Elizabeth
Cady,
the daughter of Daniel Cady, a lawyer and politician, was born in
Johnstown, New York, 12th November, 1815. She studied law under her
father, who later became a New York Supreme Court judge. During this
period she became a strong advocate of women's
rights.
In 1840 Elizabeth married the lawyer, Henry Bewster Stanton. The couple
both became active members
of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Later that year, Stanton and Lucretia Mott,
travelled to London as delegates to the
World Anti-Slavery Convention.
Both women were furious when they, like the British women at the convention,
were refused permission to speak at the meeting. Stanton later recalled:
"We resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home,
and form a society to advocate the rights of women."
However, it was not until 1848 that Stanton
and Lucretia Mott organised the Women's
Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. Stanton's resolution that
it was "the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves
the sacred right to the elective franchise" was passed, and this
became the focus of the group's campaign over the next few years.
In 1866 Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan
B. Anthony and Lucy Stone established
the American Equal Rights Association.
The following year, the organisation became active in Kansas where
Negro suffrage and woman suffrage were to be decided by popular vote.
However, both ideas were rejected at the polls.
In 1868 Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
established the political weekly, The
Revolution, and the following
year the two women formed a new organisation, the National
Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The organisation condemned
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments as blatant injustices to women.
The NWSA also advocated easier divorce and an end to discrimination
in employment and pay.
Another group, the American Woman Suffrage
Association (AWSA), was also active in the campaign for women's
rights and by the 1880s it became clear that it was not a good idea
to have two rival groups campaigning for votes for women. After several
years of negotiations, the AWSA and the NWSA merged in 1890 to form
the National American Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA). Stanton was elected as NAWSA first president but was replaced
by Susan B. Anthony in 1892.
Stanton was also a historian of the struggle for women's rights and
with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda
Joslyn Gage, complied and published the four volume, The
History of Woman Suffrage
(1881-1902). Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, whose
autobiography, Eighty
Years and More,
was published in 1898, died in New York, on 26th October, 1902.
Executive
Committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association
(1)
Editorial, Time
and Tide
(9th July, 1926)
Feminism, like any other great movement, proceeds at varying
paces and in varying forms in different countries. Few things are
more enlightening than a study of the inter-reactions of the feminist
movement in the two great English speaking peoples during
the past seventy or eighty years. It is curious how closely related
have been the movements on the two sides of the Atlantic.
Each has continually learnt from the other. Beginning with
Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th century, the feminist movement
owed its next big impetus (in the eighteen forties and fifties)
to Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, of New England. It
was Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton who organised the
first Equal Rights Convention which was held in New York in
1848; and it was Lucretia Mott who laid. down the definite proposition
which American women are still struggling to implement
today: 'Men and Women shall have Equal Rights throughout
the United States.' A few years later Susan B. Anthony, the pioneer
Suffragist, came into the American movement.
It was not till the eighteen
sixties that the political feminist movement came alive in Great Britain.
Dame Millicent Fawcett was even in those early days one of the leading
names connected with it. The British suffragists pushed forward enthusiastically
for some twenty years,
but the failure to achieve success in 1885, when the third Reform
Bill was passed giving the agricultural labourer the vote, seemed
to take the heart out of our early suffragists, and the movement died
down again. Meanwhile, in the nineties the American women were full
of life and enthusiasm, winning victory after victory in State after
State.'
In 1902 Susan B. Anthony
came to England and stayed with Mrs. Pankhurst in Manchester. The
result of that visit was
far-reaching. All unwittingly the old pioneer handed back the torch
to the British suffragists. 'It is unendurable,' declared
Christabel Pankhurst after her departure, 'to think of another generation
of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose
any more time. We must act.' Those words heralded the birth of the
British militant movement. From that moment onwards British feminists
went forward without pause till the outbreak of war in 1914 and when
that time came (although the actual Bill was not passed until 1918)
the first instalment of victory was virtually won.
Meanwhile in America by
1912 things had died down to very much the same state as the English
movement has been in since 1918. Votes had been achieved in a considerable
number of States, the feeling was widespread that a partial victory
was good enough for the moment and that complete victory would ' come
all in good time without much further trouble. And then in 1912
Alice Paul, lit by the fire of the English militant movement, returned
to America - and America woke up. It took the Americans just eight
years from that date to achieve complete political equality;
but they were under wise leadership (Alice Paul will surely
go down to history as one of the great leaders of the world),
and when they did achieve political equality they did not make
the mistake of supposing that that was the end. They turned
back to the 'declaration of sentiments' laid down by Lucretia
Mott in 1848 and they realised that political equality was
only the first step on the path which they had chosen and that
there could be neither halting nor relaxing their pace until they
had come to the end of that path.
(2)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech at the Woman's Convention (25th May,
1851)
The great work before us is the education of those just coming
on the stage of action. Begin with the girls of today, and in twenty
years we can revolutionize this nation. The childhood of woman must
be free and untrammeled. The girl must be allowed to romp and play,
climb, skate, and swim; her clothing must be more like that of the
boy - strong, loose-fitting garments, thick boots, etc., that she
may be out at all times, and enter freely into all kinds of sports.
Teach her to go alone, by night and day, if need be, on the lonely
highway, or through the busy streets of the crowded metropolis. The
manner in which all courage and self-reliance is educated out of the
girl, her path portrayed with dangers and difficulties that never
exist, is melancholy indeed. Better, far, suffer occasional insults
or die outright, than live the life of a coward, or never move without
a protector. The best protector any woman can have, one that will
serve her at all times and in all places, is courage; this she must
get by her own experience, and experience comes by exposure. Let the
girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a
piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a
body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after
the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the
traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly
mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to
think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping,
restraining, torturing,
perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another. We
have had women enough befooled under the one system, pray let us try
the other. The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she
is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone,
in the great hive of human
activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life
of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.
Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle
- that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays its thousands annually;
that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion,
will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.
Teach the girl it is no
part of her life to cater to the prejudices of those around her. Make
her independent of public sentiment, by showing her how worthless
and rotten a thing it is. It is a settled axiom with me, after much
examination
and reflection, that public sentiment is false on every subject. Yet
what a tyrant it is over us all, woman especially, whose very life
is to please, whose highest ambition is to be approved. But once outrage
this tyrant, place yourself beyond his jurisdiction, taste the joy
of free thought and action, and how powerless is his rule over you!
his sceptre lies broken at your feet; his very babblings of condemnation
are sweet music in your ears; his darkening frown is sunshine to your
heart, for they tell of your triumph and his discomfort. Think you,
women thus educated would long remain the weak, dependent beings we
now find them? By no means. Depend upon it, they would soon settIe
for themselves this
whole question of Woman's Rights. As educated capitalists and skilled
laborers, they would not be long in finding their
true level in political and social life.
(3)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech (20th February, 1894)
The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion
is the individuality of each human soul - our Protestant idea, the
right of individual conscience and judgment - our republican idea,
individual citizenship. In discussing the rights
of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual,
in a world other own, the arbiter other own destiny, an imaginary
Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights
under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own
safety and happiness.
Secondly, if we consider
her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the
same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles
of our Government.
Thirdly, viewed as a woman,
an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the
same - individual happiness
and development.
Fourthly, it is only the
incidental relations of life, such as mother,
wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some
special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to
woman's sphere, such men as Herbert Spencer, Frederick Harrison
and Grant Alien uniformly subordinate her rights and
duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities
of these incidental relations, some of which a large
class of women never assume. In discussing the sphere of
man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen,
as a man, by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother
or a son, some of which he may never undertake. Moreover
he would be better fitted for these very relations, and
whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread,
by the complete development of all his faculties as an
individual. Just so with woman. The education which will
fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human
usefulness, will best fit her for whatever special work
she may be compelled to do.
The isolation of every
human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual
the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for
giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full
development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving
her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation
from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from
all the crippling
influences of fear - is the solitude and personal responsibility of
her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman
a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she
is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief
factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn
her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because,
as an individual, she must rely on herself.
To throw obstacles in
the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny
the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political
equality is like robbing the ostracized of all self-respect, of credit
in the market place, of recompense in the world of work, of a voice
in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the
jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their
punishment. Shakespeare's play of Titus and Andronicus contains a
terrible satire on woman's position in the nineteenth century - "Rude
men seized the king's daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands,
and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands." What
a picture of woman's position! Robbed other natural rights, handicapped
by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles,
and in the emergencies of life fall back on herself for protection.
Last updated: 8th August, 2002
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