In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (42 page)

Even as a whirlwind of energy as a young mother and reformer, Stanton had always been able to sleep easily. When her children were infants, Stanton would not allow her husband or father to awaken them to show them off. Nor did she awaken her older children in the morning until they were
ready to rise. “Early risers are always uncomfortable people,” she declared. She buttressed her opinion with examples of statesmen who napped. “This is very common among great men who use their brains.” Her father was one of those. Judge Cady, after covering his face with a handkerchief, had been able to sleep on any occasion. Throughout her life Stanton followed his example. “I pass many luxurious hours in the horizontal position,” she wrote in 1890. “In fact, I pass but few in the perpendicular.”
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Despite her reluctance to move, Stanton fell and hurt her knees in the winter of 1892. The following summer Theo brought his family to England, and Stanton took care of all of her grandchildren, dressing dolls for Nora and Lizette and minding the infants. But sadness impinged on her idyll. Hattie lost her second child, and Stanton learned of the deaths of her son Daniel and her sister Tryphena Bayard. In contrast to her reaction to Henry’s death, she decided to return to the United States for “the remainder of her days.” When she sailed in August 1891, she had been gone another eighteen months. No longer able to travel unassisted, she was accompanied by a private stewardess.
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The returning Stanton was homeless. She had so far spent her widowhood as a houseguest in Europe and the United States. Now she had to make a decision about how and where she would spend her old age. She had several alternatives. She could live by herself, with her married or unmarried children, with Libby Miller, or with Anthony. Anthony urged her to live in Rochester, so that the two of them could continue to collaborate.

I could help you carry out the dream of my life—which is that you should take all your speeches and articles, carefully dissect them, and put your best utterances on each point into one essay—and then publish [them] in a nice volume. . . . This is the first time since 1850 that I have anchored myself to any particular spot, and in doing it my constant thought was that you would come here, where are the documents necessary to our work, and stay for as long, at least, as we must be together to put your writings into systematic shape to go down to posterity. . . . Then, too, I have never ceased to hope that we would finish the
History of Woman Suffrage
at least to the end of the dear old National.

The idea of spending her last years being goaded and scolded by Anthony—“the thorn in my side for forty years”—did not appeal to Stanton.
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Her children also objected. They resented “Aunt Susan’s” dominant role in their early childhoods, blamed her in part for their parents’ estrangement, and wanted their mother to rest rather than work. Stanton had no intention of either retiring or keeping still, but she used their opposition as an excuse to remain independent of Anthony. She decided to share an eight-room penthouse apartment at 26 West 61st Street in New York City with her son Bob and recently widowed daughter Margaret Lawrence. Later
the trio moved to the Stewart Apartments on the southwest corner of Broadway and West 94th Street.

Stanton’s solution to her housing problem was a form of “associative living.” In her apartment meals could be catered and maids were provided. Although Stanton appreciated the convenience of elevators and central heating, her initial adjustment to high-rise living had been difficult. “Having always lived in a large house in the country, the quarters seemed rather contracted at first,” she recalled, “but I soon realized the immense saving in labor and expense in having no more room than absolutely necessary, and all on one floor.”
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The plan appealed to Stanton for several reasons. She had long advocated “associative households,” an idea that Charlotte Perkins Gilman and other experts on domestic economy would later develop.
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Her previous impressions of community living had been positive: her visit to Brook Farm in the 1840s; her association with the utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana, through Robert Dale Owen; her stay in a French convent; and her pleasure in Theodore’s Paris apartment. In England, Stanton’s daughter Harriot, an advocate of Fabian reforms, had started a cooperative neighborhood laundry in Basingstoke. Stanton was convinced that cooperative arrangements would benefit women. The care of nuclear families in isolated homes trapped women in domestic bondage. In association with other households, women could share child care, cooking, and cleaning; they would have more leisure and less loneliness.

After making her decision about where to live, Stanton had made month-long visits to Anthony and Miller in the fall of 1891. In Rochester she and Anthony sat for a sculpture by Adelaide Johnson. In the finished piece, first exhibited at the Columbia Exposition in 1893 and now in the crypt of the United States Capitol, the heads of Stanton, Anthony, and Lucretia Mott rise from a five-foot high, unfinished marble block. Stanton and Anthony also joined forces to urge that the University of Rochester admit women. They presented their case to the school’s trustees. On the morning of their meeting with the board the wife of the university’s president gave birth to twins, a son and a daughter, prompting Stanton to remark, “If the Creator could risk placing the sexes in such near relations, they might with safety walk on the same campus and pursue the same curriculum.” The president agreed, but the trustees did not.
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Although Stanton and Anthony had not worked together on any substantive project since the completion of volume 3 of the
History
, the habit of cooperation was hard to break. They continued to correspond and to collaborate occasionally. While Stanton was in England, Anthony had sent her reports of the activities of the new National American Association. In one twenty-two page epistle, Anthony described the 1891 annual meeting
and explained that Stanton could not retire from the presidency until it was “quite certain” that Anthony rather than Lucy Stone would be elected to take her place. On her own initiative Stanton sent speeches for Anthony to read at the meetings she missed. For the 1891 convention she prepared “The Degradation of Disfranchisement” and for a February meeting of the National Council of Women, “The Matriarchate.” In that speech she claimed that civilization was indebted to women for the intelligence, morality, and material progress of the race. Now that Stanton was back in America, Anthony urged her to attend the 1892 convention. When Stanton, referring to her children, responded that “all the influences about me urge me to rest rather than action,” Anthony went to New York to escort her to Washington.
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Stanton used the 1892 occasion to deliver a definitive statement of her feminist ideology, “The Solitude of Self.” It was a demand for woman’s absolute self-reliance—physical, emotional, financial, political, intellectual, and legal independence. Stanton argued that women must be free to take responsibility for their own lives. In life’s great crises, she said, women, like men, have only themselves to rely upon, and yet they are not trained to fend for themselves. The speech combined Stanton’s natural rights philosophy, her republican bias, her feminist ferocity, and a tragic sense of loneliness.

No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men prefer to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation. . . . The talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer. . . . Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he cannot bear her burdens. . . . [In] the tragedies and triumphs of human experience each mortal stands alone. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.
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Stanton was presenting the standard of self-reliance to which she herself aspired. Throughout her life she had become increasingly confident, capable, and independent. By the time she died she would be a self sovereign, a queen in her own right.

The speech was delivered three times during a three-day period. It was presented first, in written form, to the House Committee on the Judiciary on the morning of January 18, 1892. That afternoon Stanton delivered it
as her valedictory address to the National American Association and received a standing ovation. Two days later she repeated the speech at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage. “The Solitude of Self” was reprinted in the
Woman’s Journal
and in the
Congressional Record
. Ten thousand copies were made and franked for her to distribute. The speech marked Stanton’s last appearance before the Congress and before the National American Association; she was seventy-six years old.

With the exception of Anthony, Stanton’s admirers agreed that “The Solitude of Self” was her finest effort, and she concurred. It was extraordinary in style and content.
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Instead of inspiring her audience with optimism, Stanton spoke in sober tones about the essential isolation of each individual. Women were more vulnerable than men because they were not expected or prepared to fend for themselves, but both sexes, according to Stanton, shared the same existential fate. No matter what laws were passed, no matter what reforms were enacted, individuals would still be responsible for themselves, unique, and alone. “The point I wish plainly to bring before you . . . is the individuality of each human soul.” For an hour she enumerated the “awful solitude” that all individuals, but especially women, endured—in childhood, marriage, childbirth, widowhood, old age, poverty, catastrophe, and death.

Stanton used the political implications of self-sovereignty to negate the claim that men, as voters or lawmakers, could act on behalf of women. No one could represent anyone else. Nor could individuals depend on legal remedies to improve their condition; they would still have to confront their trials alone.

But when all artificial trammels are removed and women are recognized as individuals responsible for their own environments, thoroughly educated for all positions in life they may be called to fill; with all the resources in themselves that liberal thought and broad culture can give; guided by their own conscience and judgment, trained to self-protection, by a healthy development of their muscular system, and skill in the use of weapons of defense; and stimulated to self-support by a knowledge of the business world and the pleasure that pecuniary independence must ever give; when women are trained in this way, they will in a measure be fitted for those hours of solitude that come alike to all, whether prepared or otherwise.

The speech was Stanton’s masterpiece. Her tone was tragic; her argument, existential; her case, powerful.

During the convention Stanton had refused election for another term as president. Stone was too ill for a contest, so Anthony assumed the office. Anna Howard Shaw of the American became vice-president; both Stanton
and Stone were named honorary presidents. Stanton did not resist retirement. “I am a leader of thought rather than numbers,” she had explained earlier to Olympia Brown. “The . . . Association has been growing conservative for some time. Lucy and Susan alike see suffrage only. They do not see woman’s religious and social bondage, neither do the young women. . . . They have one mind and one purpose. I would rather be a free-lance article, to say my say as opportunity offers as an individual, than to speak as president of an Association.”
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Stanton was relieved to be in a position to find fault with her successors. She criticized the decision to move the national convention out of Washington to different cities and to close the Washington office. She believed that skilled lobbying, accurate vote tallies, a presence in the capital, and public pressure on Congress were necessary for a suffrage victory. In 1900 she noted with amusement and alarm “the presence before Congress for the first time of the antisuffragists, who begged to be left in their chains.”
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The old radical was contemptuous of the timidity of the new recruits. The ascendance of a younger, conservative membership resulted in a new suffrage strategy. The emphasis shifted from congressional action for a federal amendment to state referenda campaigns. The rationale shifted from Stanton’s natural rights argument that men and women were equal and therefore citizens with identical rights, to a claim for suffrage on account of female righteousness. Woman deserved the vote because they were not the same as men, because they were virtuous, maternal, devout, sober, and respectable.
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In the past Stanton had used some of these same arguments, asserting that women were morally superior to men. Indeed she had used whatever argument seemed practical and advantageous at the time. On accasion she was equally critical of both sexes, claiming that men were destructive brutes and women were small-minded ninnies. But her arguments for suffrage and legal equality were primarily based on the similarities rather than the differences between the sexes.

Stanton was not the only dissident; she gave her blessing to Matilda Joslyn Gage, Olympia Brown, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, who founded alternative organizations and espoused broader platforms than the National American Woman Suffrage Association. “At present our association has so narrowed its platform for reasons of policy and propriety,” Stanton complained, “that our conventions have ceased to point the way.”
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