Ever Victoria!

Part 4

10

Elizabeth Cady Stanton treats her husband’s absences differently. Henry Stanton has long been gone from home for months on end, pleading abolitionist work, then political organizing, then his legal practice. Elizabeth learns to manage the home in his absence and grows to value the independent authority she wields. But she resents having no say in the arrangement. “How rebellious it makes me feel when I see Henry going about where and how he pleases,” she writes to Susan Anthony. “He can walk at will through the whole wide world or shut himself up alone, if he pleases, within four walls. As I contrast his freedom with my bondage, and feel that, because of the false position of women, I have been compelled to hold all my noblest aspirations in abeyance in order to be a wife, a mother, a nurse, a cook, a household drudge, I am fired anew and long to pour forth from my own experience the whole long story of women’s wrongs.”

Her mood doesn’t improve when Henry is forced to resign a patronage post in the New York customs house after a scandal involving misplaced government bonds. Henry adamantly affirms his innocence, and Elizabeth believes him, but the affair does nothing to enhance her respect for him. To assert her independence she purchases a house in Tenafly, New Jersey, with money from an inheritance. Henry spends little time there, preferring New York. The marriage bond never breaks but grows weaker by the year.

 Her evolving freedom suits the postwar period. During the war Elizabeth Stanton and other feminists enlisted in the cause of the Union and emancipation. Months after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, she and Susan Anthony organized a drive to gather three million signatures supporting a thirteenth amendment banning slavery by Constitution. Lincoln appreciated the sentiment but not the codicil: “There never can be a true peace in this republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established.”

After the war Stanton celebrates, along with many others, when the efforts on behalf of the amendment succeed and American slavery is ended forever. She turns to the next task. Freedom for slaves presages freedom for women, or so she hopes. Yet when the drafters of what becomes the Fourteenth Amendment apply their art to defining citizenship, she is appalled to read language that will make the lot of women worse. For the first time the Constitution will include the word “male,” in specifying sanctions upon states barring African Americans from voting. Only males, the amendment implies, possess citizenship rights worthy of active defense.

Stanton writes to Susan Anthony, who is in Kansas campaigning for a woman suffrage referendum, and tells her to hurry east. “We at once sounded the alarm,” Stanton recalls, “and sent out petitions for a constitutional amendment to ‘prohibit the States from disfranchising any of their citizens on grounds of sex.’” Meanwhile she denounces the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment as traitors to the cause of freedom. “This attempt to turn the wheels of civilization backward, on the part of Republicans claiming to be the liberal party, should rouse every woman in the nation to a prompt exercise of the only right she has in the Government, the right of petition.”

The protest of Stanton and Anthony falls short. The abolitionist leaders abandon them, with Wendell Phillips refusing to mix the movements of black rights and women’s rights. “Such mixture would lose for the Negro far more than we should gain for the woman,” Phillips avers.

Stanton responds acidly, “Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?” Anthony is even angrier than Stanton. “I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not for woman,” she says.

She condemns their former allies for treating women with scorn. “The real fact is that we have so long held women’s claims in abeyance to the Negro’s, that to name them now is received as impertinence.” Anthony attends a meeting at which Frederick Douglass asserts that the vote for blacks is more urgent than the vote for women, in that blacks confront lethal violence while women encounter mere ridicule. Applause and nods greet his remarks. But before the clapping ends, Anthony is on her feet. “If Mr. Douglass had noticed who applauded when he said, ‘Black men first and white women afterwards,’ he would have seen that it was only the men,” she declares. “When he tells us that the case of black men is so perilous, I tell him that even outraged as they are by the hateful prejudice against color, he himself would not today exchange his sex and color with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

As Stanton and Anthony continue to press for women’s rights, a rift develops in the women’s movement. On one side are those, like Stanton and Anthony, who contend that women must move forward with African Americans, that to give priority to the latter will not simply fail to promote women but will actively set them back. Moments of reform are fleeting; if women miss this moment, another opportunity may not come for decades. Besides, equality is indivisible. Blacks will never achieve equality until equality is embraced for all. And anyway, there is that half of the black population that is female.

On the other side of the women’s movement are men and women who, assessing the country’s politics in the decade after the war, judge that winning full rights of citizenship for (male) blacks is possible, that winning rights for women is unlikely, and that winning rights for blacks and women together is out of the question. Lucy Stone, whose feminist resumé is as long as Stanton’s or Anthony’s, takes this view; so does Julia Ward Howe, whose “Battle Hymn of the Republic” became the Union anthem during the Civil War, and most high-profile male feminists, including Henry Ward Beecher. The latter group clusters around Boston and is generally more conservative on a whole range of economic, social, and political issues than the equality-now feminists.

The split becomes institutionalized in 1869 when the Bostonians bolt the National Woman Suffrage Association, founded and controlled by Stanton and Anthony, to establish the rival American Woman Suffrage Association. The American Association publishes a paper, the Woman’s Journal, to riposte the Revolution, the organ of the National Association. The American Association welcomes men as members, along with women, and elects Henry Beecher president, with Lucy Stone directing the executive committee. The National Association has initially proscribed men, but to prevent further defections begins letting them in. Lest anyone question their new commitment to male participation, Stanton steps aside as president in favor of Theodore Tilton.