In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (9 page)

The Stantons arrived in London in early June. They boarded at Mark Moore’s, at No. 6 Queen Street Place, with several other American delegates, including most of the women. Two American Female Anti-Slavery societies had sent representatives. From Boston came Emily Winslow, Abby Southwick, and Ann Green Phillips, who with her husband Wendell Phillips, another delegate, was also on her wedding trip. From Philadelphia came Lucretia Mott, Sarah Pugh, Mary Grew, Abby Kimber, and Elizabeth Neall.
Birney the southerner found the situation so intolerable that he moved out.

The question of whether or not to seat the American women as legitimate delegates provided the only excitement in an otherwise tame convention. The women knew that their rejection had been planned in advance by the anti-Garrison faction of American abolitionists, with which Henry Stanton was allied. Their exclusion was intended to reinforce the position of the new American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty party. In an effort to challenge the exclusion of his wife and the other women, and to embarrass the political abolitionists, Wendell Phillips planned a parliamentary protest. Elizabeth Stanton knew little about this intrigue until she was caught up in it at her boardinghouse and on the convention floor.

The first World Anti-Slavery Convention opened on Friday, June 12, 1840, in Freemason’s Hall on Great Queen Street. The venerable Thomas Clarkson presided. Birney was made one of the vice-presidents and Henry Stanton one of the secretaries. Henry Stanton made frequent speeches, including one urging British abolitionists to rely more on the press, churches, and economic coercion in their strategy.
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Women delegates and guests were seated in a railed-off space on one side of the floor.

As delegate Mary Grew recorded in her diary, “The contest respecting the eligibility of women to seats was immediately commenced and sustained with great vigor during the remainder of the session.” Wendell Phillips moved that a roster of all delegates with credentials from any antislavery body be prepared and adopted. Debate lasted for several hours. Birney and Mary Grew’s father spoke against the motion. Members of the clergy reminded the delegates that participation by women would be “promiscuous” and inappropriate. Advocates responded that the women had been duly elected, had served the cause in America, and deserved to be seated. Finally Phillips’s motion was defeated by a crushing majority. Permission for the women to remain at the business meetings was granted as a precedent-setting concession.
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Assured that the opponents had enough votes to defeat Phillips’s motion, Henry Stanton had finessed the situation. He made a “very eloquent speech” in support of seating the women, and his wife and Garrison believed that he had voted yes on the motion. Others remembered the unrecorded tally differently. Both Birney and one of the women delegates recalled that Henry voted “emphatically” against seating the women.
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Until his break with Garrison over political action by abolitionists, Stanton had supported women’s participation in all antislavery activities. After 1840 he abandoned this position because women’s rights were not “pragmatic” and undermined the ability of the political abolitionists to attract voters. In London he had nothing to lose by supporting the Phillips’s motion, so he
did. During his career as a political abolitionist he would seldom support women’s rights in public.

On the whole, the first international antislavery convention was a timid affair. It failed to reach agreement on any of its goals. It is remembered primarily because it raised a question that would provoke a century and more of women’s rights activity in America. It was significant in the life of Elizabeth Stanton because it focused her attention more narrowly on women’s rights and introduced her to Lucretia Mott.

The antagonism to women evident in the debate aroused Elizabeth Cady Stanton more than the antislavery questions on the agenda. She was angry at the injustice of the situation and impatient with the hypocrisy of the abolitionists. The opposition of the most liberal leaders of the most radical movement of the era to a question of women’s rights stunned her. She felt, she recalled: “humiliated and chagrined, except as these feelings were outweighed by contempt for the shallow reasoning of the opponents and their comical pose and gestures. . . . It was really pitiful to hear narrow-minded bigots, pretending to be teachers and leaders of men, so cruelly remanding their own mothers, with the rest of womankind, to absolute subjection to the ordinary masculine type of humanity.”
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She claimed later that her outrage at the London meeting ignited her interest in women’s rights.

At the time everyone, not least of all Henry, was surprised that the new Mrs. Stanton sided with the Mott-Garrison faction. As a result of this vote, Garrison, Mrs. Mott, and Mrs. Stanton became mutual allies and admirers. When Garrison, arriving after the vote, chose to sit with the women, Henry’s enemy became Elizabeth’s hero. In turn, Garrison wrote to his wife that “Mrs. Stanton is a fearless woman and goes for women’s rights with all her soul.” Lucretia Mott confided to her diary, “Elizabeth Stanton growing daily in our affections.”
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Lucretia Mott’s diary also details the encounters and conversations with Elizabeth Stanton that became the basis of their enduring friendship. Although Mrs. Mott was twenty-two years older than Mrs. Stanton, they formed a lasting bond. Elizabeth praised Mott to Angelina Weld as a “peerless woman; . . . my soul finds great delight in her society.” Together the women attended convention sessions, inspected schools and prisons, went shopping and sightseeing, dined out, and visited museums. “Wherever our party went,” Mrs. Stanton remembered, “I took possession of Lucretia, much to Henry’s vexation.”
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When Elizabeth heard Mrs. Mott preach in a Unitarian chapel, it was the first time she had ever heard a woman speak in public or give a sermon.

The diminutive Mrs. Mott combined the strengths of Margaret Cady and Emma Willard with a reform conscience. Both serene and vivacious, Lucretia Coffin Mott was a Quaker minister, abolitionist, and feminist. She
was born in 1793 on Nantucket Island, to a China trade captain and his independent merchant wife. She grew up, she remembered, “so thoroughly imbued with women’s rights that it was the most important question of my life from a very early day.”
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After a brief teaching career, she married James Mott in 1811, settled in Philadelphia, and bore six children. The death of her first son resulted in an increased interest in religion. In 1821 she was ordained as a Quaker minister. Although she always dressed and spoke in the modest Quaker mode, she grew more and more restless with the rigid demands of Quaker orthodoxy. When the Great Separation of 1827 divided Friends into orthodox and Hicksite sects, she and James joined Elias Hicks. They rejected evangelical tendencies and arbitrary control by the elders, believed in a direct relationship between God and conscience, and held that men and women had equal spiritual gifts. What was then considered heresy later became official Quaker doctrine.

Mrs. Mott’s attitude about slavery was similarly progressive. From 1825 until Emancipation, she never knowingly used cotton cloth, cane sugar, or any other products of a slave economy. A proponent of immediate emancipation, she attended Garrison’s convening meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society and founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. In 1837 she organized the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Her outspoken political and religious views earned her the enmity of many, including Quakers.
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The impact on Elizabeth Cady Stanton of weeks of companionship and conversation with Lucretia Mott cannot be underestimated. At last Stanton had found a suitable female role model and a willing mentor.

Mrs. Mott was to me an entire new revelation of womanhood. I sought every opportunity to be at her side, and continually plied her with questions. . . . She had told me of the doctrines and divisions among “Friends,” of the inward light, of Mary Wollstonecraft, her social theories, and her demands of equality for women. I had been reading Combe’s “Constitution of Man” and “Moral Philosophy,” Channing’s works, and Mary Wollstonecraft, though all tabooed by orthodox teachers, but I had never heard a woman talk what, as a Scotch Presbyterian, I had scarcely dared to think.

Under the tutelage of the older woman, Stanton searched for answers to her questions about religion and reform. “When I first heard from her lips that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, I felt a new born sense of dignity and freedom,” she remembered.
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Conversations with Lucretia Mott gave Elizabeth Stanton greater confidence in her own opinions. Her independence and feminism were encouraged and congratulated.

On the day of the vote against seating the women delegates in London, Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton left the hall together. The younger woman recalled their conversation. “As [we] walked home, arm in arm, commenting on the incidents of the day, we resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and [to] form a society to advocate the rights of women.”
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They did not take action immediately upon their return, but no action was taken until the two of them initiated it eight years later.

One of the differences between Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott was the roles played by their husbands. James Mott, a well-to-do Philadelphia merchant, was supportive. He accompanied his wife as she spoke, held her bonnet, and presided when a gentleman was required. In contrast, Henry expected Elizabeth to support and applaud him and his causes. To his credit, he did not seem alarmed or angry about her behavior in London, only occasionally “vexed.” Within six weeks of their marriage, his wife had publicly aligned herself with his antagonist, William Lloyd Garrison, on an issue over which they had themselves divided. It was her first independent act as a married woman, and it was admired by her new friends.

After the London meeting adjourned in late June, Henry and Elizabeth began a five-month tour of Great Britain, Ireland, and France. In order to finance the trip, Henry had contracted to give a series of lectures on American abolition and to report on them for the
New York American
and the
National Era
. He gave forty lectures in thirty cities in England and attended two meetings in France. The trip enabled the couple to see the sights and meet with foreign reformers, but they were seldom alone. Henry was accompanied on his tour by Birney and Rev. John Scoble. The minister so offended Elizabeth’s newfound feminism by criticizing her friend Lucretia Mott that she exclaimed, “In all my life I never did desire so to ring a man’s neck as I did his.”
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Exasperated by Scoble’s rudeness, Elizabeth returned to London and stayed by herself for ten days.

Startled by such outbursts of independent behavior, Henry reproved Elizabeth. He wished her demeanor to be more demure. As she admitted in a letter to her Cousin Gerrit: “[It] will do me no harm to be checked occasionally, and as we are among strangers and on such a mission we cannot be too serious. I feel that I am a little too gay, and much too ignorant on the subject of slavery for the circumstances in which I am placed. I hope Cousin Nancy will write me one of her long serious letters. Henry often wishes that I was more like her. I console him by telling him that Cousin Nancy was quite gay and frolicsome once.” Yet her high spirits and intelligence won her many admirers among English reformers. “Mrs. Stanton is one in two thousand,” wrote Richard Webb. “I have met very few women I consider equal to her. She is better than a whole third of that
portion of the Pledged Philanthropy which assembled in Freemasons’ Hall.” His wife Hannah added, “Elizabeth Stanton (with whom we were highly delighted) is a brave upholder of woman’s rights.”
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Finally escaping their reform companions for a walking tour of Scotland in September, the Stantons felt “self-reliant and venturesome.” After a round of last-minute tea parties and departure calls, they sailed for the United States in December 1840. Elizabeth remembered the North Atlantic crossing as “a cold, rough, dreary voyage.” Henry, no longer a strict Grahamite, was confined to his berth, so she read novels, played chess, walked the deck, and worried about their homecoming. She had begun the rapprochement with her family while still in England, by writing frequent and affectionate letters.
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Arriving in New York City the day before Christmas, the Stantons stayed for a week with Elizabeth’s sister Harriet Eaton, where they had not been welcome in May. Then they traveled by train and sleigh through twelve feet of snow to Johnstown. There they were warmly greeted by the Cadys. Henry still had no job and no prospects, but his wife was happy to be home again. She reported to one of her friends that “Henry and I are quite undecided as to our future occupation and place of residence.”
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The Stantons spent the winter visiting friends, chiefly the Smiths. Birney was also a guest at Peterboro, so the men organized an impromptu abolition meeting in the Presbyterian church. But Henry realized that he could neither support Elizabeth nor advance his political ambitions as an abolition agent. After a brief stopover in Seneca Falls with the Bayards, the Stantons were back in Johnstown before the end of February. “Our trunks unpacked, wardrobes arranged in closets and drawers, the excitement of seeing friends over,” Elizabeth recalled, “we spent some time in making plans for the future.”
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For both personal and political reasons, Henry decided to read law with Judge Cady. Aware that his wife had risked severing her family ties to marry, he wanted to repair the damage. He hoped to improve his relationship with the Cadys and to enhance his political future. For fifteen months he clerked for his father-in-law. The couple lived with the Cadys in Johnstown, following the pattern established by the older daughters and their husbands, as would Elizabeth’s younger sisters. As Elizabeth reported to Libby Smith, “Papa seems quite contented with [Henry].” Henry did not abandon reform. He attended the first anniversary meeting of the Liberty party and made an average of four political speeches a week during the summer of 1841. He was rewarded with a seat on the party’s state central committee.
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