In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (5 page)

Stanton’s childhood, although punctuated by death and discipline, was not completely overcast. Elizabeth was a cheerful, active, resourceful girl, who enjoyed games, books, friends, and sports. The comfortable, conservative Cady household gave the children a sense of security and stability. Ostentation was avoided; dancing was forbidden. Breakfast was served at six, dinner at noon, supper at five, and a “piece [of pie]” at eight. The Cady daughters were dressed in red or blue flannel dresses (cotton in summer), with white neck ruffles, black alpaca aprons, and hand-knit stockings. Elizabeth rebelled against the restrictions of her confining, uncomfortable costume—she never chose to wear red as an adult—and against most of the rules. Neither parental discipline nor Presbyterian standards nor the “everlasting no, no, no!” of the nannies inhibited the Cady children from active childhoods.
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Within the restraints imposed, the children enjoyed the usual entertainments. They rode horseback, explored the hotel, jail, and courthouse, and attended apple harvests, quilting bees, school exhibitions, church fairs, and
sleighing parties. Special holidays included the Fourth of July and county militia training days in September, which featured gingerbread, molasses candy, and a review of the troops at the racetrack. Elizabeth also remembered Christmas stockings stuffed with twenty-five cents, raisins, almonds, an apple, a fried cake, and a catechism of Old Testament stories illustrated with colored pictures.
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The Cady money freed the children from all but minimal domestic chores, paid for tutors and music lessons, provided horses and sleds and the leisure to enjoy them. Their wealth ensured that every opportunity for education and enrichment could be afforded. Stanton’s childhood also provided the examples, incentive, opportunity, skills, and successes necessary for her to learn and maintain new behaviors.

Stanton’s conservative, secure childhood gave her unusual freedom and self-confidence. Her ability to enter the masculine sphere of sports, law offices, and higher education was not typical. American society in the early nineteenth century was sex segregated. Girls learned their roles and responsibilities from female relatives and friends; boys learned theirs from males. In the typical pattern, there were few areas in which men and women shared an activity or occupation either before or after marriage. Women shared the rituals of childbirth, nursing the sick, caring for the aged. They developed their own social events in sewing circles, quilting bees, and women’s auxiliaries. As a result, women had the opportunity to become intimate friends.
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Elizabeth Cady participated in both feminine and masculine spheres. Whether on account of inattention, indifference, or design, she was allowed to try out a wide range of roles. She learned the domestic caretaking roles expected of women, and she tried some of the competitive, achievement-oriented roles enjoyed by men. At the time, male mentors were more visible and possibly more important than female role models. As an adult she practiced and found satisfaction in both traditional and untraditional behavior. She was a wife, mother, homemaker, nurse, seamstress, an intellectual, orator, author, reformer, and activist. Her unusual, upper-class childhood prepared her for untraditional roles and set a pattern for independent behavior.

Elizabeth Cady grew up in Jacksonian America. It was a turbulent era characterized by rapid growth and social change. The nation had extended its borders across the Mississippi and was filled with boundless optimism about its “manifest destiny” to control the continent. Settlers moved west to populate the plains, and more and more foreigners migrated to the land of promise. Canals, highways, and railroads tied the nation together. The availability of transportation and cheap labor spurred industrial development. Production moved out of homes and farms and into factories, changing the social order. Fewer employees lived with their employers; fewer husbands worked at home. Geographic and economic growth was paralleled by the extension of political rights. “Jacksonian democracy” meant universal manhood suffrage—for white men. The national mood was expansive, energetic, ambitious, and optimistic.

Conservative elements in the population would have added “worried” to those adjectives. Like a fast-growing adolescent, the United States outgrew its boundaries and the traditions and institutions that had governed it in the past. The rhetoric of equality contrasted sharply with increased class consciousness and economic distinctions. Women and slaves were not included in the egalitarian ethic. Churches and small communities could not easily solve the larger problems that accompanied economic growth and dislocation. The overthrow of traditional values and institutions generated a religious revival, which in turn inspired widespread interest in reform. Reformers organized to perfect mankind and man-made institutions. Societies to promote temperance, common schools, and church attendance, to improve prisons and insane asylums, and to end prostitution and slavery flourished.
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It was during the Jacksonian period, in the 1830s, that the “cult of true womanhood” was first articulated by ministers, ladies’ magazines, and social conservatives. “True womanhood” was defined as domestic, maternal, religious, cultured, idle, and subservient. It sought to distinguish between ladies—the wives and daughters of the middle and upper classes—and all other women—immigrants, blacks, mill girls, and field hands. Ladies functioned only within the approved sphere of kitchen, nursery, and church. Unemployed female relatives became a status symbol for upwardly mobile males. With the rise of manufacturing, wives were no longer economic partners who turned raw materials into finished goods. Similarly, women were displaced from such traditional occupations as midwifery and undertaking. At the same time that opportunities for American men were expanding, the lives of American women became more restricted.
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Many of these trends were evident in upstate New York. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, stretching west from Albany to Buffalo for 363 miles, brought thousands of settlers into the region, mostly New Englanders and new immigrants. The availability of transportation and the development of steam power stimulated industry in the previously agrarian region. The first gristmills, distilleries, and packinghouses were joined by factories of every description. The population of the region swelled, and cities grew up along the waterway. Once middle class and homogeneous, farm settlements now had a wealthy class of bankers and merchants and a lower class of mill hands and mule drivers.

Intensive economic growth and the democratization of the political process in the Jacksonian era resulted in rapid change and social unrest. In this environment religious revival and reform were especially appealing. The first revival meetings were held around Oneida, near Syracuse. The enthusiasm spread west to Auburn and east to Troy. Because of the intensity of its revival experience, this area came to be known as the “burned-over district.” In the decades following the completion of the Erie Canal, upstate New York produced Mormonism, spiritualism, millennialism, perfectionism, three third-party efforts, bloomers, and women’s rights.
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The effect of these changes on Johnstown’s first family was initially indirect. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s hometown lay twenty-five miles north of the canal and considerably east of the principal areas of reform activity. The village experienced some industrial expansion, population growth, and a decline in church membership. Judge Cady profited from the sale of his western holdings to canal developers and new settlers, and his law practice increased. The Cady family’s social and economic position was secure, but not even the Cadys could shelter their household from what Judge Cady deemed the suspect enthusiasms sweeping the region. In the years of her
adolescence, Elizabeth Cady would be exposed to the contagion of revival, reform, and romance, and would not recover.

The years following Eleazar’s death in 1826 were full of changes for Elizabeth Cady. The most important was the advent of Edward Bayard. Elizabeth remembered him as “a southern gentleman, . . . a man of culture, of refined sensibilities, tall, graceful, extremely handsome, and very fond of children.” A classmate of Eleazar’s at Union College, a member of the politically prominent Delaware family, a clerk in Judge Cady’s office, and Tryphena’s husband, Bayard became the family’s substitute son and brother. He filled the void left by the elder Cadys’ withdrawal into grief—Judge Cady’s absence and Mrs. Cady’s retirement. The childless Bayards became acting parents for the three younger Cadys. “They selected our clothing, books, schools, acquaintances, and directed our reading and amusements,” recalled Elizabeth. While Tryphena tried to maintain her mother’s strict discipline, Bayard inaugurated “an era of picnics, birthday parties and endless amusements: the buying of pictures, fairy books, musical instruments and ponies, and frequent excursions with parties on horseback. . . . To me and my sisters he was a Companion in all our amusements, a teacher in the higher departments of knowledge, and a counselor in all our youthful trials and disappointments.” Because he had no children, Elizabeth later wrote, “his love centered on me.” For the first time the children were allowed to travel beyond the village limits. Prompted by Bayard, they made “frequent journeys” to Saratoga, Utica, Peterboro, and the northern lake region. Spending her first night in a hotel in Schenectady, young Elizabeth was most impressed by the wallpaper.
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As Elizabeth’s geographic sphere widened under Bayard’s sponsorship, so did her intellectual scope. Having learned the rudiments at Maria Yost’s dame school, Elizabeth attended the Johnstown Academy until she was fifteen. As she recalled, she “was the only girl in the higher classes of mathematics and the languages, yet in our [play] all the girls and boys mingled freely together. In running, sliding downhill, and snowballing we made no distinction of sex. . . . Equality was the general basis of our school relations.”
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Elizabeth was always at the top of her class. Her successful experience in these settings contributed to her self-esteem and accounted for her later advocacy of coeducation.

In addition to her classwork Elizabeth studied with Bayard, as she had with Rev. Hosack. Bayard “discoursed . . . on law, philosophy, political economy, history and poetry, and together we read novels without number; . . . our readings were varied with recitations, music, dancing and games.” Provoking critical discussions on every subject, he taught her “how to think clearly and reason logically.” According to her autobiography, they
engaged in “intellectual fencing.” It was Bayard who taught her to jump four-foot fences and to play chess.
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When Elizabeth graduated from the Johnstown Academy in 1830, she wanted to go to Union College, as her brother and Bayard had. At that time no college in the country admitted women.
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She resented her automatic exclusion and her father’s horror at the very idea. “My vexation and mortification knew no bounds,” she later wrote. Her father saw no reason for any additional education. He suggested instead that she attend the circuit courts with him and enjoy the “balls and dinners.” Or she could copy papers for his clerks and learn “how to keep house and make puddings and pies.”
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Elizabeth tried each of these alternatives but continued to press for more formal schooling. Finally Bayard persuaded Judge Cady to enroll her at the female seminary established by Emma Willard in Troy, New York.

Elizabeth Cady was fifteen years old when she entered the Troy Female Seminary on January 2, 1831, midway through the first term. In another example of autobiographical license, she claimed to have “already studied everything that was taught there except French, music, and dancing, so I devoted myself to these accomplishments.” The record shows, however, that she took algebra, Greek, and music her first term, followed by twenty-two weeks of logic, botany, writing, geometry, and modern history. In the fall of 1831 her course work included criticism, arithmetic, chemistry, French, and piano. The standard course of study required religious and moral instruction, literature, human psychology, natural philosophy, domestic science, and optional ornamental accomplishments like singing and sketching.
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Judge Cady paid an annual tuition of three hundred dollars, plus extra charges for piano instruction and instrument rental. The catalog directed students to dress in calico or gingham dresses, “made in plain style.” Parents were asked not to furnish “expensive laces, jewelry, . . . nor to leave [their daughters] the control of money.”
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By 1831 the seminary had an enrollment of more than a hundred boarding students and two hundred day students.

In retrospect, Elizabeth Cady heartily disliked the seminary. In contrast to her previous experience in coeducation, she was contemptuous of the “artificial relationships with boys” that resulted from single-sex isolation, and she disdained the “pretensions and petty jealousies” of the other girls. She also hated the repetition of “corned beef, liver, and bread pudding.”
Yet Stanton admired the school’s head, Emma Hart Willard, whom she later described as “a splendid-looking woman, then in her prime [who] fully realized my idea of a queen.”
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Surprisingly, Stanton would become a loyal alumna. It may be that Elizabeth Cady’s discontent at Emma Willard’s female seminary resulted from the conflicting signals she received there about what were appropriate roles for educated women.

Emma Willard was the first educator to replace the traditional offerings of female academies with a rigorous program of instruction.
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Although she called her school a “female seminary,” she in fact aspired to make the classical and scientific curricula of men’s colleges available to young women. She was the first woman to teach physiology, logic, and the enlightenment philosophy of natural rights to women. She was the first to urge the establishment of “normal schools” to train women teachers. She designed novel methods to present mathematics and history and wrote most of the textbooks used by her students. She was a militant advocate of women’s education. Although she never supported wider political rights for women, she was active in antiprostitution campaigns and encouraged the achievements of other professional women, among them Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician.
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