In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (44 page)

Stanton’s interest in disputing these claims in a formal way began in the 1870s. After publication of the New Revised Bible in 1881 made Biblical
scholarship an accepted undertaking, she turned to the task in earnest, trying to establish a committee of academic and church women to share the work. Few accepted her invitation. Clara Colby, who endorsed Stanton’s views, published samples of her commentaries in the
Woman’s Tribune
in 1888 and urged others to cooperate with the project. News of Stanton’s plans resulted in bids from publishers and blandishments from suffragists. Few feminists shared her interest, and many objected. Anthony tried to dissuade and delay her. Personal and political changes postponed the project until the mid-1890s. Anthony was still alarmed by the prospect; her young assistant, Carrie Chapmen Catt,
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warned that NAWSA would suffer “great harm” if Stanton persevered. In 1895 Anthony brought Catt to lunch with Stanton to discuss their complaints, but Stanton refused to back down. Catt came away thinking that she was a selfish, foolish old woman.
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Stanton proceeded undaunted. Although five other women were identified as coauthors of
The Woman’s Bible
, most of the work was Stanton’s.
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Even without much assistance Stanton completed the first volume, covering the Pentateuch, in a year. Published in two parts, the work dealt only with those sections of the Old and New Testaments that mentioned women or that Stanton felt ought to have included them. The Biblical texts were printed at the top of each page with Stanton’s commentaries below. For example, Stanton printed both versions of the creation of man from the Book of Genesis. She pointed out that in the one most frequently quoted, Eve was an outgrowth of Adam’s rib. In the less well known passage, man and woman were created at the same instant in the image of God. Stanton used that example to argue the existence of an androgynous God and to illustrate how male ministers employed the Bible for their own advantage—to support the socially conservative position favoring subordinate womanhood—rather than an interpretation indicating equality of the sexes.

Stanton was skeptical of Biblical authority and contemptuous of conservative piety, but she did not condemn the Bible completely. She claimed that the position of women in the Bible reflected the bias of male authors in a patriarchal culture rather than sacred writ. Her antiliteral assumptions were not very different from those of most Unitarians or most nineteenth-century Biblical scholars, but her tone was sarcastic, marked by an animosity
for clerical pretension and traditional churches. Her commentaries are interesting, her prose readable, and her thesis valid, but
The Woman’s Bible
was never accepted as a major work of Biblical scholarship. Her accomplishment seems less impressive today, now that many of her conclusions about Biblical sources and interpretation are widely accepted.
The Woman’s Bible
was most important as another declaration of Stanton’s independence, representing her intellectual freedom from religious authority and the culmination of her personal theology.

Public reaction was sensational.
The Woman’s Bible
was a best seller; it went through seven printings in six months and was translated into several languages. As Stanton explained to Antoinette Brown Blackwell, she had planned to create a commotion. “We have had hearings before Congress for 18 years steadily, good reports, good votes, but no action. I am dismayed and disgusted, and feel like making an attack on some new quarter of the enemies’ domain. Our politicians are calm and complacent under our fire but the clergy jump round . . . like parched peas on a hot shovel.”
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As a result of her tone and her thesis, Stanton was branded as a heretic by a stunned public. Her friends were embarrassed and her enemies jubilant over the scandal. Because they belived that
The Woman’s Bible
injured their chances for success, the younger suffragists were furious. In order to dissociate the National American from
The Woman’s Bible
, they planned to condemn both the book and its author at their January 1896 meeting.

Although she did not attend the annual convention in Washington, Stanton had prepared for the fight. Before the meeting she asked Clara Colby for her help: “Make the speech of your life in favor of religious freedom.”
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Stanton’s children later suggested that she had also written a defense for Anthony to deliver. Stanton’s critics among the younger women, led by the influential Carrie Chapman Catt, could not be stopped. First they added a paragraph of renunciation to Catt’s annual report as corresponding secretary. In the chair when the offending report was read, Anthony remained silent. Clara Colby quickly moved that the report be tabled or accepted without the paragraph critical of Stanton. After lengthy debate the section was stricken.

Next the committee on resolutions offered a critical motion: “This association is non-sectarian, being composed of persons of all shades of religious opinions, and has no official connection with the so-called
Woman’s Bible
, or any theological publication.” Debate raged for another hour until Anthony finally stepped down from the chair and joined the fray. Her impassioned remarks defended both the author and her right of free speech.

Who can tell now whether these commentaries may not prove a great help to woman’s emancipation from old superstitions which have barred the way? Lucretia Mott at first thought Mrs. Stanton had injured the cause
of all women’s other rights by insisting upon the demand for suffrage, but she had sense enough not to bring in a resolution against it. In 1860 when Mrs. Stanton made a speech before the New York legislature in favor of a bill making drunkenness a ground for divorce, there was a general cry among the friends that she had killed the woman’s cause. I shall be pained beyond expression if the delegates are so narrow and illiberal as to adopt this resolution. You would better not begin resolving against individual action or you will find no limit. This year it is Mrs. Stanton; next year it may be I or one of yourselves who may be the victim.
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Despite such eloquence, the censure resolution passed, fifty-three to forty-one. Approved by Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna Howard Shaw, Henry Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Rachel Foster Avery, the vote was as much a rebuke of Anthony as of Stanton.

Anthony hurried to New York to report to an indignant Mrs. Stanton. According to Anthony, “weeks of agony of soul” followed. Stanton wanted them both to resign. Anthony refused to leave “her half-fledged chickens without a mother”; Stanton preferred to wring their necks. Anthony convinced her to “try to reverse this miserable, narrow action” at the next convention; Stanton agreed, but the action was never reversed. Anthony reprimanded Catt and Avery for their part, but they did not repent. In the press Anthony made clear that she had had nothing to do with either
The Woman’s Bible
or its condemnation. She defended women’s right to “interpret and twist the Bible to their own advantage as men have always [done] to theirs.”
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Stanton was angry at Anthony and contemptuous of “her girls.” First she resolved to keep her distance, until she realized that her isolation was just what NAWSA wanted. To get back at her critics, she appended the censure resolution to the next edition of
The Woman’s Bible
. To annoy them further, she refused to resign and continued to harass them. Whenever possible, she reminded them and the public of her role as founder and former president of the National American Association. She was disappointed at what she believed was Anthony’s disloyalty to her, but she did not refer to it again. Two years later, ignoring Anthony’s objections, she published the second volume of her Bible. Despite the scandal, or perhaps because of it, the revising committee of coauthors had been enlarged to thirty members.

Political disputes, philosophical disagreements, and physical distance weakened the Stanton-Anthony bond but did not sever it. Like her relationship with Henry in its last years, Stanton’s friendship with Anthony changed course. The alliance lost its intensity. Neither any longer felt “incomplete” without the other. After 1895 they alternated between affection,
annoyance, and animosity. Only a year before, when Anthony had collapsed while speaking in California, Stanton had admitted, “I never realized how desolate the world would be to me without you until I heard of your sudden illness.”
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But in the aftermath of the Bible controversy Stanton’s tone changed. She was no longer inhibited by Anthony’s caution or her regard. Stanton was finally free of the need for her friend’s sanction. She had internalized her own standard of independence and needed only her own approval.

Each woman pursued a separate course. Anthony, surrounded by surrogate “nieces,” remained at the forefront of the suffrage struggle. Stanton, cushioned in her apartment, preferred to spend her time reflecting on larger questions. In the years before Stanton’s death in 1902, the two old friends saw each other less often, corresponded sporadically, cooperated less frequently, and even opposed each other in public. Nonetheless Stanton dedicated her autobiography to “Susan B. Anthony, my steadfast friend for half a century.” As she explained to Anthony, “the current of our lives has run in the same channel so long it cannot be separated.” Anthony continued to ask Stanton for speeches and documents, entreating her, for example, to send four different addresses for the 1898 meeting. “The summing up of the achievements of women in the past fifty years is a big job, one you alone are equal to,” Anthony wrote; “Now, my dear, this is positively the last time I am ever going to put you on the rack and torture you to make
the
speech or speeches of your life.” The aging author reluctantly complied but complained, “One would think I was a machine, that all I had to do was to turn a crank and thoughts on any theme would bubble up like water.”
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She pointedly suggested to Anthony that some of their younger coadjutors do the bubbling.

When Anthony went to London in 1899 as head of the American delegation to the International Council of Women, she stayed with Harriot Blatch in Basingstoke. But when Stanton suggested a trip to Rochester, Anthony answered that her guest chamber was occupied and asked Stanton to stay with Libby Miller instead, so that she would not have to waste time “visiting and catering.” Confident that she would refuse, Anthony invited Stanton to attend each annual NAWSA convention. “I replied I thought she and I had earned the right to sit in our rocking chairs and think and write,” recorded Stanton. “But it occurred to me later that that would be purgatory for Susan!” Stanton believed that next to Theodore Roosevelt, Anthony was the “nearest example of perpetual motion” she knew.
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In 1898 Anthony announced that she would resign the NAWSA presidency on her eightieth birthday in 1900 and tapped Carrie Chapman Catt to be her successor. Angry over the nomination of her critic, Stanton urged Lillie Devereux Blake to challenge Catt. As head of the New York Suffrage
Association, Blake had won suffrage for women in local school elections.
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She had also succeeded in getting matrons in police stations and women doctors in mental institutions. From Stanton’s perspective, Blake’s broad interests made her an appealing and well-qualified candidate, but Anthony disapproved of her fashion-plate image and her residual Southern accent. Stanton blamed Catt for the censure vote and threatened to resign if she were elected. Through an intermediary, Anthony responded that such behavior would be “very immature, . . . despotic, [and] undemocratic.”
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At the last moment Blake withdrew her name for lack of support, and Catt was elected in a landslide.

Rather than resign from NAWSA, Stanton removed herself even further from Anthony and the suffragists. As she confided to Blake, she was full of resentment at her “young coadjutors.”

They refused to read my letters and resolutions to the conventions; they have denounced the
Woman’s Bible
unsparingly; not one of them has ever reviewed or expressed the least appreciation of
Eighty Years and More
. . . . For all this I make no public protest, I propose no revenge. Because of this hostile feeling I renounced the presidency and quietly accept the situation, and publish what I have to say in the liberal papers. . . . I have outgrown the suffrage association, as the ultimative
[sic]
of human endeavor, and no longer belong in its fold with its limitations.
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Stanton directed her antagonism toward the younger women rather than at her old friend. Her hurt feelings were apparent in a letter written in 1901: “They have given Susan thousands of dollars, jewels, laces, silks and satins and me, criticisms and denunciations for my radical ideas.”
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Stanton never acknowledged in the records remaining that it was Anthony who had recruited, nurtured, and trained “her girls,” using them to develop a power base separate from Stanton and to achieve the ultimate end of woman suffrage. The younger suffragists gave Anthony the votes necessary to escape from Stanton’s shadow, and they gave her lasting status in women’s history. Anthony put suffrage ahead of Stanton; Stanton put feminism ahead of friendship.

Despite the tensions caused by her strained relations with Anthony and the younger suffragists, Stanton enjoyed her seniority. She had long argued that the greatest benefit of old age was that it allowed time for reflection. As she had written to Clara Colby in 1895: “Now I want to give my time to general reading and thinking. . . . I cannot work in the old ruts any
longer. . . . There is such a thing as being too active, living too outward a life. Most reformers fail at this point. . . . In order to develop our real selves, we need time to be alone for thought. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry too soon.” Stanton was proud of her self-sufficiency. She enjoyed what she was doing—reading, writing, and taking naps. “I am fond of all games,” she reported, “of music and novels, hence the days fly swiftly by; I am never lonely, life is ever very sweet to me and full of interest.”
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She was content.