Our daughters know everything
about their bodies and their selves. What they don't know is what it took to
win them their rights. This is why I
started this blog. I am the
administrator of Ovaries for Obama and I have been focused on its theme
“Looking back, moving forward.” In my
fourth blog I would like to introduce you to a remarkable friendship between
two extraordinary women, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
In 1848, a married
woman had no right to property (in fact, they WERE the property), no right to
sign contracts, no right to the custody of her children, no right to divorce,
and no right to serve on a jury. Without
a woman’s right to vote, none of this was going to change.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in
1851 in Seneca Falls. Elizabeth wrote of that occasion:How well I remember the day! George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison having announced an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls, Miss Anthony came to attend it. These gentlemen were my guests. Walking home after the adjournment, we met Mrs. Bloomer and Miss Anthony, on the corner of the street, waiting to greet us. There she stood, with her good earnest face and genial smile, dress in gray delaine, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why Id did not at once invite her home with me to dinner I do not know.
Both Stanton and Anthony
addressed various issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights.
Elizabeth’s concerns included women's parental and custody rights, property
rights, employment and income rights, divorce laws, the economic health of the family, and birth control (which included the right for a woman to refuse sex from
her husband). Susan, who
didn’t have any children, was the labor activist, helping to organize the
Workingwomen’s Association. She was a
Temperance worker, making her first public speech in 1848 at a Daughter of
Temperance supper. Because of this,
Susan and Elizabeth found a common resolve to use their lives to gain women the
right to vote.
Elizabeth was four
years Susan's senior, and unlike her single colleague, she was married. They
soon became the odd couple of the women's rights movement. Stanton, born into wealth, the short, stout,
spitfire of a mother of seven and had a flair for writing; Anthony, the
spinster, the slender and serious half, who agonized over putting words on
paper but so intent on her goals to speak them. Stanton, the outspoken
religious liberal who eventually translated the Bible and wrote The Woman’s
Bible often publicly and fiercely criticized Stanton, who was born a Quaker before
joining the Unitarian Church, for associating herself with women who were
orthodox in their religion. But, underneath
Stanton's white curls and Anthony's gray bun combined two brains in search of
one goal: women's rights to vote. For more than 50 years they fought together,
maintaining an excellent relationship that survived great distances and more
than the occasional heated arguments.
Henry Stanton, Elizabeth’s husband, summarized the pair:
"[Elizabeth] stirs up Susan, and she stirs the world."
In 1866, Elizabeth and
Susan founded the American Equal Rights Association. In 1868 they founded the
Rochester newspaper The Revolution. Its masthead read, "Men their
rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."
Stanton was the free
thinker, often pushing for more radical views.
She felt like a “caged lion” with seven children, the last being born
when she was forty-four, and she seems to vent by writing. Her thinking and writing fueled Anthony’s
countless speeches throughout the country.
It was Anthony who rented the halls, built the coalition, and faced the
often angry crowds.
Elizabeth and Susan’s
first legislative victory came in 1860, when the New York State Legislature
passed the Married Woman's Property Act.
It gave a wife the right to keep her earnings, buy her own property,
share custody of her children, and sue in a court of law. Women in other states
began pressuring their legislatures to pass similar measures. The following
year, the Civil War began.
Stanton persuaded Anthony, against her better
judgment, to postpone their next convention and halt their activities until
after the war, assuming that if women supported the Union, the government would
reciprocate by granting women the vote. She was mistaken.
Three amendment were proposed, the Thirteenth
Amendment -- for which Stanton and Anthony petitioned -- abolished slavery in
1865, three months before the end of the war. That summer, the Fourteenth
Amendment proposed that color would not be a reason to deny any American
citizenship. The Fifteenth Amendment raised the right to vote. Gender
was not mentioned. The women were outraged; their abolitionist former
allies had deserted them. In her
outrage, Elizabeth Stanton was very outspoken about her feeling…
Abolitionists bid the women of the nation stand aside and behold the salvation of the negro. Wendell Phillips says, "One idea for a generation," to come up in the order of their importance. First negro suffrage, then temperance, then woman suffrage. Three generations hence, woman suffrage will be in order! What an insult to the women who have labored 30 years for the emancipation of the slave, now when he is their political equal, to propose to lift him above their heads.
And another quote that became a bit
more controversial…
Sambo isn't ready for the vote.
Frederic Douglas was quick to defend the new turn
of events…
I must say that I do not see how any one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the negro. When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when they are the objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.
In the meantime, Susan Anthony was not pleased with
Stanton’s outspoken rage towards a cause for which they had both fought for
previously. However, in true BFF fasion,
she responded to Mr. Douglas…
When Mr. Douglass tells us that the cause of the black man is so perilous, I tell him that wronged and outraged as they are by this hateful and mean prejudice against color, he would not today exchange his sex and color, wronged as he is, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
In the decade following
ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony took the position that
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments actually did give women the right to
vote. They argued that the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizens as
"all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof," included women and that the Fifteenth Amendment
provided all citizens with the right to vote. Using this logic, they said women
now had the constitutional right to vote and that it was simply a matter of
claiming that right. This argument came to be called "the new departure"
in women's rights circles. Anthony (in 1872), and later Stanton (in
1880), went to the polls and demanded to vote. Despite this, and similar attempts made by
hundreds of other women, it would be nearly 50 years before women had the right
to vote throughout the United States.
Anthony started out as Stanton's protégée, but
ultimately she outlived her. Stanton
died of heart failure at her home in New York City on October 26, 1902, 18
years before women were granted the right to vote. In 1903, when a meeting was held in New
Orleans, Susan B. Anthony arrived a bit late and entered the hall to a
thunderous ovation. She was baffled by the applause. "What has happened,
Anna?" she asked Anna Howard Shaw, her able lieutenant. Shaw's reply:
"You happened, Aunt Susan."
Before writing this particular post, I was more familiar with Susan Anthony. I had no idea the strength and character behind Elizabeth Stanton. What an amazing writer she was!! I'm going to leave this post with one of my now all-time favorite quotes, which comes from Elizabeth Stanton's, Individual of Self...
And yet, there is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of eleusinian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter. Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
