In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (30 page)

In another attempt to organize women for suffrage and equal rights, Stanton and Anthony helped some local New York women form a union. As the impoverished publisher of the
Revolution
, Anthony sought out nonunion women printers because they charged the lowest rates. Her association with them prompted her to call a meeting of women typographers at the Woman’s Bureau in mid-1868 and to help them organize Working Women’s Association No. One. Next Anthony persuaded one hundred women in the sewing trades to form Working Women’s Association No. Two. The women printers elected Anthony their delegate to the National Labor Union Congress meeting in September 1868. Stanton appointed herself to be a delegate from the National Woman Suffrage Association. She was refused entry because she was not a union member and because her admission might suggest support of suffrage. Eighteen men threatened to resign over the question of her credentials.
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They had to admit Anthony because she had been chosen by union women even though she was not a union member.

Anthony seized the opportunity to explain why the ballot was especially important for working women. She convinced the committee on female labor to urge women “to secure the ballot” as well as “to learn the trades, engage in business, join labor unions or form protective unions of their own, . . . and use every other honorable means to persuade or force employers to do justice to women by paying them equal wages for equal work.” If both men and women were in the same unions, Anthony continued, employers could not replace men with women working for lower wages. The women delegates also called upon the National Labor Union Congress to
aid the organization of women’s unions, to demand the eight-hour day for women as well as men, and to ask Congress and state legislatures to pass laws providing equal pay for women in government employ. The phrase, “to secure the ballot,” was quickly challenged and had to be deleted.
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Neither Anthony nor Stanton joined a union. They continued to urge women workers to form unions at the same time that they had their paper printed in a nonunion shop because it was cheaper. Yet their concern for working women was genuine. Stanton frequently came to the defense of factory women and suggested remedies for their social and economic problems. Her position evolved from Anthony’s initiative. In later years she became more outspoken on behalf of women workers and wove threads of socialism into her feminist ideology.
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Stanton’s refusal to admit men to membership in the National Woman Suffrage Association, the racist tone of her opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment, and her association with working women, union organizers, unwed mothers, murderers, and advocates of free love, shocked the Boston branch of the reform community. To a growing number of reformers Stanton was an embarrassment and a troublemaker. Among conservative women suffrage was more respectable than Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Lucy Stone refused to share any leadership roles with Stanton; nor would she participate in an organization that barred her husband from voting. Stone was joined by Julia Ward Howe, Abby Kelley and Stephen Foster, George W. Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, T. W. Higginson, and other disenchanted New Englanders. They resolved to establish an alternate association.

On November 24, 1869, the Boston contingent founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. In an effort to counter Stanton’s inroads into the Midwest, it met in Cleveland. The American Association was organized on a delegate basis: each member had to represent a local suffrage group. With such credentials, men could participate as well as women. The American, as it came to be called, purposely elected a male president, choosing the famous minister Henry Ward Beecher. Stone headed the executive committee. The group proposed to win suffrage by state-by-state referenda campaigns.
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The American also decided to publish its own newspaper, the
Woman’s Journal
, to challenge the claims made by the
Revolution
. Its first issue appeared in January 1870. Edited by Mary Livermore of Chicago with the assistance of Stone and Blackwell, the
Woman’s Journal
was well financed, respectable, and conservative in everything but its advocacy of woman suffrage. The newspaper flourished long after the
Revolution
died and eventually became the official organ of the reunited suffrage movement.

Alarmed by these developments, Mrs. Mott urged Stanton and Anthony
to attend the Cleveland convention and work toward some reconciliation. She delivered the same message to Stone in Boston. Stone and Stanton both refused, but Anthony decided to attend the meeting. Uninvited, she claimed to represent the National Association. She was not asked to sit on the platform. She was offended by veiled attacks on Stanton and by repetition of rumors about her mismanagement of AERA funds. The
Revolution
was condemned in comparison to the
Woman’s Journal
. Unlike the National, asserted one participant, the new organization “will not mistake rashness for courage, folly for smartness, cunning for sagacity, badinage for wit, unscrupulousness for fidelity, extravagance for devotion, effrontery for heroism, lunacy for genius, or an incongruous melange for a simple palatable dish.”
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Anthony was furious. According to one report, she “stamped her foot” and stunned the group by claiming that Stone and Blackwell had never married and were living in sin.
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The result was an irreparable breach.

The Stanton-Anthony-Stone triangle had a history of misunderstandings. Previously the three had been able to maintain a facade of friendship. After an earlier clash with Stone, Stanton had written to a mutual friend:

I fully agree with you as to the wisdom of keeping all our misunderstandings to ourselves. No word or pen of mine shall ever wrong or detract from any woman, especially one who has done so good a work for woman as Lucy Stone. I rest assured that time will vindicate our own position. I accept all things patiently, for I see that human nature is the same inside and outside the reform world. Our Abolitionists are just as sectarian in their association as the Methodists in their church, and divisions are always the most bitter where there is the least to differ about. But in spite of all, the men and women who have been battling for freedom in this country, are as grand and noble as any that have ever walked the earth. So we will forget their faults and love them for their many virtues.
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But by 1870 Stanton was less patient with opposition, whether male or female, family or friend. Yet her instinct to keep the fight private was strong. Previous observation and experience had taught her that the appearance of cordiality was more comfortable and more useful. After a few salvos in the
Revolution
, Stanton kept silent on the schism, and on the whole Stone did the same.
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But Stanton found it harder and harder to hold her tongue. As she gained self-confidence, she was less worried about the repercussions of her outbursts. She maintained a congenial public style because it suited her personality and purpose to be perceived as a popular and appealing radical.

In a signed editorial in the
Revolution
, Stanton described the split as “a division in the ranks of the strongminded.” She labeled Stone and her allies “the Boston malcontents.” She did not sidestep the issue of discontent with her leadership. She offered to resign the presidency of the National, in essence
challenging Stone to find the votes to defeat her. “That the difference is one simply of leadership and personalities is well known to all behind the scenes,” she wrote. The “antagonism between the old and the new . . . is well known to every worker in the movement.” Until the American could share the National’s broad, catholic ground and demand “suffrage for All—
even Negro suffrage, without distinction of sex
,” she did not want to associate with it.
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The differences between the National and the American Woman Suffrage associations were personal, political, philosophical, organizational, and even geographic. Lucy Stone distrusted Stanton and Anthony because of their involvement with Train in Kansas and on the
Revolution
, and Stanton and Anthony resented the vituperative tone of Stone’s criticism. Stanton’s refusal to support the Fifteenth Amendment offended Stone and those Bostonians who had been abolitionists before they were feminists. Stanton’s rude and racist rhetoric regarding blacks repelled the Garrisonians. Nor did thy share Stanton’s view of men as tyrants. “Society,” Stanton had editorialized, “as organized today under the man power, is one grand rape of womanhood.” According to Stanton, the situation required extensive social change. As she claimed in the National Association’s statement of purpose: “The woman question is more than a demand for suffrage. . . . [It] is a question covering a whole range of woman’s needs and demands . . . including her work, her wages, her property, her education, her physical training, her social status, her political equalization, her marriage and her divorce.” In a direct reference to Stone’s position, Stanton objected to “the Boston attempt to distill our whole question into a single drop.” Replied Stone, “Suffrage is not the only object but it is the first to be attained. . . . Suffrage for women gained and all else will speedily follow.”
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Whether to work for suffrage alone and how to achieve that goal were the two most important points of disagreement. Not only did the American want to narrow the focus of the women’s movement, it also believed that issues like divorce reform would damage its chances for success. The leaders of the American were afraid to associate suffrage with any extraneous or radical ideas or individuals. Mrs. Stanton, with her all-encompassing view of women’s wrongs and how to right them, was anathema to the Bostonians. In contrast, Stanton believed, as the Garrisonians had in the antebellum period, that reformers must seek solutions wherever and however possible. She also adopted the tactic of the political abolitionists in making her issues political questions requiring political solutions in the legislatures and the courts.

The different political and philosophical positions of the National and the American reflected the personalities of their leaders. For a feminist Lucy Stone was a straitlaced, traditional, happily married Bostonian who had
risen from poverty to respectability and disliked flamboyant display. Stanton was more self-confident, intellectually curious, and compassionate. Despite her upper-class upbringing and leanings, she was more aware of and more concerned about the lives of ordinary women, in factories and on farms. She believed they needed more than suffrage.

The difference between Stone and Stanton was apparent in their attitudes toward the West, attitudes that carried over into their organizations and reflected their personalities. Stone hated the frontier. She had convinced her husband to leave his Cincinnati business and move to Boston. Comfortably established there, she was reluctant to leave. Pioneer conditions appalled her; she had hurried home from Kansas in 1867, relieved to be leaving. She was satisfied to stay in Boston, surrounded by other ladies of similar outlook. As a result, most of the membership of the highly structured American Association resided in New England. Stanton, in contrast, was invigorated by the West. She began to travel widely beyond the Mississippi River, testing her endurance, enhancing her self-esteem, recruiting new members for the National, and making allies among men and women who had less traditional attitudes about appropriate sex roles. Although the National, like the American, had its headquarters in an Eastern urban center, New York was much more vital than Boston. In New York and in the West Stanton was continually exposed to new ideas and could test the solutions she proposed. Because the National Association was larger and more geographically diverse in membership, it became a loose affiliation of state groups and individuals.
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Stanton was convinced that her goals, her means, and her organization were superior to those of Lucy Stone and the American Association. She agreed with Anthony that “cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and advocates, and bear the consequences.”
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The consequences for Stanton were considerable.

Publicly unruffled, Stanton chose to ignore the American. In January 1870 she attended the second and last meeting of the Woman Suffrage Association of America. While in Washington she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in favor of woman suffrage in the District of Columbia. In May she arranged the first anniversary meeting of the National Association in New York City. The membership of these two groups was almost identical. Beginning in 1871 the National, although headquartered in New York, held its annual meetings in Washington. This action reflected the
priority that the National gave to federal action and congressional contacts.
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At the May 1870 meeting of the National, Theodore Tilton tried to unite the two rival associations. Working independently, he suggested creating a Union Association, made up of the National and American. Rather than refuse him outright, Stanton agreed to allow the question to be considered. She did not want to appear to be uncompromising. She trusted that Stone would never consent to Tilton’s plan. In another unusual move, the National abandoned its antimale policy and elected Tilton its president. Stanton agreed to step down.

After five years of fighting, Stanton had lost every battle and most of her allies. She had lost married women’s property rights, divorce reform, and limited suffrage for the New York constitutional convention. She had lost woman suffrage in New York, Kansas, the District of Columbia, and the Constitution. She had lost her newspaper and the presidency of the National Association. Even more significant, she had alienated a host of former allies. Her antagonists in 1870 numbered the members of the American Association plus Garrison, Greeley, Higginson, Douglass, Phillips, Foster, and even Gerrit Smith.
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