotal figure in a body divided seventeen Whigs to fifteen Democrats. In recognition of his wife’s political interest and his own self-importance, Henry reported every debate and roll call and enclosed copies of proposed bills for her to read. As promised, he had presented the women’s rights petitions from western New York that she had collected. “Two Senators tried to throw ridicule upon them,” Henry related. “I pounced upon them and they backed out.”
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The next fight came over a Whig bill to enlarge the Erie Canal. The
Democrats viewed it as unnecessary and graft ridden, but it passed the House easily. To prevent the presence of the three-fifths quorum necessary to introduce the canal bill and so forestall its easy passage in the Senate, twelve members resigned, among them Henry Stanton. To fill the vacancies, a special election was ordered for May 28, 1851. The six senators whose districts were far away from the canal were successful. Of the six whose constituencies lay along the canal, only Henry Stanton was reelected. His margin was five votes. It was a “savage fight,” Stanton recalled, in which the stump speakers in the field against him had been marshaled by his friend and relative Gerrit Smith.
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Henry Stanton’s victory was so narrow that many supporters thought he had lost and sent him notes of condolence. His in-laws celebrated his defeat prematurely. Elizabeth Cady Stanton responded to these attacks with heat, writing to Libby Smith Miller:

I have just received a letter from your father rejoicing over the supposed defeat of my husband last week Tuesday. We have had a crowing letter from Papa also. But he and Cousin Gerrit have “gone off” too soon. . . . I rejoice in the victory with my whole soul, for in spite of all my seeming liberality towards his opposers, I would sooner see every relative and friend I have on the face of the earth blown into thin air, and that old ditch running from Buffalo to Albany filled in with mud, than have had Henry mortified by a defeat in this election.

Three weeks later the canal bill passed the reconstituted Senate, twenty-two to eight. A year later, the State Court of Appeals found the bill unconstitutional.
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Henry’s shrewdness and nerve had earned him new celebrity and the gratitude of New York Democrats. They were prepared to offer him the nomination for lieutenant governor in 1852. Henry rejected the offer and refused to run for reelection in the fall of 1851. As he self-righteously phrased it in his autobiography, “I could not afford to be a member, and I had no desire to support myself on the ‘drippings of unclean legislation.’” He admitted to Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts abolitionist, that he had won the special election at the cost of neglecting his clients and family. Without steady legal fees he could not support his expanding household, and without his authority his older sons were creating havoc at home. Even Judge Cady felt constrained to remind his son-in-law of his paternal responsibilities. He warned Henry that he should not jeopardize domestic harmony in pursuit of public praise.
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The boys in question were hellions. In 1851 Daniel (Neil) was nine and almost as tall as his petite mother. His younger brother Henry (Kit) was seven and had a reputation for inventing both pranks and excuses. The smallest of the trio, Gerrit (Gat), was five and more manageable. All three
were full of energy and mischief. Stanton referred to them as her “young savages.” They were guilty of many misdemeanors that required swift justice or quick rescues. They leapt from rooftops and broke legs, slid down the lightning rod and cut hands, threw stones at Seneca Falls’ shantytown residents, cursed, smoked, and drank. Once Neil shot an arrow into Gat’s eye and locked Kit in the smokehouse. Another time Kit stranded baby Theo on a cork raft in the river; the next day he put the baby on top of the chimney.
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It was no coincidence that Mrs. Stanton’s first temperance article had been addressed to an imaginary delinquent named “Henry Neil.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a permissive parent. Although she claimed to have had a strict upbringing, her parents alternated between punishment and indulgence. Rather than reject her parents’ pattern, she may have expanded upon it. Her children were not required to attend church. Occasionally she took them to the local Episcopal service because she enjoyed the music and the boys were fascinated by the minister’s “nightgown.” When he was home, Henry went to the Presbyterian church by himself. She refused to wake the children in the morning, believing that they should motivate themselves. When Theo was reluctant to practice the piano, she asked him to “be reasonable” and consider the benefits of self-discipline. She tried to distract or bribe the boys into good behavior. One of Henry’s nephews recalled an incident in which Neil was promised an orange by his mother if he would return a toy to a younger brother. In Henry’s absence Grandfather Cady alternated between threats of canings and promises of ponies.
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Without a consistent approach and without their father’s authority, the children’s discipline deteriorated.

Preoccupied with the new baby, Elizabeth was unable to supervise the boys adequately. Initially dissatisfied with the schools in Seneca Falls, she had taught her children at home. Now she and Henry decided to send them away to school. In January 1852 the Stantons enrolled Neil and Kit in a progressive, coeducational boarding school established by Theodore and Angelina Grimké Weld. The Grimké-Welds were no longer active abolitionists. Impoverished, they had begun teaching in Belleville, New Jersey, and moved their school to a utopian community in Raritan. Gerrit Smith, Libby Miller, and Martha Wright also sent children there. The Welds found the Stanton boys, whom their parents candidly described as “miserable little underdeveloped vandals,” difficult to handle. When the boys outgrew the Welds’ school, they were entered in one closer to home, in Geneva, New York.
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