In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (39 page)

Anthony was actually relieved. She had been afraid that her iconoclastic colleague would make public her letter congratulating Frederick Douglass on his marriage to a white woman. “I do hope you won’t put your foot into the question of intermarriage of the races,” Anthony entreated Stanton. “You very well know that if you plunge in . . . your endorsement will be charged upon me and the whole association.”
⁴⁸
Anthony’s loyalty to suffrage was paramount. She would no longer allow any other ideas or individuals to share her platform, not even Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In March 1884 Anthony traveled to Johnstown through six feet of snow to write volume 3 of the
History of Woman Suffrage
. Rather than live with Stanton, she established headquarters in a boardinghouse. Together they tried to rouse “sleepy old Johnstown.” In May Stanton gave her “Our Boys” speech in the Presbyterian church. In August they organized a women’s convention in the old courthouse where Judge Cady had once presided. Lillie Devereux Blake, the attractive novelist and president of the New York Suffrage Association, was the featured speaker. The women urged the election of a woman for school trustee. New York was one of seventeen states in which women could vote in local school campaigns. According to a local newspaper report, both Stanton and Anthony voted in the Johnstown school election in November 1884 without incident. They were accompanied by Henry Stanton.
⁴⁹

Still president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the 1885 meeting in Washington. She presided over all the sessions and delivered the principal address, “The Limitations of Sex.” Her argument emphasized that men and women could not be segregated into separate spheres on account of ability or biology.

There would be more sense in insisting on man’s limitations because he cannot be a mother, than on a woman’s because she can be. Surely maternity is an added power and development of some of the most tender sentiments of the human heart and not a “limitation,” . . . “But it unfits her for much of the world’s work.” Yes, and it fits her for much of [it]; a large share of human legislation would be better done by her because of this deep experience. . . . If one-half the effort had been expended to exalt the feminine element that has been made to degrade it, we should have reached the natural equilibrium long ago. Either sex, in isolation, is robbed of one-half its power for the accomplishment of any given work.
⁵⁰

Although Stanton’s speech was applauded, she soon fell into disfavor by supporting a controversial resolution condemning all religious creeds teaching that “woman was an afterthought in the creation, her sex a misfortune, marriage a condition of subordination, and maternity a curse.” It had been introduced by Clara Bewick Colby
*
and was defended by Stanton. She had met Colby, the first female valedictorian of the University of Wisconsin and a journalist, while lecturing in Nebraska.
⁵¹
Typically, Stanton was outspoken in her approval of the resolution. In her first public dispute with Stanton since the Woodhull incident, Anthony opposed Colby’s resolution as irrelevant and unprofitable. At Anthony’s signal the resolution was tabled by the membership.

Anthony’s opposition was practical rather than philosophical. When the two old friends attended a sermon on “Women and Skepticism” the next week, Stanton reported that Anthony was just as offended as she was. The preacher, the president of Howard University, concluded that “freedom for women meant infidelity and unchastity.” Stanton found his conclusion “abominable.” Anthony was so angry that she stood up in her pew and announced that the minister ought to be spanked. For once horrified by her own behavior, Anthony was not comforted by cartoons of the pair portraying them as “a spanking team.”
⁵²

Stanton, accompanied to Washington by Henry’s niece, enjoyed a busy social schedule and visited many old friends. Altogether she had a “grand time.” At the end of February she “returned home to Johnstown quite satisfied with myself bodily and mentally, having been on the go for over a month.” She was pleased with herself, her work and her life. For the next several months of 1885 Stanton was busy “both as regards hands and brains.” She continued to collect state reports for inclusion in volume 3 of the
History
and closed the Johnstown house again. She spent April and May preparing to reopen the Tenafly house. Anthony came in midsummer, and together they settled down to complete the often interrupted
History
. Volume 3 brought the women’s movement up to 1885 and was published the following year.
⁵³

By that time Mrs. Stanton was more interested in other writing assignments. She had returned from Europe rested and refreshed, full of new thoughts based on wider reading and quiet reflection, stimulated by her contact with English Fabians and socialists.
⁵⁴
She made one attempt at fiction, a short story called “Our Romance,” which was never published. Then she began writing essays on current events for newspapers and magazines. In 1885 the
North American Review
carried her article on divorce reform and one entitled, “Has Christianity Benefited Women?” The
Boston Index
printed “The Christian Church and Women.” “Our Boys on Sunday” in the
Forum
(April 1886) argued against closing parks and museums on Sunday, the only day working people could relax and improve themselves.
⁵⁵
Stanton began to envision a longer work that would challenge the theological assumptions and conclusions of male ministers about woman’s place.

Stanton was not the only family member busy writing. In March 1885 Henry Stanton published
Random Recollections
, an abbreviated autobiography. It was an anecdotal account of his career as a journalist, preacher, reformer, lawyer, and politician. Its prose captured much of his casual charm and quick wit. The book had three printings. In the first and second editions Henry’s only reference to Elizabeth noted that he had married the daughter of the famous jurist, Daniel Cady, but the daughter was not named. In the third edition Henry mentioned his wife once, identifying her as the reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who worked with Susan B. Anthony for woman suffrage.
⁵⁶

Henry’s eightieth birthday, in June 1885, was marked by an “informal reception” at the New York Press Club. “As no ladies were invited,” his wife recalled tartly, “I can only judge from the reports in the daily press and what I can glean from the honored guest himself, that it was a very interesting occasion.” The octogenarian was described as a tall, trim figure with a gray beard and alert, piercing eyes. A few years earlier Stanton had written Theodore Weld that “Henry is well, looks about fifty, scarcely any gray hairs in his head.”
⁵⁷
He was still a handsome man, still practicing law in New York, and still writing for the
Sun
.

Although Henry retained his townhouse and his law practice in the city, he became more visible in his wife’s life in the 1880s, perhaps because she was at home more. They were brought together again by the graduations and marriages of their children. He appears in accounts of local political meetings in Johnstown and in descriptions of family life in Tenafly—sitting on the piazza, reading in the parlor, driving with his wife. After 1884 Henry spent more and more time at Tenafly, revising his
Recollections
. Mrs. Stanton had the veranda screened with mosquito netting, “so the paterfamilias, with his pipe, could muse and gaze at the stars unmolested.”
⁵⁸

By 1885 the Stantons had been married forty-five years and seemed to have come to terms with each other. Stanton was no longer romantically devoted to her husband, but she still cared about him. “Henry is so old now,” she wrote to Libby Miller that year, “that I feel my first duty is to make a home for him.” By March 1886 he reported to a friend that he
was “tormented with acute rheumatism.”
⁵⁹
His health continued to fail. During that summer Hattie and Theo brought their families to visit. It was Henry’s first and last encounter with his grandchildren. The other children gathered as well, thinking it was their father’s last season, but in the fall Henry rallied and returned to the city.

The attention paid to Henry Stanton’s birthday prompted suffragists to honor Mrs. Stanton with a similar but larger event. On her seventieth birthday in November 1885 simultaneous memorial meetings were held throughout the North and West. Sponsored by the National Woman Suffrage Association, they were organized by May Wright Sewall, head of the executive committee and founder of the Indianapolis Girls’ Classical School, and by Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, editor of the
New Era
. The instigators advised that the events should be simple, inexpensive, proper, and “as Mrs. Stanton is herself pre-eminently social, the element of sociability should be provided for in the programme.”
⁶⁰

Stanton attended the New York City party at the home of Dr. Clemence Lozier, one of the first generation of female gynecologists.
*
She and Stanton had worked together in 1863 to persuade the New York legislature to charter the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, five years before Elizabeth Blackwell opened her infirmary. At her party Stanton read an essay on “The Pleasures of Old Age,” in which she concluded that over fifty is the “heyday” of a woman’s life. “Then the forces hitherto finding an outlet in flirtations, courtship, conjugal and maternal love, are garnered in the brain to find expression in intellectual achievements, in spiritual friendships and beautiful thoughts, in music, poetry and art.” Presents, flowers, letters, and cables poured in. Mrs. Harbert devoted the November issue of her magazine to tributes to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “If I were not kept humble by the continual cuffing of the opposition,” wrote Stanton in appreciation, “I am really afraid this number of the
Era
might fill me with conceit.”
⁶¹

As it was, Stanton was well pleased with herself. Her life was in order. Her house was redecorated and functioning smoothly, her children were prospering, and Henry was recovering. She had reestablished her friendship with Anthony and her ties to the National Association. She was invigorated by plans for a new theological study and proud of her work on the
History
.

To reward herself, Stanton decided to return to Europe. In late October
1886 she sailed for England with Hattie, Nora, and a nanny. Installed once more at Basingstoke, Stanton resumed a comfortable pattern. She played games with Nora, read constantly, wrote regularly, napped often, and ate well, only occasionally sallying forth to confer with English suffragists or other reformers. Her routine was broken on January 14, 1887, by news of Henry’s death.

Henry Stanton had died of pneumonia at age eighty-one with his sons Bob and Henry at his side. He had caught cold standing in the rain on election night to watch the posting of the returns. He had not been considered seriously ill, and his wife had not gone home to nurse him. Nor did she return to bury him. As she recorded in her diary:

This morning while I was taking breakfast in my room, Hattie entered with a cablegram from New York, announcing the death of her father. Death! We all think we are prepared to hear of the passing away of the aged. But when the news comes, the heart and pulses all seem to stand still. . . . The startling news comes upon you without preparation, it is a terrible shock to every nerve and feeling, to body and mind alike. Then well up regrets for every unkind, ungracious word spoken, for every act of coldness and neglect. Ah! If we could only remember in life to be gentle and forbearing with each other, and to strive to serve nobly instead of exacting service, our memories of the past would be more pleasant
⁶²

Compared to entries noting the passing of more distant relatives, Stanton’s tone was cool, reserved, almost impersonal. She does not mention Henry’s name or his relationship to her or recall fond memories of their life together. Since the diary was intended as a record for her children, perhaps she felt no need to amend or change the impression her adult children already had of their parents’ marriage.

Family history insists that Henry and Elizabeth Stanton were estranged when he died and that the children were divided in placing the blame. The older boys except Neil sided with Henry, the younger children with their mother. There is no evidence to confirm that Henry’s return to New York and Elizabeth’s return to England augured a permanent or even an ongoing separation. Nor is there any evidence that Henry had had any affairs, although he always had an eye for the ladies.
⁶³
The couple had spent more time together since 1883 than they had in the previous fifteen years. Whether their cohabitation was the result of Stanton’s greater tolerance, Henry’s increasing infirmity, convenience, or a charade for the children cannot be determined. Stanton still cared for Henry, but she no longer loved him. She regretted that they did not share “the joy of a deep soul-love.” “No depth of friendship can compensate for it,” she wrote to Libby Miller. “The older I grow the deeper my sorrow that I have no son of Adam to reverence and
worship as a god.”
⁶⁴
She had loved no other man more than Henry, and she mourned him more than she expected.

For all her radicalism, or because of it, Stanton was a romantic. As a bride she had been intellectually and physically attracted to her husband, but her expectations of marriage as a partnership of equals had been disappointed early. Her resentment of Henry’s male freedom raged during her years of domestic drudgery. Her respect for him as a principled and heroic reform agent diminished. Yet she stayed married. For someone who condemned “ill-assorted unions,” surely Stanton would have divorced Henry had he been guilty of drunkenness, brutality, or an illicit affair. Without grounds, with remnants of their earlier affection, they separated informally and unofficially, an arrangement that satisfied both of them. After 1868 the marriage placed no burdens on her; there were no reasons not to remain nominally married to Henry.