In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (48 page)

Your energy of character might so manifest itself that you would get the credit of being proud and haughty but in reality you are not so, indeed are at times wanting in true pride and self-love. You have remarkable Firmness and perseverance when you have once laid out your plans and taken your position. You are not to be driven from your purposes or prevented from consummating your designs. Your moral brain is unevenly developed. Conscien[tiousness] as connected with Firmness is fully developed and its manifestations are particularly seen with reference to the “Higher Law.”

It should [illegible] have a distinct influence in your character, while that portion joining Cautiousness is defective. Hence your regard for human law and the consequences of conduct is less active which may sometines manifest itself in want of circumspection as seen by others. No law is law to you unless sanctioned by the intellect and in harmony with moral obligation.

Hope is full and has a sustaining influence on your mind, tho’ you are not particularly elated by enthusiasm and extravagant expectations of success, still are not easily discouraged and have a disposition to regard things in a favorable more than a discouraging light. Veneration and Marvellousness are also average and their influence would be comparatively small and guided mostly by other faculties. Veneration as manifested toward intellect and superior merit has a fair influence over your character and conduct but as giving deference for mere opinions forms and
customs as such is not distinct. Whatever others value as superior is no criterion to you. Faith is weak when compared with your reason. You are governed by what you can understand and comprehend, more than by faith. Benevolence is large, you are naturally kind, humane, generous in your feelings, anxious for the good of society, delight in rendering service and promoting the happiness of others. This is the strongest and most influential impulse in your moral nature. Your mechanical capacity is good, particularly in contriving ways and means to secure ends, also your sense of the beautiful, poetical and love of the sublime in nature and oratory.

You have uncommon power to [isolate?] and conform. You are not noted for your power to apply thoughts and make it tangible and practical. Larger Comparison would give more power of analysis and ability to apply principles to every day life, you would then more readily see the affinities between principles and the wants of mankind. You have a good degree of suavity of manner and youthfulness of mind and prefer younger society rather than older. But the organ of Intuition is not particularly large, still owing to the strength and vigor of your intellect you may readily see the motives of others but this state of mind is not the result of intuition. Language is fully developed but you are more energetic and forcible than copious, can write better than speak, are decidedly fond of music, appreciate good [tones?] have good memory of time and events, excellent memory of places are [“not” scratched out] naturally systematic, fond of order quite inclined to arrange and systematize your thoughts, are very much annoyed at a want of system and method in business. Capacity in figures is good, you might excel in mathematics and the study of Languages, have a good mechanical eye, are a good judge of proportions forms and outlines but are not as ready in seeing adaptations of things, are more given to thought and investigation than to observation. Reported phrenologically by E. S. Stark

1
. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (hereafter ECS),
Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897
, introd. Gail Parker (New York: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 458–68 (hereafter
80Y
). Further descriptive material is ECS diary, 13 Nov. 1895,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences
, ed. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: Harper & Bros., 1922), 2:314–15 (vol. 2 hereafter
Letters
). Quotation from Alma Lutz (hereafter AL),
Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815–1902
(New York: John Day, 1940), 292 (hereafter
CE
).

2
. Suitable roles for nineteenth-century women were referred to by ministers and ladies’ magazines as their “appropriate sphere” or the “cult of true womanhood.” They confined women to the domestic circle. See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,”
American Quarterly
18 (1966):151–74; Gerda Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson,”
Mid-Continent American Studies Journal
10 (1969): 5–15; Nancy F. Cott,
The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977).

3
. ECS to Clara Colby, [1896?],
CE
, 296.

4
. In the heat of the suffrage battle, the “antis” frequently quoted ECS’s more radical comments on marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. See “The Case against Woman Suffrage” (Massachusetts, 1916), National American Woman Suffrage Association MSS (hereafter NAWSA), box 42, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter LC).

5
. Program and other souvenirs of this event, ECS MSS, LC. See also Alice Stone Blackwell, “Woman’s 75 Year Fight,”
Nation
(18 July 1923), 53–54.

6
. Anecdote recorded by Harriot Stanton Blatch on handwritten copy of ECS speech to the New York Senate Judiciary Committee, May 1867, ECS-LC. About keeping her papers for posterity, ECS wrote in her diary, 1 Oct. 1896,
Letters
, 321:
“Since I got back to town, my chief occupation has been looking over my papers, destroying many, and putting the rest in order. As from day to day I have worked alone at this monotonous task, I have felt that perhaps this is the last time I shall ever handle them, and that I should make the work of destruction easier for my children. How we dislike to burn what we once deemed valuable, and yet what a nuisance to those who come after us are bushels of old papers. Well, I have thinned mine out and may try it again should I remain on this planet half a dozen years longer.” See also Susan B. Anthony (hereafter SBA) to Elizabeth Smith Miller (hereafter ESM), 2 March 1897, Smith Family MSS, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. (hereafter NYPL).

7
. Rhoda Barney Jenkins (ECS great-granddaughter), interview with author, Greenwich, Conn., 18 Oct. 1976.

8
.
CE
; Harriot Stanton Blatch and AL,
Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940) (hereafter CY). See AL MSS, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter AES).

9
. Ellen C. DuBois,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches
(New York: Schocken Books, 1981), is the most carefully annotated collection to date. My research method was to locate and compare as many versions of each letter as I could. If there was no holograph copy extant, I usually trusted copies by Ida Husted Harper or Theodore Stanton before any others. The material quoted by AL and Harper in their books I accepted as reliable. That appearing only in
Letters
is more questionable.

10
. See content analysis by Anne Grant, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Quarrel with God” (typescript, n.d.), 53–54. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Blatch also drastically reduced ECS’s references to her friend SBA. They added a tribute to her childhood Greek tutor, Rev. Simon Hosack.

11
.
80Y
, xxii.

12
.
The History of Woman Suffrage
, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage et al., 6 vols. (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881–86; reprint, New York: Source Book Press, 1970) (hereafter
HWS
). The original editions of
HWS
were personally distributed by Anthony to libraries, politicians, and associates. Of those remaining, most are too fragile to circulate. In addition to the hardbound reprint edition, there is
The Concise History of Woman Suffrage
, ed. Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978).

13
. Theodore Tilton to ECS, 17 March 1897, in Margaret Stanton Lawrence, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815–1902: A Sketch of Her Life by Her Elder Daughter” (typescript, 1915), 23, ECS MSS, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (hereafter VC).

14
. The best examples of recent Stanton scholarship are Lois W. Banner,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman’s Rights
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), also typescript with footnotes, AES; and Ellen C. DuBois,
Feminism and Suffrage: the Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978). Banner uses some Eriksonian theory; DuBois traces the political and intellectual sources of Stanton’s ideas.

15
. ECS, “The Solitude of Self” (address to U.S. Congressional Committee on the Judiciary, 18 Jan. 1892, holograph copy), ECS-LC, also
HWS
, 4:189–91.

16
. Ida Husted Harper, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,”
American Monthly Review of Reviews
(Dec. 1902), 715–19, ECS-LC.

17
. Barbara W. Tuchman, “Biography as a Prism of History,” in
Telling Lives:
The Biographer’s Art
, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books and National Portrait Gallery, 1979), 133–47. The model for this generation is Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973).