“A convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel of Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, 19th and 20thJuly current; commencing at 10 a.m. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day when Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia and other ladies and gentlemen will address the convention.”
On Sunday, Elizabeth again went over, this time to Mary Ann McClintock’s parlour, and sat round a table with her four Quaker friends to plan the convention. They all looked at each other “as helpless and hopeless as if they had been asked to construct a steam engine.”27 Lucretia Mott was by far the most experienced, with a long history of attending and addressing anti-slavery meetings behind her, but even she was at a loss. What exactly was their aim? Other declarations and reports from anti-slavery, peace and temperance literature were looked at but none of them seemed to provide the appropriate form to follow. They were breaking new ground and there were no guidelines of the kind they were looking for. But then Elizabeth had the brilliant idea of using the style of the Declaration of Independence of 1776. America had wanted independence from Britain by whom she felt unjustly treated and exploited: women wanted independence from men by whom they felt unjustly treated and exploited. The analogy was surprisingly apt. The more the women tried it out, the better it fitted – it was just a matter of substituting “all men” for “King George”. Only the eighteen grievances did not correspond exactly so they set themselves to formulate their own. The finished document was called a Declaration of Sentiments, and pleased them all highly. Every one of the grievances listed (the final tally was fifteen) was felt to be justified.
Afterwards, they went home to prepare for the great day and to work on the resolutions they meant to propose. Henry Stanton at that time was at home and at first amused and encouraging. He was pleased to see his wife so animated once more. But then, when he came to cast his eye over her draft of the resolutions, his sympathy evaporated. One resolution in particular caught his eye. It had been proposed by Elizabeth herself and read “It is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” It was, Henry said, quite absurd and must be crossed out – the whole idea was ridiculous and he would be smeared with the ridicule too. If his wife read such a proposal out he would have to leave town. Very well, replied Elizabeth, he should feel free to leave town if he wished.
The more she thought about it the more important it seemed to her to stand by her demand that women should be given the vote, and she would not be moved. But her resolution wavered when it came to standing up in a public meeting and saying this out loud. She was extremely nervous when she set out on the first morning of the convention for the hall where it was to be held and almost relieved to find that the doors had been locked and the meeting looked as if it would have to be cancelled. But the enthusiasm of the waiting women – astonishing numbers, many of whom had travelled long distances to be there – encouraged the organizers to push a small boy through an open window and effect entry. James Mott, Lucretia’s husband, took the chair because neither his wife nor any of her friends had quite the courage to break that particular convention. Elizabeth, in a quavering voice which gained strength as she went on, then gave an address. “I should feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time,” she began, “having never before spoken in public were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty.” It was no good, she said, men speaking for women any longer. They must stand up and speak for themselves because only a woman understood “the height, the depth, the length and the breadth of her own degradation.” Women had allowed themselves to be made martyrs “early schooled to self denial and suffering.” Their rights had been ignored and the time had come “to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government we are taxed to support . . . we now demand our right to vote.” She warned her audience that gaining this right would not be easy – “We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers of popular applause but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudice will be our way and on our banners will beat the dark storm clouds of opposition from those who have entrenched themselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority . . .”28
With these stirring words to inspire them, the meeting then debated the proposed resolutions which followed Elizabeth’s reading of the Declaration of Sentiments. The debate was calm and orderly. Lucretia, Martha and Mary Ann were in Quaker costume and presided gravely over the proceedings and Elizabeth herself was the epitome of feminine respectability. She stood up on the platform, the very opposite of the harridan her enemies were to imagine. Only five feet three inches, she had black, curly hair, small delicate hands and feet and a general air of softness and warmth. Her dress was spotless and fashionable, her grooming immaculate. She was pretty, lively and dainty and not in the least masculine. The mere sight of her puzzled the opposition.
The discussion on the resolutions was animated, with Elizabeth’s demand for the vote arousing, as expected, the most controversy. But it was passed. At the end of the meeting one hundred women present signed the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Elizabeth and her friends went home well pleased with their first efforts, looking forward to the next meeting they had already arranged, and quite unprepared for the publicity which followed. The press gave them extensive coverage of an unwelcome sort. Elizabeth was astonished and dumbfounded by the way in which the Seneca Falls meeting was so “extensively published, unsparingly ridiculed.”29 She did not recognize the gathering she had taken part in from the lurid and downright ridiculous descriptions given. Only the New York Tribune gave a fair and accurate account – the rest made vicious attacks on herself and the other speakers which were quite unsubstantiated. Within hours of these reports appearing many of those who had signed the Declaration withdrew their signatures: they did not wish to be associated with what was now branded as a dangerous and ludicrous movement. But another convention in nearby Rochester had already been arranged and it went ahead with equal success. It was also equally mis-reported.
By the end of August 1848, Elizabeth had no doubt that something important had been started and that there was no need to fear malicious newspaper reports seeking to distort the truth. The truth was that all over America conventions on Woman’s Rights were now being held. In Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts women were getting together to discuss what should be done and there was a uniformity of appeals and resolutions quite impossible to explain. At Ohio, the women even ran the convention themselves – “not a man was allowed to sit on the platform, to speak or to vote . . . for the first time in the world’s history men learned how it felt to sit in silence when questions in which they were interested were under discussion.”30 Natural orators were springing up everywhere. Sitting at home in Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was no longer depressed. She realized that unwittingly she had tapped a river of resentment already running strongly underground. She could not travel to these other conventions, surrounded as she was by small children, but she wrote letters of encouragement and endorsement to them all and the valuable habit grew up of such letters being read out at the start of each convention. In this way, links were made and maintained and women reassured that their particular protest, wherever it was made, was no isolated occurrence. The time was right. This was warily being acknowledged by the state legislatures who had begun to grant women their property rights. In that very year, the Married Woman’s Property Bill passed the New York legislature and Elizabeth noted “The reception of the Bill showed unlooked for support.”31 The problem now was how to harness that support, how to organize it.
During the next decade, from 1848 to the outbreak of civil war, this was what pre-occupied the new Woman’s Rights movement. No permanent organization was set up in the fifties, no ideology formally adopted. Instead, convention
s were held on a regular basis and ideas disseminated through sympathetic newspapers and magazines. If this seems amateurish there were good reasons for it. The fifties was a period of exploration during which all concerned were tentatively trying out ideas not only on what should be done to change the condition of women but on what that condition was in the first place. What did being a woman mean? How many of women’s grievances were unavoidable, due to “nature”? As everyone felt their way carefully, Elizabeth Cady Stanton formulated ideas which seemed to express, in a logical and forceful way, what women felt. At first, these ideas were spread through articles in the Lily, a newspaper started in 1849 by Mrs Amelia Bloomer, the sub-postmistress of Seneca Falls. Elizabeth had simply walked in one day and asked if she might contribute under the pen name Sunflower. She wrote on general topics, mostly on the duties of a woman bringing up children, but gradually the content of her articles became more openly feminist and they were taken up in other newspapers, like the New York Tribune, in whose pages lively discussions would follow. But of course the effect of Elizabeth’s writings and of all the conventions was limited. It was still a case of preparing the ground only. And then, in 1852, Susan B. Anthony began to work in close partnership with her.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton had by then a fourth son, born in 1851, and was even more housebound. It was quite impossible for her to do anything but write letters and articles and she did not for one moment delude herself into imagining this was sufficient. It was only sufficient for the moment. Soon, if the impetus was not to be lost, all the women speaking and writing and thinking along the same lines must be brought together and positive action taken. Once Elizabeth met Susan Anthony her work became twice as important. “I forged the thunderbolts,” said Elizabeth, “and she in the early days fired them.”32 They met in 1851 at an anti-slavery convention held in Seneca Falls and struck up the most significant of partnerships although they seemed so unalike. Susan was a schoolteacher who had originally worked for Temperance in the valley of Mohawk. She was a spinster with no ties, able to travel around bringing like-minded people together. She could literally hold the baby while Elizabeth wrote one of her splendid speeches. Through Susan, Elizabeth extended her range and without her she would have continued to experience the agony of that conflict which bedevils life for all feminists – the conflict between domesticity and career. To the Ohio convention of 1850 Elizabeth had written grandly of woman, “By her own efforts the change must come. She must carve out her future destiny with her own right hand. If she have not the energy to secure for herself her true position neither would she have the force or stability to maintain it if placed there by another.”
But energy and force were strictly limited in her own case. Her own right hand was strong metaphorically but weak in reality. She could only do her bit at night when the children were asleep. The rest of the time, during each hectic day, she could only think. “You see,” she explained to Susan, “while I am about the house surrounded by my children, washing dishes, baking, sewing etc I can think up many points but I cannot search books for my hands as well as my brains would be necessary for that work.”33 Instead of things getting easier they got harder: she had more children. By 1856 she had six and although she wrote vigorously, “The woman is greater than the wife or mother and in consenting to take upon herself these relations she should never subscribe one iota of her individuality to any senseless conventionalisms or false codes,”34 she knew it was not as simple as she made it sound. The woman in her was subordinated all the time to being a wife and mother. Her children came first, often to Susan’s fury. Once, when she had almost left her brood in the charge of a housekeeper while she went to a convention, she felt faint at what might have happened because during the time she would have been away, if she had followed her own desire, one of the boys shot an arrow into her baby’s eye – “imagine if I had been in Rochester when it happened!” Imagine indeed: the mother would never have forgiven the woman. But with Susan’s cooperation her domestic concerns were not entirely all-consuming. She managed to achieve a great deal without betraying her own high ideals as to what a mother should be. As her work gathered momentum she was not so fortunate in her relationship with her husband.
On the evidence available it is difficult to decide when exactly things began to go wrong between the Stantons and also how wrong they actually did go. There was no split on the surface. Henry was away a lot in Boston or New York but then he always had been. When he was at home the Stanton family life seemed happy. They all played games together (Elizabeth being by far the most fiercely competitive) and musical instruments. They appeared both close and affectionate. But when Henry was away his wife did not seem to miss him unduly. The days of leaning on him for support and of being influenced by his opinions were over. “A true conjugal union is the highest kind of human love,”35 wrote Elizabeth authoritatively but like many women she found later in her marriage that she was closer to her children. Alice Stone Blackwell was bold enough to cast doubts on Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s own fidelity, writing in a letter that she was shocked because Mrs Stanton had said “that a woman’s obligation to be faithful to her husband extended only to that period while she was having children. After that it was none of his business what she did . . . Of course we don’t proclaim these things about publicly for the sake of the cause . . .”36 But whatever the true nature of the Stantons’ marriage there were visible signs of friction right from the beginning of Elizabeth’s involvement with the Woman’s Rights movement even though Henry basically supported her work.
One of the biggest causes of this friction was the amount of time this work took up. Already competing with the children for Elizabeth’s time, Henry found that when he was at home he was also competing with the writing and composing of articles and speeches. Competing and losing. He was proud of Elizabeth but also resentful that she appeared to care more about the cause than about him. Then there was the embarrassment he had to endure. “Woman’s degradation is in a man’s idea of his sexual rights,”37 thundered Elizabeth, and Henry understandably squirmed. Unlike George Butler, Henry was no saint and thought the inference people might draw distinctly unpleasant. There is no doubt that he had a great deal to put up with and that many friends sympathized with his position. It was not easy, for example, to have a wife wearing the new Bloomer costume while he was running for the New York Senate. It exposed him as well as her to ridicule and he is to be admired for being willing to walk with Elizabeth while she was wearing it without ever trying to persuade her not to. When she returned to ordinary dress it was because her sons begged her to, not Henry, and because she herself had decided the “cup of ridicule” was too great to make it worth bearing.
By the end of the fifties Elizabeth felt that great strides had been made in advancing the idea that changes should be made to give women rights that were theirs in the first place, but she was also taken aback at the realization of how much further there was to go. In the field of legal rights it was possible to point triumphantly to actual reforms in a large number of northern states but politically not one legislature had given an inch. Votes for women, after ten years of agitation, were nowhere in sight. Elizabeth was puzzled by this lack of real progress and inclined to put it down to women themselves. Women seemed only responsive to matters concerning changes in marriage and were hard to rouse on political affairs, not appearing to appreciate that through political power everything that eluded them could be gained. There were cheers if she stood up and said, “Let them fine a woman 50 dollars for every child she conceive by a Drunkard,”38 but tepid applause if she spoke on anything whatsoever to do with the vote. The plain truth was, as she observed at every convention, women were politically uneducated. “We shall never get what we ask for until the majority of women are openly with us,” she concluded “and they will never claim their civil rights until they know their social wrongs.”39
By 1861, when these social wrongs had been thoroughly exposed, the Civil War was beginning and the n
ext stage could hardly be embarked on. All activity on the Woman’s Rights front had to be suspended. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony were both quick to see that the war might actually turn out to be useful to the cause. Women, because of their desire to help, organized themselves on a national level and involved themselves in national politics by doing so – all excellent experience and practice for the future. The women formed a sanitary commission and a Women’s Loyal League. There was every reason to believe that having proved themselves women would get their thanks after the war was over.
It came as a great shock to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to discover her trust was misplaced. The men in power had no intention of giving women the vote. They could go back to the position they had occupied before the war and wait their turn – the negro must come first. Once he had been enfranchized women would be considered. Elizabeth’s rage was real and deep. She remembered with bitterness the praise for the women’s war efforts and wrote, “All these transcendent virtues vanished like dew before the morning sun. And thus it ever is so long as woman labours to second man’s endeavours and exalt his sex above her own.”40 She would not listen to the plea of the male liberal leaders who argued that, if women were included in the proposed 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the negro would not get the vote and that was surely more important. She denied that it was. Not caring about the implications of her reasoning she maintained that women who had “wealth, education and refinement” were more valuable as voters than many ignorant black men. Well-known anti-slavery leaders like her own cousin Gerrit Smith, who wanted suffrage to follow quickly after emancipation, told her firmly that “the removal of political disabilities of race is my first desire, of sex my second.” He expected her to agree but she refused. She found this attitude contemptible. The willingness of women humbly to agree maddened her. “If all the women . . . had stood firm woman would have been enfranchised with the negro. But few could withstand the persecution, the ridicule, the pathetic appeals to keep silent . . .”41 Nobody would listen to her or to Susan who warned that “in purging the constitution of all invidious distinctions on the grounds of colour” new distinctions were being created on the grounds of sex. If, said Elizabeth, the word “male” was inserted into the constitution it would take a hundred years to get it out. But it was inserted. The 14th Amendment passed into Congress in 1866 and a new phase began in the woman’s suffrage movement.
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