Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life - Hardcover

Ginzberg, Lori D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809094932 ISBN 13: 9780809094936

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2009

Synopsis

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a brilliant activist-intellectual. That nearly all of her ideas—that women are entitled to seek an education, to own property, to get a divorce, and to vote—are now commonplace is in large part because she worked tirelessly to extend the nation’s promise of radical individualism to women. In this subtly crafted biography, the historian Lori D. Ginzberg narrates the life of a woman of great charm, enormous appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who turned the limitations placed on women like herself into a universal philosophy of equal rights. Few could match Stanton’s self-confidence; loving an argument, she rarely wavered in her assumption that she had won. But she was no secular saint, and her positions were not always on the side of the broadest possible conception of justice and social change. Elitism runs through Stanton’s life and thought, defined most often by class, frequently by race, and always by intellect. Even her closest friends found her absolutism both thrilling and exasperating, for Stanton could be an excellent ally and a bothersome menace, sometimes simultaneously. At once critical and admiring, Ginzberg captures Stanton’s ambiguous place in the world of reformers and intellectuals, describes how she changed the world, and suggests that Stanton left a mixed legacy that continues to haunt American feminism.

About this title

About the Author:

A professor of history and women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University, Lori D. Ginzberg has written several books on women’s history, including Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York. She lives in Philadelphia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1 THE TWO WORLDS
OF ELIZABETH CADY
(1815–1840) To hear Elizabeth Cady Stanton tell it, Johnstown, New York, where she was born in 1815, was a place of comfort and con­vention, privilege and patriarchy. Her parents, Daniel and Mar­garet Livingston Cady, were devoted to family, tradition, and the Federalist Party. They were strict and stodgy, and their children were raised according to old-fashioned norms of childhood, religion, class—and, especially, gender. Church, school, and family taught only “that everlasting no! no! no!” and conspired to enforce “the constant cribbing and crippling of a child’s life.” It struck the young Elizabeth Cady that “everything we like to do is a sin, and . . . everything we dis­like is commanded by God or someone on earth.” Only with her sister Margaret’s complicity was she able to get over her “infantile fear of punishment” in order to have fun.1 It was a perfect setting against which to rebel, and, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled fondly, she rebelled with gusto.
Provincial it was, but the world of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s birth, while it seemed only to reinforce the traditional, pastoral life her father enjoyed, was far from static. The inhabitants of the town, an 1824 gazetteer reported, “seem to be very industrious and intent on keeping pace, in every improvement, with the progress of things around them” and, indeed, Johnstown was a local center for the industrial changes that had skirted other small towns. The nation’s .rst glove and mitten factory had been founded there, in about 1808, and manufacturing was at the heart of Johnstown’s economy; the very air of Stanton’s childhood must have smelled of progress.2 Nor was the local elite of long standing. The family and Episcopal church con­gregation of Johnstown’s founder, Sir William Johnson, all Loyalists, had left for Canada after the Revolution, leaving an open door for the likes of Daniel Cady.
For all their sense of established respectability and community leadership, the Cadys were, like most white residents of Upstate New York, new blood. Daniel Cady had been born in Columbia County in 1773, studied law in Albany, and moved the forty miles to Johnstown in 1798. Margaret Livingston, a dozen years his junior, had been born in the Hudson Valley to Revolutionary War hero James Livingston and his wife, Elizabeth Simpson Livingston. Although their own Elizabeth believed that the laws, norms, and values that structured men’s and women’s lives in her childhood were unchanging and unchallenged, Daniel and Margeret Cady had already seen changes of various kinds. Not all of these were progressive in nature. Churches that had shown some openness to women’s speech in the mid-eighteenth century were, by the early nineteenth, reasserting traditional forms of male authority. Near Margaret Cady’s birthplace, Dutch traditions that had given married women greater property rights had been largely super­seded by more stringent English common law that declared the whole of a woman’s inherited property her husband’s. Even in politics, the barriers of sex had been less rigid, less seemingly absolute, in 1800 than they would be during Elizabeth Cady’s youth. In New Jersey, women who owned property could vote until 1807, when the legisla­ture restricted suffrage to white men, re.ecting a growing consensus that women had no role in political life. Indeed, the Revolution itself, while underscoring the political equality of greater numbers of white men, saw a narrowing of elite women’s conventional access to public authority. Daniel Cady, stubbornly conservative, wished to hold on to what authority he had gained (cultural, familial, political, and eco­nomic) as long as possible.3
Historians tend to mark 1815, the end of the War of 1812, and the year of Elizabeth Cady’s birth, as the start of a new era in American history. It was a time that would, before too long, seethe with changes in law, religion, trade, politics, transportation, class structures, and, of course, ideas about women. Vast changes would take place that the Cadys could not possibly imagine or predict. Indeed, among Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s generation of Americans would be the .rst women to attend college, once Oberlin formally admitted them in 1837; the .rst female doctors, once sisters Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell earned their medical degrees; and an astonishing array of female speakers, antislavery reformers, writers, editors, labor activists, educators, and, of course, advocates of woman suffrage.
But before imagining the change that would occur, consider the world, and the rules, into which these women, citizens of the United States, were born. In 1830, when Elizabeth Cady was .fteen, the common-law notion of coverture—that is, the idea that wives were “covered” by their husbands’ protection—virtually de.ned the laws of marriage. Once they married, women could not own or inherit prop­erty, sign a contract, or pursue their business interests in court. Although women tended to bear somewhat fewer children than they had a century earlier, childbearing was still frequent and deadly. Legal divorce, as opposed to less formal desertion, was rare, and custody of minor children went to the husband, who essentially “owned” their labor. The opportunities for middle- and upper-class women to live independently of men—whether husbands, fathers, or brothers— were few indeed, and it would not be until the very late nineteenth century that signi.cant numbers of them could do so. Unmarried women paid taxes just as men did, but they could not vote for the rep­resentatives who set their tax rates or give advice about how those taxes were spent. Women could not serve on a jury, though they were tried often enough for crimes; nor could they speak out about such crimes in most religious assemblies. They were barred both from men’s colleges and from a wide array of occupations—and not surpris­ingly, those they dominated, such as domestic service and prostitu­tion, were among the lowest paid. In cities, new commercial markets presented both opportunities and pitfalls for women; they ran shops and small manufactories, operated millinery businesses, opened schools, and did the grueling work that the growing upper classes expected of seamstresses, servants, and nursemaids. But if these enterprising women married, their wages were no longer their own, but their husbands’. Over the next century, much of this—.rst and mostly among the upper and middle classes—would change. In the meantime, for all the rhetoric about the common man, Elizabeth Cady’s world was in many respects characterized by greater restric­tion, reinforced hierarchies, and frequent declarations that what America needed was more stability and tradition, not less.
The Cadys, who married in 1801, when Margaret was sixteen, .ourished in Johnstown and in this larger world, living in a large house on a corner of Main Street. Aided by his ties to Margaret’s brother-in-law, the fabulously wealthy Peter Smith, Daniel Cady established himself as a lawyer, landowner, state legislator, and judge. In the year of Elizabeth’s birth, his neighbors elected him to Con­gress, where he served one term. The couple had eleven children, of whom only six would survive childhood; the only son among those, Eleazar, would die at twenty.
The Cady family’s economic privilege and social authority are nearly invisible threads running through Stanton’s recollections, unquestioned and, to Stanton, unproblematic. It was, rather, her fa­ther’s intransigence about gender that formed the core of the story Elizabeth Cady Stanton told about her childhood. Her most vivid, and oft-repeated, story was that of a brilliant, boisterous, rebellious little girl, eleven years old, whose only living brother, Eleazar, had just died. How dark the household must have seemed. Distraught, she crawled into her father’s lap, seeking to give and receive comfort. But her grieving, distracted father put his arm around her and sighed, “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!” The sting of the father’s remark, whether spiteful or unfeeling or simply careless, lingers. Every girl who has yearned to impress an accomplished or demanding father, every woman who has felt the slight of being thought less promising than her brothers, can relate to the insult. Elizabeth Cady, as it turned out, had more than enough reserves of self-esteem to survive the slap, though she never forgot it; not only was she as brilliant as the boys and men around her, but she knew it. She was, as one historian puts it, “singularly unaf.icted with psychological insecurity,” and she quickly put her extraordinary self-con.dence to work.4 The child, as the woman later recalled, vowed to make her father happy by being all a son could have been, thus providing a rationale for her grand ambi­tions. But the political moral that she took from this childhood affront was the germ of something even larger: her recognition that society’s preference for and pride in boys dwarfed girls’ lives, limited their opportunities, and were used to justify the denial of woman’s rights. She took this insult very personally indeed.
Is it possible to sympathize, however grudgingly, with Judge Cady? There is every evidence that he loved his daughters, and even in sigh­ing over the limitations of Elizabeth’s sex, he surely knew that this one was especially bright. But the man had just lost his only living son, at an age when the young man’s promise was evident but his path not clearly marked, and at a time when a man such as the judge could reasonably rest his ambitions for succession only on boys. Surely he envisioned Eleazar, who had just graduated from Union College, fol­lowing in his footsteps, perhaps joining him in the law of.ce or at court. It is possible to read Daniel Cady’s comment to his daughter not simply as a putdown, though it surely was that, but also as an acknowledgment that her intellect and her wit would in fact have found more expansive arenas if she had been a boy. Elizabeth’s father was neither so wrong nor uniquely old-fashioned in feeling a twinge of regret that this gifted child was a girl, for in the judge’s world, and pretty much everyplace else, the barriers that limited her sex were real indeed.
To hear Stanton tell it, she spent her girlhood days trying to impress her learned father, live up to the standards set by her brother, and learn from the law students who wandered through the house. That the household was not composed exclusively of men seems largely to have escaped her notice. There is little of Margaret Liv­ingston Cady in her daughter’s account, and her appearances are gen­erally fairly passive. To her daughter, Mrs. Cady was simply “a tall, queenly looking woman,” a female enforcer of the “Puritan ideas,” and the reason that “fear, rather than love, of God and parents alike, pre­dominated” in the household. It was she, presumably, who often placed the young Elizabeth “under punishment for what, in those days, were called ‘tantrums’” but that Stanton insisted were “justi.­able acts of rebellion against the tyranny of those in authority.”5 But Margaret Cady demonstrated both a strong will and the capacity to change; years later, in 1867, she signed a woman suffrage petition and was, according to her granddaughter Harriot, “a dyed-in-the-wool Abolitionist,” even a “Garrisonian extremist.”6 However distant and disciplined she may have been, it was not Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “queenly” mother alone who upheld the family’s conservative atti­tudes. Unfortunately, neither Stanton’s account nor other historical documents offer clues about what ambivalence Margaret Cady might have felt about her rebellious daughter.
If, in Stanton’s recollections, Judge Cady embodied the hard-line patriarchal attitudes that shaped his daughter’s rebellion, Mrs. Cady was the regal exemplar of discipline, and Elizabeth Cady’s younger sister Margaret was her “fearless and self-reliant” companion, the other women in the Cady household appear largely as the enforcers of conventional attitudes about women’s place. Sister Harriet Cady, later Eaton, maintained a tight grip over Elizabeth Stanton’s decisions even late in life, and often made the Stanton children miserable with restraint. Tryphena, the eldest, was conservative to her very bones. Not only would she oppose her younger sister’s radical proclamations and actions, but, as Harriot Stanton Blatch recalled, “ ‘Aunty By’ had a leaning to the southern side in Civil War days.” Even Margaret Cady was, as her granddaughter recalled, “much freer and .ner . . . without the aunts weaving nets of convention about her.”7
Gender conventions were not the only vestiges of tradition in the Cady household. Among Stanton’s most quoted reminiscences are stories about the “three colored men, Abraham, Peter, and Jacob, who acted as menservants in our youth.” Peter in particular evoked the “most pleasant recollections,” for Stanton recalled that the little girls followed him to “the negro pew” at their otherwise all-white church, to celebrations of the Fourth of July, and on various river-rafting expe­ditions. But Peter Teabout was not simply a “manservant”; he was a slave—and he likely remained one until 1827, when the last slaves were .nally, grudgingly, emancipated in the state of New York.8
Daniel Cady was hardly unique in holding slaves in Montgomery County, New York. Johnstown’s founder, Sir William Johnson, had brought slaves to central New York in the mid-eighteenth century, and by the time the Cadys arrived, revolutionary declarations of liberty notwithstanding, the practice of holding people in bondage had expanded. Five hundred and eighty-eight enslaved African Americans lived in the county in 1790, and 712 in 1810; by 1820, when Eliza­beth Cady was .ve, 40 percent of the 152 African Americans in Johnstown still lived as slaves. Only in 1799 had the state legislature passed a law for gradual, and compensated, emancipation; a very few years before Elizabeth’s birth, an African American man or woman in her county remained almost twice as likely to be a slave as to be free. Finally, on July 4, 1827, slavery was ended in New York. African Americans, refusing to have their day of emancipation eclipsed by their white neighbors’ own independence, pointedly waited until the following day, the .fth of July, to hold celebrations around the state.9
Stanton never mentioned that day of emancipation, neither to re.ect on its implications for her father nor to consider its meaning for the supposedly greatly cherished Peter. Is it unfair to have expected an eleven-year-old to notice? By her own account she was an unusually alert child, exceptionally sensitive to injustice and mat­ters of law. Even as a young girl, she claimed, she found in the restric­tions on married women’s property ownership deeply personal insults, and had plotted to cut them out of her father’s legal tomes. Certainly she seethed when one of the judge’s law students, Henry Bayard, upon being shown Elizabeth’s new Christmas gifts, teased, “if in due time you should be my wife, those ornaments would be mine.”10 Surely a young woman who could be so vexed about some coral trin­kets would be affected by the knowledge that a beloved companion and chaperone of her youth was himself her father’s property.
Furthermore, it is hard to imagine that the momentous emancipa­tion day passed her by entirely. The young Elizabeth Cady was enthralled with public events, and loved “attending court” with Peter, learning about the law, and participating in the “numerous and pro­tracted” gatherings surrounding each Fourth of July.11 One wonders how she could have remained untouched by the celebrations and fêtes that took place in honor of emancipation. She felt no qualms, then or later, about criticizing her father’s adherence to convention where the st...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0809094932
• ISBN 13: 9780809094936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272