I keep in my office a remark of Stanton’s that I found on a post card many years ago and gave to my friend Joan, my companion in the 20th century struggle for women’s rights: “I shall not grow conservative with age.” We vowed to do likewise, to remain as radical at 80 as we were at 40. While I believe I have mellowed in temperament from earlier incarnations, I like to think I am still as a radical in my thinking and prepared to act in a radical fashion when necessary. Stanton is my model.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was radical in thought and deed.
Consider the following:
She refused to allow the minister to use the word “obey” as part of her marriage vows to Henry Stanton in 1840. “I refuse to obey anyone with whom I am entering into an equal relationship.” In 1840, marriage was anything but an equal relationship. To imagine it to be so and then act to try to make it so was nothing short of revolutionary. Of course, it was considered outrageous. I suspect Stanton was served outrage for breakfast, lunch and dinner throughout her life.
Stanton proposed, wrote, and insisted on including the following resolution in the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments: “Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right of the elective franchise.” Her fellow organizers opposed this, fearing it would make them look ridiculous. Her husband threatened to leave town if she presented it and when she did, he did.
In 1852 she proposed to the National Women’s Rights Convention that women who owned property should refuse to pay taxes on that property until they got the vote. She articulated the concept of civil disobedience for women: no taxation without representation.
In 1854, she addressed the New York State legislature, composed entirely of men, to insist on the right of women to create the laws that governed their lives. Surely Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, the first to hear the words “Madam Vice President, Madam Speaker,” owe much to Stanton.
In 1856 she began advocating for liberal divorce laws. For this stance, her father disinherited her. “To think,” she wrote her dear friend and colleague, Susan, B. Anthony, “that all in me of which my father would have felt a proper pride had I been a man is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.”
In 1866, she became the first woman to run for Congress. She ran as an independent. She got 24 votes.
She wrote the suffrage amendment that was finally ratified in August of 1920.
As the women’s movement increasingly focused on suffrage after the Civil War, Stanton continued to insist that getting the vote would be meaningless if social, political, economic and legal equality were not achieved as well. Getting the vote had become a respectable cause; Stanton championed those changes that still caused outrage.
She understood the role of religion in the oppression of women. “Man, of himself,” she pointed out, “could not do this; but when he declares ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ of course he can do it.” She understood that the bible was the work of man and designed to create God in man’s image, not vice versa. In 1896 she published the Women’s Bible, a feminist commentary on the Bible as a man-made document, This resulted in her being censured by the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. She had become too radical for the movement she started.
She gloried in being older and heavier. She declared that fifty, not fifteen, was the heyday of a woman’s life. When she turned seventy, she gave a talk on “The Pleasures of Old Age.” She never stopped reading, writing, speaking, thinking.
She wanted her brain to be donated to science upon her death to disprove the claims that the mass of men’s brains made them smarter than women. Her children, however, did not honor her wish.
At the end of her life, struggling with failing eyesight, she wrote in her diary, “I say nothing to my children of this great grief, but it is a sore trial, with prospective total blindness. I will then be able to do nothing but think!”
Of course, for Stanton, thinking was everything. Yes, it should lead to action, to writing and speaking, but she understood that thinking in and of itself was a radical act when the thinker was female. In her extraordinary book on Stanton, “The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton” (2005),Vivian Gornick observes that thinking was Stanton’s primary passion. It took precedence over rage and resentment and gave her the temperament and the courage to speak her truths and survive the consequences of uttering them. “Come what will,” she said, of the furor her demand for liberal divorce laws created, “my whole soul rejoices in the truth that I have uttered.” To be whole-souled in the love of truth is to be possessed of enormous power, and of enormous peace.
Thinking about Stanton and wondering why she has received so little attention, I think: she has received less attention than her activist companion, Anthony, because in this country we are still uneasy when confronted with “woman thinking.” Philosophy, the intellect, still comes bearded. Far safer that way. For what indeed might a woman who thinks discover? Perhaps the truth.
I had the joyous experience last week of listening as a former student thanked a former colleague of mine in the English Department at the University at Albany for being the first person to recognize her as “thinking.” This recognition changed the course of the student’s life and, as a result, touched the lives of all the persons she affected as a professional
If I had a fortune I would commission a statue of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to be placed in Johnstown, and I would ask that it represent her as thinker. Then I would commission another statue and ask that it represent teacher and student, both women, engaged in the revolutionary act of recognizing each other as thinkers.
I doubt this would be radical enough suit Stanton, but hopefully it would make her smile.
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