In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (21 page)

In her second appearance before the legislature, Mrs. Stanton compared woman’s legal status to that of the slave, demanding that women be treated as citizens rather than as slaves. The ultimate protection for women, their property, and children, Stanton asserted, was the right to vote. Anticipating
the usual “separate spheres” objection to women’s engaging in the coarseness of public life, Stanton responded:

But, say you, we would not have women exposed to the grossness and vulgarity of public life, or encounter what she must at the polls. When you talk, gentlemen, of sheltering woman from the rough minds, and revolting scenes of real life, you must be either talking for effect, or be wholly ignorant of what the facts of life are. The man, whatever he is, is known to the woman. She is the companion not only of the statesman, the orator, and the scholar, but the vile, vulgar, brutal man, as his mother, his wife, his sister, his daughter . . . and if man shows out what he is anywhere, it is at his own hearthstone. There are over 40,000 drunkards in this State. All these are bound by the ties of family to some woman. . . . Gentlemen, such scenes as woman has witnessed at her own fireside, where no eyes save Omnipotence could pity, no strong arm could help, can never be realized at the polls.
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She called her address “A Slave’s Appeal.” The Married Women’s Property Act passed the New York Assembly the next day.

Emboldened by her reception in Albany, Stanton decided to tackle the divorce issue next. In mid-nineteenth-century America divorce was a scandalous subject. Popular opinion assumed that only adulterers divorced. Many believed that permitting divorce was the same as licensing free love. Divorce threatened the traditional family structure; if allowed, it might rend the fabric of society. Hence the hesitation with which it was treated.

Nonetheless, divorce was the subject of legal debate. In 1859 the Indiana legislature passed a controversial divorce reform bill adding desertion, habitual drunkenness, and cruelty to adultery as grounds for divorce by wives. A similar bill, introduced in the New York legislature in 1860, lost by four votes in the Senate. These developments generated a public discussion of divorce, including a debate in the
New York Tribune
between Robert Dale Owen, author of the Indiana bill, and Horace Greeley, the paper’s editor. Despite his generally favorable disposition toward women’s rights, Greeley was a principal opponent of the New York bill. It was in this atmosphere that Stanton raised the issue in the spring of 1860.
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Stanton notified both Susan Anthony and Lucy Stone that divorce would be the subject of her address to the Tenth National Women’s Rights Convention. Ever since their early association in the temperance movement in 1852, the three women had agreed that wives must be able to escape from degrading marriage bonds. In the intervening years Stanton had become more committed, Stone more cautious, while Anthony compromised. Having made her point about habitual drunkenness as grounds for divorce in her presidential address to the Woman’s State Temperance Society as early as 1852, Stanton had begun to analyze the question more thoroughly.
Writing to Anthony in 1853, she concluded: “I do not know if the world is quite willing or ready to discuss the question of marriage [but] I feel in my innermost that . . . it is in vain to look for the elevation of woman as long as she is degraded in marriage.” Anthony passed the letter on to Stone, who agreed privately with Stanton but considered it “premature” to talk about divorce as a remedy for women’s ills as it would scare potential converts away from the women’s rights movement. Stone did ask Stanton to write a letter about divorce to the 1856 women’s rights convention. She was willing to allow the subject to be raised as long as she was not the lightning rod, so she urged Mrs. Stanton to take the lead.
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Stanton’s letter to the convention had been straightforward.

How can she calmly contemplate the barbarous code of laws which govern her civil and political existence? How can she devotedly subscribe to a theology which makes her a conscientious victim of another’s will, forever subject to the triple bondage of man, priest, and law? How can she tolerate our social customs, by which womankind is stripped of true virtue, dignity and nobility? How can she endure our present marriage relations by which women’s life, health, and happiness are held so cheap that she herself feels that God has given her no charter of rights, no individuality of her own? I answer, she patiently bears all this because in her blindness she sees no way of escape. Her bondage, though it differs from that of the Negro slave, frets and chafes her all the same. She too sighs and groans in her chains and lives but in hope of better things to come. She looks to Heaven, while the more practical slave looks to the North Star, and sets out for Canada. Let it be the object of this convention to show that there is hope for woman this side of Heaven, and that there is work for her to do before she leaves for the Celestial City.
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Marriage, Stanton had reiterated, “stripped womankind of true virtue, dignity and nobility.” Husbands legally owned wives, body, soul, children, and clothing. Every woman was familiar with stories of sexual abuse in marriage beds. “Man in his lust has regulated this whole question of sexual intercourse long enough,” Stanton had written on an earlier occasion. “Let the mothers of mankind [now] set bounds to his indulgence.”
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Revised divorce statutes were necessary to give women a means to protect themselves.

Most of the audience who had heard these remarks in 1856 were shocked. The nature of the response caused Stone to revert to her earlier reservations about not raising the marriage question in the context of women’s rights. From then on she insisted that the issue be addressed separately, with “infanticide,” abortion, and other sordid topics.
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When Stanton notified Stone of her plans for the 1860 meeting, Stone declined an invitation to join Stanton on the program.

In the meantime Mrs. Stanton had accepted a last-minute invitation from William Lloyd Garrison to address the opening session of the annual American Anti-Slavery Society meeting in New York, on May 8, 1860. She reminded the abolitionists that women were also slaves in need of emancipation. She urged the society to rise above “custom, creed, conventionalism and constitutions” to liberate women.
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Her resolutions and the criticism they provoked foreshadowed the fight that would divide and undermine the group before the decade of the 1860s was out.

Many of the same people who had heard her address to the antislavery group were in the hall of the Cooper Institute when the Tenth National Women’s Rights Convention was called to order two days later. Mrs. Stanton introduced ten resolutions favoring divorce, such as: “An unfortunate or ill-assorted marriage is ever a calamity, but not ever, perhaps never a crime—and when society or government, by its laws or customs, compels its continuance, always to the grief of one of the parties, and the actual loss and damage of both, it usurps an authority never delegated to man nor exercised by God himself.”
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Having startled her audience to attention, Stanton then spoke for an hour in defense of divorce.

In Stanton’s view marriage was a “man-made institution,” inherently unjust to wives. With the sanction of church and state, husbands were given absolute authority over wives. She considered the traditional marriage ceremony a “humiliating” symbol of the transfer of a powerless female from “one master to another.” While Stanton conceded that “man, too, suffers in the false marriage relation,” she was unsympathetic.

What can his suffering be compared to what every woman experiences, whether happy or unhappy? . . . A man marrying gives up no right, but a woman, every right, even the most sacred of all, the right to her own person. . . . So long as our present false marriage relation continues, which in most cases is nothing more or less than legalized prostitution, women can have no self respect and of course man will have none for her, for the world estimates us according to the value we put upon ourselves. Personal freedom is the first right to be proclaimed, and that does not and cannot now belong to the relation of wife, to the mistress of the isolated home, to the financial dependent.
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Women in these and more desperate straits needed the escape hatch of liberalized divorce laws.

Stanton’s thesis was that marriage and divorce were private matters that ought not to be regulated by civil or canon law. If the legislatures were to interfere, she urged them to make divorce easier to obtain and marriage more difficult to undertake by establishing age requirements and waiting periods. Marriage should be treated as a simple contract that could be dissolved
quickly in cases of drunkenness, insanity, desertion, cruel and brutal treatment, adultery, or mere incompatibility. She envisioned divorce “without delinquencies” or guilty parties.

Stanton cited examples of tragic marriages and asked her audiences if they believed that tnose marriages had been made in Heaven. She teased her friend, Greeley, the chief public opponent of divorce reform.

I know Horace Greeley has been most eloquent in recent weeks on the holy sacrament of ill-assorted marriages; but let us hope that all wisdom does not live and shall not die with Horace Greeley. I think if he had been married to the
New York Herald
instead of the Republican Party, he would have found some scriptural arguments against life-long unions where great incompatibility of temper existed between the parties. Horace Greeley in his recent discussion with Robert Dale Owen, said that the whole question had been tried in all its varieties and conditions, from indissoluble monogamous marriage down to free love. . . . There is one kind of marriage that has not been tried, and that is a contract made by equal parties to lead an equal life, with equal restraints and privileges on either side. Thus far, we have had man marriage and nothing more.
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When Stanton finished, her friends responded with loud applause while opponents demanded the floor. Debate raged for an entire session of the convention. The Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell reminded Mrs. Stanton that the marriage relation was made in heaven and was “as permanent and indissoluble as the relation of parent and child.” Lucy Stone surprised Stanton by joining the negative side. Among recognized feminists, only Ernestine Rose and Anthony supported Stanton. Finally Wendell Phillips, the hero of the 1840 London meeting, moved to table the entire discussion. He sought to remove it from the record, asserting that as marriage and divorce affected men and women equally, the subject ought to be out of order at a women’s rights convention. William Lloyd Garrison, another opponent, wanted to table the discussion but keep it in the minutes. Typically Anthony had the last word in defense of Stanton. The vote was called. The question was tabled and recorded.
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Cloture did not end discussion. Public reaction was heated and hostile. As Stanton recalled later, “Enemies were unsparing in their denunciations and friends ridiculed the whole proceedings.” Although widely censured, she would not drop the subject. Stanton was becoming accustomed to disapproval. She was characteristically convinced that she alone was right. “My reason, my experience, my soul proclaim it.” Innocently she asserted, “I began to feel that I had inadvertently taken the underpinning from the social system.” That was exactly what she had intended to do. She realized that any attack on marriage or defense of divorce was indeed a blow at a patriarchal social system, so she kept hammering away. “This marriage
question,” she wrote, “lies at the very foundation of all progress.”
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Divorce reform would continue to attract her support in the decades to come.

But Stanton was also astute enough to realize that divorce was an unacceptable alternative for most women, depriving them of their reputations, homes, children and financial security. Her peripheral involvement in a runaway wife case in 1861 emphasized for her the cruel and unsavory aspect of divorce for the individuals involved.
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Stanton worked to liberalize and legitimize divorce as one aspect of the larger reform. She believed women must become independent so they could marry and remain married out of choice rather than economic necessity. In order to be free to choose, women had to have equal legal rights, and they had to be able to vote in order to safeguard educational and economic opportunities. Stanton’s feminist philosophy encompassed all these issues.

While the debate about divorce continued in the press after the annual women’s rights meeting had adjourned, it was soon overshadowed by news of the 1860 Republican National Convention. Delegates swarming into Chicago’s Wigwam had to choose a nominee from four candidates: Edward Bates of Missouri, Sen. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, former congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, and Sen. William Seward of New York. Seward seemed to be the favorite until Chase switched his votes to Lincoln, who was perceived as the most moderate on slavery. One of the delegates was Henry Stanton. Always ready to support a winner, Henry would have jumped on the Lincoln bandwagon had there been one. Unfortunately for Henry’s future, he backed Seward, who lost.
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Republican opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories won over many abolitionists, including both of the Stantons, but not Anthony. She opposed Lincoln because he favored enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and did not endorse Negro citizenship. With the perennial enthusiasm of an old fire dog, Henry joined Lincoln’s campaign against Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a popular sovereignty Democrat; John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a Southern Democrat; and John Bell of Tennessee, representing the Constitutional Union party. Henry secured stump speakers for Lincoln in the Northeast, wrote pamphlets, and then mounted the hustings himself. For only the second time since 1828, Henry supported a winner.
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