The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Women's Rights and the American Political Traditions

Sue Davis

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814720295
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was not only one of the most important leaders of the nineteenth century women’s rights movement but was also the movement’s principal philosopher. Her ideas both drew from and challenged the conventions that so severely constrained women’s choices and excluded them from public life.

In The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sue Davis argues that Cady Stanton’s work reflects the rich tapestry of American political culture in the second half of the nineteenth century and that she deserves recognition as a major figure in the history of political ideas. Davis reveals the way that Cady Stanton’s work drew from different political traditions ranging from liberalism, republicanism, inegalitarian ascriptivism, and radicalism. Cady Stanton’s arguments for women’s rights combined approaches that in contemporary feminist theory are perceived to involve conflicting strategies and visions. Nevertheless, her ideas had a major impact on the development of the varieties of feminism in the twentieth century.

Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton draws on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources and promises to fill a gap in the literature on the history of political ideas in the United States as well as women’s history and feminist theory.

1

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Multiple Traditions

Introduction

The meeting that began on July 19, 1848, in the Wesleyan chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, launched the first organized movement for women’s rights in the United States. The Seneca Falls Convention also marked the beginning of the long career of its chief organizer, thirty-three-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Not only was Cady Stanton¹ one of the most important leaders of the woman’s rights movement for nearly half a century, but she was also the movement’s principal philosopher. Her ideas challenged the conventions of the nineteenth century that constrained women’s lives and excluded women from public life. Although it may seem paradoxical at first glance, Cady Stanton’s ideas also grew out of the very traditions that she seemed to reject so thoroughly.

Because this book is a study of Cady Stanton’s political thought, it differs fundamentally from the several excellent biographies that have examined her life in rich detail and have provided insights into her character.² It also differs from the considerable body of literature published since the late 1970s that analyzes the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century woman’s movement.³ The idea for the book began with my conviction that Cady Stanton deserves recognition as a central figure in the political thought of the United States in the nineteenth century. Her work represents a contribution of enormous importance to the woman’s rights movement and to an understanding of the sources of and solutions to the subordination of women. Her ideas also had a major influence on the development of feminist theory in the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s thought reflects the rich tapestry of American political culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. My purpose in analyzing her work is to demonstrate how this is so and why it is important. She drew on a wide spectrum of traditions of political thought to support her demands for women’s rights, utilizing ideas that were available to her, adapting them, and often subverting them to further her goals. From the beginning of her career as a leader of the woman’s rights movement, she relied on liberal-egalitarian arguments, asserting that the principles of natural rights and equality applied to women, as well as to men. She also drew on the republican tradition that moved away from an emphasis on natural rights and equality of individuals to focus on the importance to a successful political community of a body of virtuous citizens who transcend self-interest to participate in public affairs in order to promote the common good. She subverted the tradition of republicanism that so thoroughly excluded women from participation in public life by emphasizing the special qualities of women—the “mothers of the race”—that they would bring to the political life of the nation.

Cady Stanton also utilized inegalitarian, undemocratic arguments to argue that educated, white, native-born women were far better suited to participate in the political life of the nation than were males who were uneducated, nonwhite, and foreign born. Such arguments reinforced racist and nativist justifications for exclusion and intolerance that were popular during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. But, in Cady Stanton’s rendering, inegalitarian arguments served to demonstrate the need for women’s full participation in public life. She thereby subverted the tradition that held women to be morally and intellectually inferior to men and thus incapable of functioning successfully beyond the realm of home and family by emphasizing their superiority over certain groups of men.

In addition, she drew from a radical tradition to develop her argument that fundamental change in social, political, and cultural arrangements of the United States would be essential for women to achieve equality. For example, the positions that Cady Stanton took regarding marriage reveal her conviction that radical change not only in the institution of marriage itself but also in widespread attitudes about women would be necessary for women and men to become equal partners in marriage. Moreover, her critique of organized religion pointed to deeply imbedded cultural sources of women’s subordination that could not be eliminated without a major transformation of institutions and values. Thus, she was fully aware that legal and political reform alone would never be sufficient to eliminate women’s subordinate status that was so thoroughly embedded in the culture of the nineteenth century.

Arguments that reflect those four very different and contradictory traditions run through Cady Stanton’s work. She often combined different strains of thought in the same speech or employed contrasting approaches in different speeches concerning the same topic. Moreover, she relied on the different traditions to a greater or lesser extent at different times. Indeed, the extent to which she relied on inegalitarian, antidemocratic arguments increased over the years and assumed a prominent role in her work during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.

The basis of her arguments shifted over time in a way that coincided with the changing political culture of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. She began to rely on inegalitarian arguments, for example, at the same time that social Darwinism began to play a leading role in the American political culture. The way that Cady Stanton shifted the basis of her arguments over time clearly had a practical dimension. By the 1880s, not only had social Darwinism become a popular ideology that attempted to justify vast inequalities in wealth and power, but it also offered new possibilities for success in the campaign for women’s rights after all the years during which liberal arguments met with only limited success.

There has been considerable disagreement among scholars as to the nature of Cady Stanton’s political thought. Was she genuinely committed to a philosophy of individual rights and equality? Did she act out of a belief that those individual rights belong to women as well as men on the grounds that all men and women are created equal? Alternatively, did she consider women to be different from or morally superior to men because of their unique experiences as childbearers and mothers? Did she subscribe to inegalitarian arguments that humans are not naturally equal and that a hierarchically organized society is most consistent with the natural order of the world? Is it possible that she was less a political thinker than a rational political actor—a strategist—who simply gauged which type of argument would be most likely to further her goals in any given context?

I argue throughout this study that the ways in which Cady Stanton drew on the panoply of political traditions makes it impossible to label her work as belonging to only one system of thought. Indeed, the way she combined different and conflicting strands of political thought, emphasizing first one and then another depending on the time and circumstances, not only mirrors the development of American political thought in the second half of the nineteenth century but also is consistent with the way that other political thinkers have developed their arguments. For example, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” also expressed a belief that black people were intellectually inferior to whites.⁴ In addition, the fact that Cady Stanton’s work had a strategic dimension should not detract from her status as a major political thinker, because strategy is invariably an ingredient in the making of political theory.

Another controversy among scholars that bears on attempts to understand the political thought of the nineteenth-century woman’s rights movement or even, for that matter, feminism in the twentieth century revolves around the very nature of liberalism. Carole Pateman has argued that liberalism cannot be separated from its original narrative in which men entered into a social contract from which women—who were already subordinate to men—were excluded. Thus, while men were envisioned as the bearers of equal rights, women were either ignored or relegated to the subordinate role of wives, mothers, and daughters.⁵ Cady Stanton, however, was able to make use of liberalism’s emphasis on natural rights, subverting traditional patriarchal ideas about the natural inequality of women, by insisting that those rights belonged to women, as well as to men. She thereby used liberal principles to advance the cause of women’s rights. But those principles were not by themselves sufficient to challenge the overwhelming structure of inequality and exclusion, nor were they the only ideas with which she was familiar. Thus, Cady Stanton relied on other traditions to support her demands for bringing an end to the subordination of women.

Over the years as I have worked to develop an understanding of the contradictions in American political thought and practice, I have found Rogers M. Smith’s explanation of American political culture as a dynamic of contradictory traditions to be the most useful for explaining the conflict between egalitarian and inegalitarian currents and between democratic and antidemocratic trends that mark American history. Because Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s work mirrors the complexity of the conflicting traditions, Smith’s Multiple-Traditions Thesis provides an extremely useful framework for understanding her political thought.⁶

The Emergence of a Reformer and Political Thinker

Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted her long life to the arduous task of redressing the enormous imbalance of power between men and women. Her role as a leader of the woman’s rights movement began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention and continued until the 1890s. Her life as a political thinker and her commitment to reform, however, began earlier and did not end until her death, in 1902. Born in Johnstown, New York, in 1815, into a large and prosperous family, Cady Stanton grew into a young woman with the education, skills, and social standing that made it possible for her to begin to organize for reform. Her mother, Margaret Livingstone Cady, the daughter of an officer in the American Revolution, was the descendant of early Dutch settlers and was well connected to the most prominent families in New York. Her father, Daniel Cady, was a lawyer who served several terms in the New York State Assembly and one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and who, in 1847, became a justice on the New York Supreme Court.

According to her autobiography, Cady Stanton learned as a child, by reading her father’s law books and listening to his clients, that the law was unfair to women.⁷ She related how, “supposing that [her] father and his library were the beginning and the end of the laws,” she determined to eliminate the problem by using scissors to literally cut the unjust laws out of his books. According to the story, when he discovered his daughter’s plan, Daniel Cady suggested that when Elizabeth was grown she “go down to Albany and talk to the legislators” to persuade them to change the laws.⁸ While Cady Stanton’s account of that conversation was most likely an invention, the anecdote suggests that her lifelong commitment to expanding women’s rights began at an early age.⁹

The last years of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s life were distinguished by her thoroughgoing critique of religion as a major force in the creation and perpetuation of women’s subordinate status. The Woman’s Bible, which Cady Stanton wrote with several other women, was published in two volumes in 1895 and 1898, respectively, and represented the culmination of her analysis of the role of the church and the Bible in the oppression of women. The same theme was prominent in her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, published in 1898, where she explained how her earliest experiences with religion led to her determination to reject what she viewed as superstition and to embrace science and reason.¹⁰ As Calvinist Presbyterians, her family believed in original sin and subscribed to the doctrine of predestination. Biographers have attributed the young Elizabeth Cady’s recurring nightmares about death, her depression, and her fear of her surroundings to her parents’ childrearing practices and their religion.¹¹ In 1831, when she was a student at the Troy Female Seminary, she attended a series of revivals conducted by the evangelist minister Charles Grandison Finney, the leader of the Second Great Awakening, whose efforts are said to have been responsible for the conversion of some 500,000 people. Finney’s theology departed from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and original sin to embrace the idea of free will and the possibility of human perfection. He also encouraged women to pray in public and later became an advocate of abolition, temperance, and women’s rights.¹² Nevertheless, his emotional, demanding, even threatening methods of winning souls repelled Cady Stanton. She recalled in her autobiography that, as a result of her Calvinistic training, she was one of Finney’s first victims. She found the notions of conversion and salvation “puzzling and harrowing to the young mind.” After listening to Finney every day for six weeks, she tried to “repent and believe” as he implored, although she confessed that the more “sincerely I believe, the more unhappy I am.” His preaching, she concluded, “worked incalculable harm to the very souls he sought to save.” Her conversion, as she described it, had disturbing consequences: “Fear of the judgment seized my soul. Visions of the lost haunted my dreams. Mental anguish prostrated my health. Dethronement of my reason was apprehended by friends. . . . Returning home, I often at night roused my father from his slumbers to pray for me, lest I should be cast into the bottomless pit before morning.”¹³

Cady Stanton related how she traveled with her father, sister, and brother-in-law to Niagara Falls, still feeling nervous and unsettled. But, as the group read and discussed books such as George Combe’s Constitution of Man and Moral Philosophy and new research on phrenology, she “found [her] way out of the darkness into the clear sunlight of Truth [as] . . . religious superstitions gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts.”¹⁴ She recalled that she grew happier as her new perspective restored her to a normal state of mind. Her juxtaposition of rational thought and scientific inquiry as sources of light and happiness on the one hand and religious superstition linked to darkness and despair on the other underlines a major theme in her life and work. In the mature Cady Stanton’s own analysis, the outlines of that theme were firmly in place when she was only fifteen.

The prominent abolitionist Gerrit Smith was Elizabeth Cady’s cousin, and it was through him that she was first exposed to the abolitionist movement. At his home in Peterboro, New York, in the late 1830s, she came into contact with escaped slaves, as well as other abolitionists, including Henry Brewster Stanton. As a theological student at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Henry Stanton had participated in the revival debates on slavery in 1834 that resulted in the conversion of an overwhelming number of the students to abolitionism. He led a walkout of fifty students when the trustees forbade further activity or discussion of the slavery issue and then became an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Although he initially embraced William Lloyd Garrison’s moral-suasion approach, by the time Stanton met Elizabeth Cady in 1839, he had broken with the Garrisonians and had joined the abolitionists who embraced political action.

In 1840, Elizabeth Cady married Henry Stanton, and the couple traveled to London to attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. At that meeting, the political abolitionists and the Garrisonians disagreed over whether to admit women to the convention. When the political abolitionists prevailed and the women delegates were excluded, Garrison himself chose to sit with the women in their curtained-off area in the gallery. Cady Stanton claimed later that the debate among the abolitionists over the role of women in the movement sharpened her awareness of women’s condition and helped to spark her interest in women’s rights. It was at that time as well that her ideas began to diverge markedly from those of her husband, who abandoned his support for women’s participation in the abolitionist movement when he broke with the Garrisonians.

Some of the major elements of Cady Stanton’s thought—primarily her commitment to legal reform and her opposition to organized religion—were forged out of her early experiences. Those ideas, however, provided only a basic outline of the structure of thought that she would develop over the next several decades. Her thought is a complex web composed of interconnected but often contradictory strands. I argue throughout this book that Cady Stanton’s political thought cannot be understood apart from the traditions of American political culture that were familiar to her, as well as the changing political, social, and economic conditions of the nineteenth century. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to explaining the approach I use to take those ideological and historical factors into account.

American Political Culture: The Multiple-Traditions Thesis

The liberal-consensus view of American political thought became virtually all-pervasive in the years after World War II and was still widely accepted as late as the 1980s. Richard Hofstadter began to articulate the principles upon which the consensus theory was based when he published The American Political Tradition, in 1948, arguing that an unusually high level of consensus over the central tenets of liberal capitalism underlay the apparent conflicts that have run through the history of the United States. Thus, Hofstadter noted, “However much at odds on specific issues, the major political traditions have shared a belief in t...