ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.
FOUNDER OF THE WOMAN-SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT.
MONG the few women who have shown themselves the polemic equals of the most trained and brilliant men of their times, the subject of this sketch stands prominently with the first. Mrs. Stanton was always a vigorous woman of commanding size with the mental force of a giant. In public debates and private arguments, she has shown herself to be an orator, forceful, logical, witty, sarcastic and eloquent. Like all great orators, she is imbued with one great idea which presses to the front in all she says or does and has been the moving force of her life. She believes that social and national safety lies alone in the purity of individuals and in the full and free bestowal upon every individual, regardless of sex, of all the rights and privileges of citizenship. In other words, whatever other excellencies or merits she may possess, she is primarily a Woman Suffragist.
Elizabeth Cady was the daughter of Judge Daniel Cady and was born in Johnstown, N. Y., November 12, 1815. She was a child of marked intelligence and was thoroughly educated by her parents and graduated in Troy, N. Y., in 1832. She was learned in Latin and Greek, was a great lover of sports and, it is said that in early life she frequently complained that she had been born a girl instead of a boy. She used to discuss law in her father’s office and always insisted that no law was just which denied to women an equal right with men. She was anxious to complete her education in Union College where her brother had been educated, and her indignation was unbounded when she was refused entrance because girls were not admitted to that institution. Thus it will be seen how she became a Woman’s Rights believer, and with her strong and cultured mind it was only natural that she should become one of its chief advocates. At the age of twenty-five, in 1840, she married Henry B. Stanton, an Anti-slavery orator, journalist and author. Thus she became an Abolitionist and entered, with her usual force and zeal, into that movement. She was a delegate to the World’s Anti-slavery Convention, which met the next year in London. With Lucretia Mott, she signed the first call for a Woman’s Rights Convention, which met in Seneca Falls, N. Y., on the 19th of July, 1848. Mrs. Stanton received and cared for the visitors, wrote the resolutions, declarations and aims of the organization, and had the satisfaction of being ridiculed throughout the United States. Even her father, Judge Cady, imagined that she had gone crazy and journeyed all the way to Seneca Falls in order to endeavor to reason her out of her position; but she remained unshaken. Since that convention, Mrs. Stanton has been one of the leaders of the movement in the United States.
In 1854, Mrs. Stanton addressed the New York Legislature, endeavoring to bring about such a change in the constitution as would enfranchise women, an extract from which, we insert in this volume. She delivered another address to the same body in 1860 and again in 1867. In Kansas and in Michigan in ’67 and ’74, when those states were submitting the question of “Woman’s Suffrage” to the people, she did heroic work by canvassing and speaking throughout both of these Commonwealths. Until the year of 1890, she was President of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. In 1868, she ventured to run as candidate for Congress and, in her speech to the electors of the district, she announced her creed to be “Free speech, free press, free men and free trade.”
The “New York Herald” ventured to support her in this effort; but of course she was defeated, as she expected, her object being only to emphasize and advertise the principle of “Woman Suffrage.”
The literary works of Mrs. Stanton consist of her contributions to “The Revolution,” a magazine published in New York City, of which she became editor in 1868, Susan B. Anthony being the publisher. She was also joint-author of the “History of Woman’s Suffrage” of which three volumes have appeared. She has, also, lectured much and contributed to the secular press.
Mrs. Stanton, with all her public works, has been a thoroughly domestic woman. She has a family of seven children, five sons and two daughters, all of whom were living up to a recent date and some of them have inherited the talents of their mother and bid fair to become famous. Mrs. Stanton possesses conversational powers of the highest order. In the light of recent developments, the retrospect of her long career must afford her unusual pleasure. She was met with bitterness, ridicule and misrepresentation at the beginning of her crusade. She has lived down all of this and has seen her cherished ambition fruited here and there, while many of the leading men of the age in all sections of the country have been brought to look upon “Woman Suffrage” as something to be desired; while in the minds of the public generally, the seed of thoughts sown by her are so fast rooting themselves and springing up, that she looks with confidence forward to the early realization of her hopes—the enfranchisement of woman.
A PLEA FOR EQUAL RIGHTS.
Delivered at Seneca Falls, N. Y., on the assembling of the first Woman-Suffragist Convention, July 19, 1848. Mrs. Stanton begins by saying:
SHOULD feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time, having never before spoken in public, were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty.
[After delivering a masterly and eloquent argument of nearly two hours length announcing the principles and setting forth the arguments which have since signalized the movement, Mrs. Stanton closed in the following eloquent strain:]
Our churches are multiplying on all sides, our missionary societies, Sunday Schools, and prayer meetings and innumerable charitable and reform organizations are all in operation, but still the tide of vice is swelling, and threatens the destruction of everything, and the battlements of righteousness are weak against the raging elements of sin and death. Verily the world waits the coming of some new element, some purifying power, some spirit of mercy and love. The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided. There are deep and tender cords of sympathy and love in the hearts of the down-fallen and oppressed that woman can touch more skilfully than man. The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source. It is vain to look for silver and gold from the mines of copper and lead. It is the wise mother that has the wise son. So long as your women are slaves you may throw your colleges and churches to the winds. You can’t have scholars and saints so long as your mothers are ground to powder between the upper and nether millstone of tyranny and lust. How seldom, now, is a father’s pride gratified, his fond hopes realized, in the budding genius of his son. The wife is degraded, made the mere creature of caprice, and the foolish son is heaviness to his heart. Truly are the sins of the father visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. God, in his wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together, that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length, and here, too, is the law of restoration, as in woman all have fallen, so in her elevation shall the race be recreated. “Voices” were the visitors and advisers of Joan of Arc. Do not “voices” come to us daily from the haunts of poverty, sorrow, degradation and despair, already too long unheeded. Now is the time for the women of this country, if they would save our free institutions, to defend the right, to buckle on the armor that can best resist the keenest weapons of the enemy—contempt and ridicule. The same religious enthusiasm that nerved Joan of Arc to her work nerves us to ours. In every generation God calls some men and women for the utterance of the truth, a heroic action, and our work to-day is the fulfilling of what has long since been foretold by the prophet—Joel ii. 28, “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudice will be our way, and on our banners will beat the dark storm-clouds of opposition from those who have entrenched themselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who have fortified their position by every means, holy and unholy. But we will steadfastly abide the result. Unmoved we will bear it aloft. Undauntedly we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric flash will but more clearly show to us the glorious words inscribed upon it, “Equality of Rights.”
“Then fear not thou to wind thy horn,
Though elf and gnome thy courage scorn.
Ask for the Castle’s King and Queen,
Though rabble rout may rush between,
Beat thee senseless to the ground,
And in the dark beset thee round,
Persist to ask and it will come,
Seek not for rest in humbler home,
So shalt thou see what few have seen;
The palace home of King and Queen.”
MRS. STANTON’S ADDRESS TO THE LEGISLATURE OF NEW YORK.
UNDER THE SANCTION OF THE STATE WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION. FEBRUARY 14, 1854.
To the Legislature of the State of New York:
HE tyrant, Custom, has been summoned before the bar of Common Sense. His majesty no longer awes the multitude—his sceptre is broken—his crown is trampled in the dust—the sentence of death is pronounced upon him. All nations, ranks and classes have, in turn, questioned and repudiated his authority; and now, that the monster is chained and caged, timid woman, on tiptoe, comes to look him in the face, and to demand of her brave sires and sons, who have struck stout blows for liberty, if, in this change of dynasty, she, too, shall find relief.
Yes, gentlemen, in republican America, in the nineteenth century, we, the daughters of the revolutionary heroes of ’76, demand at your hands the redress of our grievances—a revision of your state constitution—a new code of laws.... We demand the full recognition of all our rights as citizens of the Empire State. We are persons; native, free-born citizens; property-holders, tax-payers; yet we are denied the exercise of our right to the elective franchise. We support ourselves, and, in part, your schools, colleges, churches, your poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the whole machinery of government, and yet we have no voice in your councils. We have every qualification required by the constitution, necessary to the legal voter; but the one of sex. We are moral, virtuous and intelligent, and in all respects quite equal to the proud white man himself, and yet by your laws we are classed with idiots, lunatics and negroes;... in fact, our legal position is lower than that of either; for the negro can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of $250; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool; but we, who have guided great movements of charity, established missions, edited journals, published works on history, economy and statistics; who have governed nations, led armies, filled the professor’s chair, taught philosophy and mathematics to the savants of our age, discovered planets, piloted ships across the sea, are denied the most sacred rights of citizens, because, forsooth, we came not into this republic crowned with the dignity of manhood!... Now, gentlemen, we would fain know by what authority you have disfranchised one-half of the people of this state?... Would that the men who can sanction a constitution so opposed to the genius of this government, who can enact and execute laws so degrading to womankind, had sprung, Minerva-like, from the brains of their fathers, that the matrons of this republic need not blush to own their sons!... Again we demand in criminal cases, that most sacred of all rights, trial by a jury of our own peers. The establishment of trial by jury is of so early a date that its beginning is lost in antiquity; but the right of trial by a jury of one’s own peers is a great, progressive step of advanced civilization.... Would it not, in woman’s hour of trial at the bar, be some consolation to see that she was surrounded by the wise and virtuous of her own sex; by those who had known the depth of a mother’s love and the misery of a lover’s falsehood; to know that to these she could make her confession, and from them receive her sentence? If so, then listen to our just demands and make such a change in your laws as will secure to every woman tried in your courts, an impartial jury. At this moment among the hundreds of women who are shut up in the prisons of this state, not one has enjoyed that most sacred of all her rights—that right which you would die to defend for yourselves—trial by a jury of one’s peers.
(After referring to the law relating to woman’s inability to make contracts; to own property and to control the property of her children after her husband’s death (except by special provision in his will); the inability of the wife to protect the family property against the drunken husband; her inability to prevent her children from being bound out for a term of years against her express wishes,—Mrs. Stanton closes her address in the following words:)
For all these, then, we speak. If to this long list you add all the laboring women, who are loudly demanding remuneration for their unending toil—those women who teach in our seminaries, academies and common schools for a miserable pittance, the widows, who are taxed without mercy; the unfortunate ones in our work-houses, poor-houses and prisons; who are they that we do not now represent? But a small class of fashionable butterflies, who, through the short summer days, seek the sunshine and the flowers; but the cool breezes of autumn and the hoary frosts of winter will soon chase all these away; then; they too will need and seek protection, and through other lips demand, in their turn, justice and equity at your hands.
