A History of the Wife (31 page)

Her father gave her more serious advice. When grown up, she should “go down to Albany and talk to the legislators; tell them all you have seen in this office—the sufferings of these Scotchwomen, robbed of their inheritance and left dependent on their unworthy sons, and, if you can persuade them to pass new laws, the old ones will be a dead letter.” Ironically, when Elizabeth was ready to follow this prescribed course of action, her father opposed it as inappropriate for a married woman.

Until the age of sixteen, Elizabeth studied at a coeducational acad- emy. But when the boys of her class went off to Union College in Sche- nectady, she was mortified to discover that girls were not admitted. She went instead to Mrs. Willard’s Seminary at Troy, a fashionable all-girls school that specialized in the feminine “accomplishments” of French, music, and dancing. Separated from the boys she had previously taken for granted, she now took “an intense interest” in their company.

After leaving school, Elizabeth returned to her parents’ home, where she enjoyed friendship with many young women and men. Her life was “intensified by the usual number of flirtations,” but with the advice of her brother-in-law she and her sisters put off “matrimonial entangle- ments” as long as possible.

She was twenty-four when she met Henry B. Stanton, “the most elo- quent and impassioned orator on the anti-slavery platform.” Elizabeth was staying in Peterboro, New York, at the home of her relative Gerritt Smith, whose mansion served as one of the stations on the Under- ground Railroad for slaves escaping to Canada from the South. It was also the meeting place of “choice society from every part of the coun- try.” Each morning, two carriages of ladies and gentlemen drove off to one of the antislavery conventions held in the area. “The enthusiasm of the people in these great meetings, the thrilling oratory, and lucid argu- ments of the speakers, all conspired to make these days memorable as among the most charming in my life.” In this atmosphere of ethical exuberance, Elizabeth and Henry fell in love.

But Cousin Gerrit, aware of the budding romance, warned Elizabeth that her father would never consent to her marriage with an abolition- ist. “He felt in duty bound, as my engagement had occurred under his roof, to free himself from all responsibility by giving me a long disserta- tion on love, friendship, marriage, and all the pitfalls for the unwary.”

Events moved very quickly, despite “doubt and conflict” on Eliza- beth’s part. She doubted “the wisdom of changing a girlhood of free- dom and enjoyment” for the uncertainties of a marriage opposed by her family. She even broke off her engagement “after months of anxiety and bewilderment,” but since Henry Stanton was leaving for Europe as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, and she did not wish to be separated from him by an ocean, she changed her mind again, and they were married on May 10, 1840, after a turbulent seven-month engagement.

The precipitousness of the Stantons’ wedding plans caused them to be married on a Friday, “a day commonly supposed to be a most unlucky day.” Elizabeth takes pains to assure us that, since she and her husband lived together “without more than the usual matrimonial fric- tion, for nearly a half a century, had seven children, all but one of whom are still living [in 1897],... no one need be afraid of going through the marriage ceremony on Friday for fear of bad luck.” Nine- teenth-century etiquette manuals indicate that Saturday, too, was not considered propitious for a wedding.
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What was more unusual than the day of the week chosen for Eliza- beth’s wedding was her insistence that the marriage vows “leave out the word ‘obey’.” Despite the clergyman’s objections, Elizabeth Cady was

married to Henry Stanton without the traditional vow of obedience. (Two weeks later, Amelia Jenks followed suit when she became Mrs. Dexter C. Bloomer, a name that would subsequently become identified with dress reform and the notorious “bloomers.”) Elizabeth was mar- ried “in a simple white evening dress,” in the presence of a few friends and family members. Then the newlyweds traveled to New York and boarded the vessel that would take them to Europe.

It is clear that Elizabeth Cady’s history was exceptional in many ways. She came from an affluent, extremely well placed family; she was educated far beyond the norm for girls of her day; and she had a unique propensity for questioning the status quo. But she was to learn, first in England and then in her homeland, that she was not exempt from the laws and prejudices designed to keep wives in their place.

Accompanying her husband to the antislavery convention held in London in 1840, she was part of the female contingent that was not permitted to sit on the main floor of the convention. Shunted upstairs to the balcony, the female delegates were thus deprived of voting rights. Gail Parker, in her introduction to the paperback edition of Stanton’s autobiography, signals this humiliation as decisive in Stanton’s emerg- ing feminist consciousness.

Yet in 1840, the new bride was enchanted with most aspects of her wedding journey: the remarkable men and women she and her hus- band met, their sightseeing in London and Paris in the company of friends, and a trip for just the two of them among the Scotch lakes and mountains. Only Ireland, with its dire poverty, constituted a trial to their sensibilities.

Returning to the United States, Henry decided to begin the study of law with Elizabeth’s father. This meant that she would once again live under the parental roof and have “two added years of pleasure” with her sisters. In due time the sisters also took husbands and, according to Elizabeth, they were all “peculiarly fortunate in their marriages.”

Before long, Elizabeth gave birth to the first of her seven children. She was a progressive mother for her times, refusing to give in to ques- tionable practices, such as the swaddling of infants from hip to armpit. Every day when the temporary nurse bandaged up the baby, Elizabeth took off the bindings. Less enlightened mothers and nurses continued to swaddle babes into the late nineteenth century, despite mounting criticism of this practice coming from the medical profession that found

its way into popular publications—for example, the
Bazaar-Book of Decorum
(1870), which argued that swaddling clothes endangered “the health and vigor of whole generations.”
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Like most American mothers, Elizabeth nursed her baby. Wet nurses were never fashionable in the North, and the bottle, which had been in existence since before 1800, would not become common until the last decades of the century, after Pasteur’s germ theory led to the under- standing that boiling bottles would make them safe. Elizabeth fed her baby every two hours, and learned to trust her “mother’s instinct.”

Motherhood was seen as a serious occupation. Indeed, some Ameri- can historians have argued that it was
the
major occupation for Victo- rian wives, superseding the earlier colonial role of “helpmeet” to the husband. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, authority over children had shifted from the paternal to the maternal, with the new nation calling on its mothers to nurture good citizens. By midcen- tury, motherhood was seen as the raison d’être and crowning glory of American women. The homes over which they presided were expected to provide a moral bastion for impressionable young children and a domestic sanctuary for weary husbands returning from the harsh ele- ments of the outside world.

In 1843, Henry Stanton was admitted to the bar and began to prac- tice law in Boston. For the first time, Elizabeth was the mistress of her own home. As she later recalled, “A new house, newly furnished with a beautiful view of Boston Bay, was all I could desire. Mr. Stanton announced to me, in starting, that I must take entire charge of the housekeeping. So, with two good servants and two babies under my sole supervision, my time was pleasantly occupied.”

Like other affluent Victorian women, Elizabeth entered the separate sphere reserved for wives and mothers, and she entered it enthusiasti- cally. In her words: “When first installed as mistress over an establish- ment, one has the same feeling of pride and satisfaction that a young minister must have in taking charge of his first congregation. It is a proud moment in a woman’s life to reign supreme within four walls . . . I studied up everything pertaining to housekeeping, and enjoyed it all.” A third child came along, and Elizabeth complained of only one problem: “the lack of faithful, competent servants.” But unlike most women of her class, Stanton did not think that servants were the only answer. Her “hope of co-operative housekeeping” with other families

was undoubtedly inspired by the utopian communities that were springing up in America and Europe, especially Fourier’s community in France, with which she was familiar.

In 1847, the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls. There they spent the next sixteen years of their married life and produced four more chil- dren. Initially, Elizabeth found Seneca Falls somewhat depressing because she no longer had the circle of friends and activities that had sustained her in Boston. Their residence was on the outskirts of town, where roads were muddy and sidewalks nonexistent. Mr. Stanton was frequently away from home, and his wife had more responsibilities than she could handle. Her analysis of her situation at that time sounds very much like the wifely malaise Betty Friedan identified a hundred years later in
The Feminine Mystique
.

To keep a house and grounds in good order, purchase every article for daily use, keep the wardrobes of half a dozen human beings in proper trim, take the children to dentists, shoemakers, and different schools, or find teachers at home, altogether made sufficient work to keep one brain busy, as well as all the hands I could impress into the service. Then, too, the novelty of housekeeping had passed away, and much that was once attractive in domestic life was now irksome.

For the first time in her life, Elizabeth felt overwhelmed by all that faced her—her homebound isolation, her all too numerous duties, her lack of friends, and the absence of stimulating mental activities. She understood, as she never had before, how women could give up in despair. “Housekeeping, under such conditions, was impossible.”

Fortunately for Elizabeth, she was able to retreat with her children to her parental home. There she began to work her way out of her despair by relating it to the situation of all women under similar circumstances. As she later realized, “The general discontent I felt with woman’s por- tion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic conditions into which everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measures should be taken to remedy the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular.” She did what many great thinkers have always done: she raised her particular unhappiness to a universal level and tried to solve

not only her personal problem, but a problem shared with many oth- ers. It can be argued that the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the subsequent history of the women’s rights movement in the second half of the nineteenth century sprang from the dissatisfactions of one Amer- ican housewife.

From 1850 onward, Stanton worked with Susan B. Anthony to bring before the American public all the major issues that progressive women were clamoring for, including the overriding issue of women’s suffrage. Though neither Anthony nor Stanton would live to 1920, when American women got the vote, they had many moments of triumph in their long partnership. Perhaps none was more gratifying to Stanton than the 1860 passage of the Married Women’s Property Act by the State of New York, an act that finally granted wives the right to own their own property and earnings. For the rest of the century, almost up to the moment of her death in 1902, Stanton worked tirelessly with Anthony for the full equality of women. Their intense, purposeful friendship was often compared to a marriage. As historian Caroll Smith-Rosenberg has shown, it was not unusual for nineteenth-century female friendships to rival, in depth of affection, the feelings one was supposed to have for one’s husband.
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Stanton’s eloquent address known as “The Solitude of Self,” deliv- ered in 1892 to the United States Congressional Committee on the Judiciary, is a remarkable plea for women’s rights in education, employ- ment, and political life. And it is more than that. It is an existential cri de coeur springing from the religious belief that each individual is fun- damentally alone.

In it, Stanton totally repudiates the theory that women are intrinsi- cally relative creatures. The roles of mother, wife, sister, and daughter are labeled “incidental relations.”
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The true nature of woman, like the true nature of man, is to be found in “the isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence.” Stanton speaks bluntly of her contemporaries: “No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone.”

Drawn from her own personal experience of wifehood and mother- hood, Stanton lays out a counter-doctrine to the theory of woman’s dependence on the male—one that emphasizes female self-reliance.

The young wife and mother, at the head of some establishment with

a kind husband to shield her from the adverse winds of life, with wealth, fortune, and position, has a certain harbor of safety, secure against the ordinary ills of life. But to manage a household, have a desirable influence in society, keep her friends and the affections of her husband, train her children and servants well, she must have rare com- mon sense, wisdom, diplomacy, and a knowledge of human nature. To do all this she needs the cardinal virtues and the strong points of char- acter that the most successful statesman possesses.

In the last years of her life, “when the pleasures of youth are passed, children grown up, married and gone, the hurry and bustle of life in a measure over,” Stanton knew full well that “men and women alike must fall back on their own resources” and that “he cannot bear her bur- dens.” Like Stanton herself, this speech was far ahead of its time.