Elizabeth Cady Stanton: freethinker and radical revisionist

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1996 by Alice Leuchtag

As a rule, critics and revisionists of religious doctrines and "holy books" live uncomfortable and dangerous lives. Their work is subject to condemnation and blacklisting, they tend to become isolated, and even their lives are sometimes threatened.

Witness the persecution of Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie and Bengali writer Taslima Nasrin, to name only two of the most notable contemporaries.

The great nineteenth-century American orator, writer, and organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was no exception. Stanton believed that orthodox religion was the prime oppressor of women. Her highly controversial writings and speeches outraged many members of the clergy, the church-going public, and even some church-going feminists. These elements managed to make the later years of Stanton's life difficult and sometimes bitter. In spite of a growing spiritual isolation, Stanton persevered, becoming ever more uncompromising in her advocacy of freethought and the separation of church and state, as well as her attacks on the Christian church and on the literal truth of the Bible.

In the last decade of her life, Stanton began to turn inward, becoming almost an existentialist long before that philosophy was formally enunciated. In a speech entitled "The Solitude of Self," she said:

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 Eleusian 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?

Elizabeth Cady was born to an upper-middle-class New York family and was educated at Emma Willard's Troy Seminary, considered one of the best educational institutions then available to young women. In school, she displayed a sharp wit and keen intelligence. Her appearance was impressive. She was large and powerfully built and possessed tremendous vitality. After graduation, she was trained in the law by her father (a noted jurist) and became a student of legal and constitutional history. In 1840, she married abolitionist organizer Henry Stanton and through the next 15 years gave birth to seven children.

A turning point in Stanton's intellectual development was her acquaintance with Lucretia Mott, the famous Quaker abolitionist. Mott encouraged Stanton to read the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Robert Own the Elder, Frances Wright, and Angelina and Sarah Grimke--all of whom became seminal influences in the development of Stanton's philosophy.

Another transforming moment for Stanton was when she met Susan B. Anthony. Although their temperaments were different, and they often argued about strategy and tactics, Stanton and Anthony became inseparable comrades in the struggle to achieve social equality for women. Anthony, who never married, helped sustain Stanton during the times when her activities and ideas were opposed by her father, her husband, and most of her other friends. When appearing together, the two women made a striking contrast. Anthony, who wore her long, straight hair twisted back into a discreet bun, was thin and bony and grew ever gaunter with age; whereas Stanton, whose enormous round head was crowned with an awe-inspiring halo of thick curly hair, continued to gain weight, so that in her eighties she weighed over 240 pounds and was proud of it.

Stanton's name is associated with a lifetime of writing, speaking, and organizing for feminist, working-class, and antislavery causes. Stanton conceived and organized the first women's rights convention. Early on, when domestic duties kept her at home much of the time, she wrote newspaper articles for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and for Amelia Bloomer's Lily. Through these articles, Stanton gained admirers, including Sara Grimke and Lucy Stone.

With Stone, Mott, and Anthony, Stanton organized the American Equal Rights Association to bring the women's rights movement more into conjuction with the drive for black suffrage. When this organization collapsed at the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony founded a boldly radical feminist newspaper called the Revolution, for which Stanton wrote many articles calling for women's control over their own persons in marital relations; liberalized divorce laws that would recognize marriage as a legal contract like other contracts; radical improvement of prisons, poor houses, and insane asylums; and even an end to state-authorized prostitution. Using the newspaper as a launching pad, Stanton and Anthony founded the national Woman Suffrage Association.

Later still, Stanton proposed a third party to represent labor and women's interests. Far ahead of her own time (and perhaps even of ours), she held that such a third party should push for infant day-care centers for working mothers as part of the public-school system, free school lunches, public colleges for working-class youth, abolition of capital punishment, an end to police brutality, equal justice in the courts for the poor and the rich, and a peaceful transition from wage labor to cooperation and international peace.