In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (45 page)

Stanton had completed two volumes of
The Woman’s Bible
and in 1898 published her autobiography,
Eighty Years and More
. In 1901 she began to compile her speeches and other papers. Always quick witted and quotable, Mrs. Stanton remained popular with the public. She noted in her diary that she was “constantly asked by reporters to talk and write on every imaginable subject.”
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Newspapers and magazines carried articles by and about her. Her last essay, on divorce reform, was syndicated by the Hearst chain just two weeks before her death.

Finally at leisure, Stanton filled her days with reading. She had always read voraciously. Among the books she devoured now were Andrew White’s
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology
; James Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
; Matthew Arnold’s
Essays in Criticism
; Herbert Spencer’s
Education
; biographies of George Eliot, William Lloyd Garrison, Alfred Tennyson, and George Washington; Thomas Hughes’s
Tom Brown at Oxford
; and novels by Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, and Leo Tolstoy, noting, “we are sandwiching between these various books a good deal of Mark Twain, whose fun is only equaled by his morals.”
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Because reading and writing were Stanton’s primary occupations, failing eyesight became a more serious physical handicap than her immobility. Like her father, she began to go blind in her old age. Although she never lost her sight entirely, after 1896 the condition deteriorated rapidly. As she confided in her diary in 1897: “Oh what a privation! I say nothing to my children of this great grief, but it is a sore trial, with prospective total blindness! I will than be able to do nothing but think. However, I can still write without spectacles, though I cannot read my own writing. But my hearing is as good as ever, and I am perfectly well otherwise.” Not to be hampered, she hired a typist and a reader.
⁶⁸

Such optimism and resourcefulness were characteristic. Stanton accepted the reality of her circumstances and emphasized the positive elements. “I never encourage sad moods,” she told Harriot. Like Mrs. Mott, whenever she felt depressed, she worked at “physical labor or practical thought . . . cheating] myself into the thought that all is well, grand, glorious, [and] triumphant.” About her blindness, she concluded, “As my eyes grow dimmer from day to day, my intellectual vision grows clearer.”
⁶⁹

On Stanton’s eighty-fifth birthday in November 1900 she received “so many congratulatory letters and telegrams and gifts that the reproaches and ridicule of half a century ago are quite forgotten.” She spent the day at the dentist with a toothache. “I asked . . . if he could patch me up for five years longer as I wished to live as long as my maternal grandmother did, and thus maintain the family reputation for longevity.”
⁷⁰
Anthony, herself eighty, sent Mrs. Stanton a birthday greeting. Although no longer president of NAWSA, Anthony remained the senior member of its executive committee. Centered over her Rochester desk hung a photograph of Mrs. Stanton. On Stanton’s desk sat a plaster cast of their two right hands, clasped together.

In the spring of 1902 Anthony visited Stanton in New York several times. After all they had been through, conversation was somewhat strained. “We have grown a little apart since not so closely associated as of old,” Anthony admitted to her diary. Absence had made her even more aware of Stanton’s physical deterioration. The summer of 1902 passed without incident; Anthony planned to return in the fall for Stanton’s eighty-seventh birthday. In October the
New York American
published Stanton’s essay on divorce. Ten days later she dictated an open letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, asking him to endorse the federal woman suffrage amendment in his next congressional message, and sent a similar appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt.
⁷¹
They were her last letters. On Sunday, October 26, 1902, Elizabeth Cady Stanton died.

Her daughter Harriot described Stanton’s last day and death in a letter to a friend.

None of us knew mother was so near her end ’til Sunday really (the day she died). She had been suffering from shortness of breath lately, from time to time, and from that cause felt under the mark. On Saturday she said to the doctor, very emphatically, “Now if you can’t cure this difficulty of breathing, and if I am not to feel brighter and more like work again, I want you to give me something to send me pack-horse speed to heaven.” . . . Two hours before her death (on Sunday) she said she wished to stand up. She was sitting in her arm chair in the drawing room, not dressed but in her dressing gown, and with her hair arranged all as usual. She had told her maid earlier in the day to dress her hair, and when it was finished she said, “Now, I’ll be dressed.” But I dissuaded her, seeing she was weary. The trained nurse (who had only been summoned an hour earlier) and the doctor, when she asked to stand, helped her to rise and stood on either side of her. I placed a table for her to rest her hands on. She drew herself up very erect (the doctor said the muscular strength was extraordinary) and there she stood seven or eight minutes, steadily looking out proudly before her. I think she was mentally making an address. When we urged her to sit down she fell asleep. Two hours later, the doctor thinking her position constrained in her chair, we lifted her to her bed, and she slipped away peacefully in a few minutes.
⁷²

All six of Stanton’s surviving children were present when she died.

The medical report gave heart failure as the cause of death. Stanton’s granddaughter Nora, a recent graduate of Cornell, told her son John Barney much later that Stanton had asked the family physician, a woman, “to be put to death if she were losing her faculties.” She might have been referring to the same incident Harriot Blatch described in her letter, when Stanton asked the doctor to speed her death if she were not going to recover. Family history also claimed that Stanton had instructed her children that there should be no autopsy and no investigation. It would not have been out of character for Stanton to ask for a drug overdose to shorten her life. Stanton had said she liked living but hoped to die “as quickly as possible . . . when the time comes.”
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Hers was not an unusual or necessarily suicidal sentiment.

The death of Elizabeth Cady Stanton was front page news. Every major newspaper and most magazines published editorials, eulogies, and announcements of memorial services. Hundreds of letters of condolence poured in and were acknowledged with engraved cards from “the sons and daughters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.” Mrs. Catt scheduled a memorial service for the January 1903 NAWSA convention in New Orleans, but Harriot Blatch refused to attend.
⁷⁴

Anthony was stunned by the news. “I am too crushed to say much,” she told reporters. En route to the funeral, she wrote Ida Harper, “Well, it is an awful hush—it seems impossible—that the voice is hushed that I longed to hear for fifty years—longed to get her opinion of things—before I knew exactly where I stood.” Six months later she was still mourning the death of her friend. “How lonesome I do feel. . . . It was a great going out of my life when she went.”
⁷⁵

On the occasion of Libby Miller’s husband’s death, Stanton had told her daughter Margaret how she wanted her funeral conducted. “I should like to be in my ordinary dress, no crepe or black, no fripperies or fandangoes of any sort, and some common sense women to conduct the services.” In keeping with her wishes, a private service was held in her New York City apartment. It was conducted by Stanton’s friend Moncure Conway. He was assisted by Lucy Stone’s sister-in-law, the Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who gave one of the tributes. The table on which the Declaration of Sentiments had been written in Seneca Falls stood at the head of her casket, bearing
The History of Woman Suffrage
.
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The Reverend Phebe Hanaford, a coauthor of
The Woman’s Bible
, led the graveside service at Woodlawn Cemetery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had doubted the existence of an afterlife. She died as she had lived, impatient and independent.

As the repetition of phrases like “role model” and “behavior” may have signaled, this biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton is based on a psychological theory. To explain and illuminate Stanton’s motivation and behavior, I have employed social learning theory, a tool I found well suited to biography. In terms of social learning theory, Stanton defined and developed a model of independent behavior, and then achieved it. Her sense of self-sovereignty provided her with an ideal role on which to pattern her life.

In the same way that historians attempt to explain events, biographers try to elucidate motivation. In the past this has been done by a straightforward statement of the facts of a life, as the biographer had determined them. Readers were left to draw their own conclusions. Yet biographers from Plutarch to Parson Weems have relied at least implicitly on some assumptions about personality and behavior to account for the actions of their subjects. They drew from their own experience or “common sense” or from the prevailing explanatory modes of their times—mythological, religious, economic, whatever. Such early approaches lacked the discipline of a sustained framework.

Although the craft of biography became more sophisticated at the turn of the century, under the pen of Lytton Strachey, and the available tools improved, most biographies remain assertive and impressionistic. The principal personality theory used in biography in the twentieth century, when any theory is employed, is psychoanalytic, based on the theories of Sigmund Freud.
¹
Rapid advances in knowledge about human behavior have created competition among theories and confusion among amateurs. Concepts that were startling sixty years ago have become widely accepted as “common sense” interpretations today and incorporated into child-raising practices, educational theory, management systems, art history, and politics. Terms like “identity crisis,” “Oedipal complex,” and “egocentric” have become part of our everyday vocabulary. Nonetheless many biographers are hesitant to use them.

There are valid reasons for reservations about psychological methodology. First, few biographers hold dual degrees in history and psychology, and fewer are medical doctors with a specialty in psychiatry. Biographers lack the training and experience to deal with psychological models. Second, social scientists often present their arguments and evidence in an unfamiliar format or unfathomable jargon. Further, historians are skeptical about the nature and validity of the evidence on which some theories of personality are based. For example, Freudian theory regards early childhood experiences as formative, if not determinative. But for many biographers data from this period are inaccessible or inadmissible as evidence.
Freudian theory also postulates the strong influence on individual behavior of the unconscious mind, which cannot be directly observed or documented.

The problem of evidence is compounded by the concern of historians about the applicability of contemporary theory to historical subjects: can seventeenth-century thoughts and deeds be penetrated by twentieth-century social science? That some behavioral theories of human personality resulted from research on animals also disconcerts many historians. Moreover, some theories of behavior contradict the biographer’s faith in the uniqueness of individuals, or, if they do allow for individuality, they apply to deviant rather than normal activity. Most behavioral theories of personality do not account for those nuances that make one person malevolent and another mischievous, that take into account the brilliant as well as the average. Finally, because few attempts at “psycho-biography” have been convincing and most are damned by professionals in both fields, biographers may have become gun-shy. They worry that such methodology will distort their subjects, divert their emphasis, and discourage their readers.

Despite these drawbacks, the tools of social science must be employed by the modern biographer. With such methods, historians can make “common sense” explanations more precise and causal statements more penetrating. Because the task of biography is to illuminate its subject, the insights of personality theory must be applied. In order to tell a life story, one must be able to unmask the subject, to unveil “the personal myth,” to reveal a person’s “self-concept,” as Henry James’s biographer Leon Edel describes the biographical process.
²
Fortunately some theories of human behavior are both appropriate and available to biography. They allow for individual idiosyncracy and utilize data likely to be credible and obtainable.

This biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton employs one such psychological model, social learning theory. As defined over the past decade by Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura and others, social learning theory is a sophisticated form of behaviorism. Individual actions are an amalgam of responses to environment and circumstance and a person’s genetic inheritance. A person is motivated by a need for approval and fear of disapproval. Bandura’s refinement of basic behaviorism credits the individual with initiative and intelligence. Social learning theory takes into account the human ability to learn from observation, to make comparisons, and to anticipate the outcome of one’s actions. Behavior depends on “the continuous reciprocal interaction of cognitive, behavioral and environmental determinants.” Within the ongoing process of reciprocal interactions lies the opportunity for people in part to direct their destiny, as well as to set the limits of such self direction.
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Put simply, social learning theory claims that individuals “learn” social or antisocial behavior. People have the ability to make thoughtful choices about what course of action they will undertake, based on information they have acquired or “learned” by experience or observation about the probable outcomes of the various options open to them. They can acquire such information either directly or vicariously. Individuals take into account their own ability to undertake such a course, the probability of their success, and their expectations about how others will react to their actions before they actually do anything. How much the individuals value the opinion of various observers is another factor in their decision-making process. Each of these elements influences and is influenced by the others, thus the concept of “continuous reciprocal determinism.”