Moira Donegan reviews “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life,” Ellen Carol DuBois’s biography of the pioneering feminist, suffragist, and abolitionist.
Several American women, including Mott, had been elected by U.S. abolitionist groups to serve as delegates to the convention. But when they arrived in London, the organizers, who were all men, had refused to seat them.
Could women really advocate for liberty, they asked? Would including them make the cause look ridiculous? The women had been made to sit silently in the gallery while the male attendees debated whether they should be allowed to participate as equals. By a large majority, they voted against it. “I never felt more disappointed,” Stanton later wrote. Stanton was enraptured by the abolitionist women she was meeting in London, who, she observed with faint awe, “talk as those who had been accustomed to think.” How could all their passion and intellect be allowed to go to waste? How could her own? To understand Stanton, who became one of the most famous feminists of the nineteenth century, you have to keep in mind that injuries like this were formative. She was brilliant, relentless, and possessed of a pride that bordered on conceit. In a 2005 biography, Vivian Gornick referred to her “remarkably intact ego,” which might be a mild way of putting it. Mostly, Stanton’s sense of her own virtues made her bristle at all the great and petty indignities that characterized her place as a woman. “She truly felt herself to be a person of superior intelligence and courage,” the historian Ellen Carol DuBois writes in a new biography, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life.” “This did not so much put her above other women as focus her rage at men whom she considered unworthy to criticize her.” In DuBois’s telling, Stanton’s ego can seem like a superpower. The sting of the London convention inspired her, almost a decade later, to write a manifesto modelled after the Declaration of Independence, which was her opening salvo in a long fight for women’s suffrage. Up until she died, at eighty-six, in 1902, Stanton wrote countless, often acerbic articles and petitions; gave speeches to crowds that often jeered and booed her; and issued exasperated testimonies before state legislatures that mostly ignored her pleas for suffrage and legal reform. She often campaigned while pregnant or postpartum after having one of her seven children, or when aching and fatigued in her old age. In an era when even the most basic of women’s rights were legally foreclosed and politically unpopular, her activism required the kind of persistence in the face of repeated disappointment that is best supported by a near-delusional self-regard. But Stanton’s superiority also became her undoing. She struggled, in Gornick’s words, “with a reckless disposition to scorn and dismiss.” During Reconstruction, Stanton pushed for a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise all citizens, regardless of race or sex; when it became clear that few shared this ambition, and that the only politically feasible amendment would extend the vote to Black men alone, she expressed her disappointment in vivid, rageful, and slur-ridden terms. In London, she’d been perplexed at how a group of radicals committed to human equality could still succumb to prejudice. Later, many would ask the same thing about her. A palpable sense of betrayal can be felt in recent histories by millennial feminists, who have taken on Stanton’s racism as a kind of original sin for the women’s-rights movement. Stanton features as a villain in Kyla Schuller’s “The Trouble with White Women,” Rafia Zakaria’s “Against White Feminism,” Koa Beck’s “White Feminism” , and Sophie Lewis’s “Enemy Feminisms” . Beck detects traces of Stanton’s bigotry in racist incidents that occurred in the movement years after she died; Schuller argues that Stanton “invented white feminism,” though it might be more precise to say that the term “white feminism” was coined to describe figures like Stanton. To these critics, the pitfalls of feminist politics—that jealously guarded privileges of race and class keep women from uniting in the interests of their gender—are neatly symbolized in Stanton’s story. These books were correctives to a tradition of feminist history that has often minimized Stanton’s wrongdoing in order to defend the movement more broadly—a tradition that DuBois, a distinguished research professor at U.C.L.A. and one of the foremost authorities on the early suffragists, comes from. But DuBois has written a usefully ambivalent book, one that looks for a way to reconcile younger writers’ criticisms of Stanton with her own loyalty to the early women’s-rights activists. The author approaches her subject with the weariness of a long-suffering old friend, sighingly explaining Stanton’s tantrums to newcomers. What emerges is a portrait of Stanton not as a paragon of feminism but as a deeply peculiar person—one whose combination of vision and hubris happened to change history. As a young woman, Stanton frequently visited her cousin Gerrit Smith, a militant abolitionist and an ally of John Brown, whose house in Peterboro, New York, was a hotbed for radical intellectuals. Newly out of school, Stanton was at first less interested in Smith’s ideas than she was attracted to the excitement and glamour of his circle. But her life changed one day in 1839, when Smith hurriedly ushered Stanton, her sister, and his daughter up to the third floor, saying that there was something serious and secret that he wanted them to see. The secret turned out to be Harriet Powell, a fugitive from slavery on her way to Canada—Smith’s house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. At the time, Stanton was in her early twenties; Powell was about the same age. “For two hours we listened to the sad story of her childhood and youth, separated from all of her family and sold for her beauty,” Stanton wrote. “We all wept together as she talked.” Stanton recalled that she had asked Powell about what she called “the parallel condition of slaves and women,” and that Powell had responded, “Yes, but I am both. I am doubly damned in sex and color. Yes, in class too, for I am poor and ignorant.” Stanton left their conversation changed. “We needed no further education to make us earnest abolitionists,” she wrote. As a child, Stanton’s primary caregiver had been Peter Teabout, a Black man she called a “manservant,” and who was almost certainly enslaved by her father. Maybe it was out of defiance of this, or perhaps penance, that Stanton threw herself into the movement against human bondage. Against her father’s wishes, she married Henry Stanton, a speaker on the abolitionist circuit. Elizabeth quickly made an impression on her husband’s friends; one of them, Angelina Grimké, wrote a letter remarking that Henry did not seem equipped to handle his intelligent young wife. The Stantons stood for a program of liberal legal advocacy in an era when some abolitionists were turning away from political participation altogether, hoping instead to end slavery through pure “moral suasion.” Elizabeth wrote forcefully about the need to wield the levers of power. “So long as we are to be governed by human laws, I should be unwilling to have the making & administering of those laws left entirely to the selfish & unprincipled part of the community,” she wrote in 1842. One gets the sense, reading DuBois, that Stanton’s fervor for political action stemmed from a dread of being governed by idiots. Stanton cultivated a group of women-abolitionist friends, first at her and Henry’s home, in Boston, and then at a house that her father gave her along the new Erie Canal, in the western New York town of Seneca Falls. These women, including Mary Ann M’Clintock, Amelia Bloomer, and Martha Coffin Wright, provided a respite from the drudgery of child rearing. But Stanton differed from her peers in temperament and orientation: unlike many radical women of her time, she was steadfastly secular—an agnostic, at most. To justify her political commitments, she looked not to scripture but to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Stanton’s mother’s family had been active in the American Revolution, and she began to extrapolate the principles of equality and self-government outlined by the Founders to the situation of women. Was the female citizen not entitled to shape the government whose laws she was subjected to? Was her exclusion from the political world not its own kind of tyranny? One hot afternoon in Seneca Falls, in July, 1848, after Stanton had a particularly animated discussion about women’s status with a few of her friends, she decided to write these thoughts down. The result was what she called the Declaration of Sentiments, which stated in no uncertain terms that all men and women are created equal. Even now, the Declaration of Sentiments is a lucid and audacious document. It reveals as political what many took to be natural—the domination of men over women—and reconceptualizes women not as the frailer and more childlike half of humanity but as equals in dignity and intellect, a class of citizens who deserve the full privileges of that status. “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” Stanton wrote, not shying from accusation. More bold still was the Declaration’s conclusion: that women should vote. The Seneca Falls convention where Stanton read her Declaration is now famous for sparking the women’s-suffrage movement, but it almost ended in disaster. First, no one had thought to make sure that the venue, a chapel in the middle of town, was unlocked. Once they got in, it was by no means clear that the assembled crowd of reformers would support Stanton’s call for women’s right to vote. It was a wild, almost unheard-of notion; not even the bloody Jacobins of the French Revolution had been willing to countenance it. Lucretia Mott, the guest of honor, told Stanton that the issue was politically risky; she wasn’t willing to follow her there. But one person in attendance was: Stanton’s friend Frederick Douglass. Stanton had met Douglass in Boston a few years before, when he had only recently escaped from slavery. He was one of the few people she esteemed to be her moral and intellectual equal; he was impressed by her contempt for racism, and had been converted to the cause of women’s rights by her encouragement. When Stanton shakily read her Declaration, the crowd seemed wary of the voting-rights point. It was Douglass, the only Black person at the gathering, who stood up and lent his support to the cause. No one wrote down what Douglass said that day, only that, after he spoke, the audience was persuaded. The first resolution calling for women’s suffrage was passed. In 1863, Stanton and Anthony formed the Women’s Loyal National League, an abolitionist group that collected a staggering near four hundred thousand signatures for a constitutional amendment to permanently end slavery. Stanton’s efforts helped create the political will to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. Before that, she had delivered abolitionist speeches around New York State, facing down angry, menacing mobs and travelling under the banner “No Compromise with Slaveholders: Immediate and Unconditional Emancipation.” When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, Stanton’s only concern was that it didn’t go far enough. “I must confess that the administration is too slow and politic to suit my straight-forward ideas of justice and vengeance,” she wrote. She was beginning to shed her pragmatism for an all-or-nothing approach. A year after the Civil War ended, Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association , a national advocacy group that campaigned for the expansion of the franchise to all citizens, regardless of race or sex. In the radical reimagining of the nation that was under way in the early Reconstruction era, Stanton had assumed that many of her old abolitionist comrades would follow her into the fight for what she called “universal suffrage.” But, to her frustration, she found few takers. Men who had been passionate abolitionists either felt outright distaste at the prospect of women’s suffrage, or thought that it would be a fruitless political risk. Wendell Phillips, a onetime abolitionist ally, became a staunch opponent of Stanton’s women’s-suffrage push. He called their historical moment “the Negro’s Hour.” In her response, Stanton was livid and sarcastic. “May I ask you in reply to your fallacious letter just one question based on the apparent opposition in which you place the negro and the woman. My question is this: Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?” It was in these years that suffragism transformed, in DuBois’s words, “from abolitionism’s junior partner to an autonomous, woman-directed movement,” with all of the complications that entailed. Part of what is depressing about the story of this period, when prominent Americans struggled over whether race or sex should be kept as a barrier to the franchise, is how rarely Black women are mentioned in their discussions. DuBois concedes that Stanton’s invocations of Black women, as in her letter to Phillips, were largely opportunistic—more a “gotcha” to her opponents than a genuine expression of solidarity. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a free-born poet from Baltimore who was then one of the nation’s most famous women writers, was one of the A.E.R.A.’s few Black women officials. Black women were not often asked their opinions on the debate, but we have hers: “When it was a question of race,” she “let the lesser question of sex go.” As Stanton realized that Reconstruction would not enfranchise women, she began to think less about what the vote could do than who was worthy of it—and specifically, why Black and immigrant men were less worthy of it than she was. She was becoming influenced by social scientists such as the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who were less concerned with enshrining individual rights than with imposing a social order—a departure from her earlier universalist thinking. In speeches and writing, Stanton began to depict the potential enfranchisement of immigrants and freedmen as a cataclysm that could endanger “daughters of Jefferson and Washington” such as herself. “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung . . . making laws for Lucretia Mott,” she said in one particularly nasty rant, conjuring slurs for Irishmen, Black men, and German and Chinese immigrants. “The more frequently her great hopes for a revolution in women’s status were blocked,” DuBois writes, “the more she shifted back to more familiar hierarchies and prejudices.” The contemporary flattening of Stanton into an avatar of white feminism might suggest that her racism was representative of her peers. This undersells the singular malignance of her outbursts, which drove away Black and white allies alike. In January, 1869, at a meeting of an interracial advocacy group called the Universal Franchise Association, Stanton issued a diatribe about how the country risked placing “educated refined women . . . in the humiliating position of supplicants at the feet of serfs, peasants, plantation slaves, paupers knaves drunkards, all the ragged ignorant foreign and native riff raff in the country.” Word of Stanton’s comments spread through an outraged suffrage community. Not long after, Mott quit her leadership position in the A.E.R.A. Stanton’s nadir came in May of that year, when the organization met for its annual convention in New York. The Fifteenth Amendment, which would formally grant the vote to Black men, but not to any women, was at the top of the agenda. Most members supported the amendment: Lucy Stone, a Boston-based suffragist, declared that she would be happy if “any body can get out of the terrible pit.” Stanton opposed it, and urged the group to hold out for a universal-suffrage law, though no such amendment was forthcoming. Douglass stood from the audience to rebuke his old friend; many others joined him. The A.E.R.A. erupted in outrage against its embattled, embittered founder. One of the more uncanny experiences of DuBois’s book is swinging between the civic utopianism of Stanton’s Declaration and abolitionist writings, and the vile bigotry that she displayed later. It is nearly impossible to read it without indulging a bit of counterfactual ideation: to wish that Stanton would take back her racist remarks, that she would reconcile with her comrades who had supported the Fifteenth Amendment, that the women’s and Black freedom struggles would be reunited. Perhaps both movements could have animated each other; perhaps the subsequent fight for women’s suffrage would have been less sporadic and slow. When contemporary feminists insist on disposing of Stanton and purging the movement of her influence, they are not just disavowing her racism but wishing for a history less riven by contradiction and betrayal. They want a better past—one in which the righteousness of the feminist cause to be was matched by moral uprightness in its leaders. It’s true that Stanton’s contributions to feminism were so significant, and her lapses so grave, that her life would seem a referendum on the movement itself. But it might also help us to remember her as someone who thought her life’s great project was failing. We look at Stanton now with the privilege of hindsight, knowing that votes for women were inevitable, but, in her life, she had no such assurances. In 1892, when Stanton was seventy-six, she addressed the National Woman Suffrage Association in her final speech as the group’s president, which she called “The Solitude of Self,” in which she proposed suffrage as a remedy to the isolation of human existence, comparing each life to a ship cast out upon a stormy sea. “It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman,” Stanton said. “Nature having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.” It was a vivid argument for the sovereignty of the singular soul; it also suggested that Stanton, in her old age, was growing lonely. Perhaps she realized that she had not been quite equal to the occasion herself. ♦
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