The Elizabeth Cady Stanton

This revised edition of a 1981 collection, edited by historian Ellen Carol DuBois, assembles the correspondence, speeches, diary entries, and writings of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, two central figures of the nineteenth-century American women's rights movement. Organized chronologically into three parts, the collection pairs primary documents with DuBois's critical introductions to trace both women's political careers and evolving partnership from the 1840s through their deaths in the early 1900s. A foreword by historian Gerda Lerner identifies the collection's central insight: Although Stanton and Anthony projected a public image of unity, the documents reveal two distinct individuals whose views were "not infrequently in conflict."

DuBois frames the collection around a core argument. Stanton and Anthony belonged to a women's rights tradition rooted in secularism, individualism, and the conviction that the sexes were fundamentally alike, a tradition that openly challenged the dominant ideology of "separate spheres," which confined women to domestic life. The demand for woman suffrage was their bond: Both believed it was the essential tool for transforming women's grievances from private complaints into a collective political struggle. DuBois identifies a recurring tension in their partnership. Anthony believed the movement preserved its radicalism by remaining separate from other political causes, while Stanton feared that without connection to broader democratic traditions, women's politics would become narrow and conservative. DuBois acknowledges she sides with Stanton on this question. In her introduction to the revised edition, DuBois also reassesses the racial character of the suffrage movement. She argues that when Stanton and Anthony broke with male abolitionists during the crisis over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, constitutional changes that extended citizenship and voting rights to formerly enslaved Black men but excluded women, they sacrificed their historic connection to Black women. The case for woman suffrage became "simultaneously more gender-based and more elitist and racist."

Part One covers 1815 to 1861. DuBois traces the intellectual origins of women's rights thought from Mary Wollstonecraft's 1791 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which insisted women's nature was the same as men's, through Frances Wright's advocacy of sexual freedom and coeducation in the 1820s, to female antislavery activism in the 1830s. She contrasts this egalitarian tradition with the domestic alternative promoted by Catherine Beecher, who defended women's influence through motherhood and teaching but opposed political equality.

Stanton, born in 1815 to a prominent New York family, was educated at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, survived the emotional pressures of a religious revival, and emerged committed to rationalism. She studied law in the office of her father, Judge Daniel Cady, and was drawn into abolitionism by her cousin, the reformer Gerrit Smith. Her 1840 marriage to abolitionist Henry B. Stanton brought her into contact with the Quaker minister Lucretia Mott, who accelerated her feminist development. Stanton's 1848 address at the Seneca Falls women's rights convention declares that "woman alone can understand the height, the depth, the length, and the breadth of her own degradation," systematically challenges claims of male superiority, and demands the right to vote. DuBois argues this demand was Stanton's crucial innovation: By focusing on political power, women could struggle collectively against their subordination.

Anthony, born in 1820 to an antislavery Quaker family, became a teacher after her father's business failed and developed a passionate commitment to economic independence. She was the only major first-generation women's rights leader to remain unmarried. When she was barred from speaking at a temperance convention because of her sex, she and Stanton organized the New York State Women's Temperance Society in 1852, but both were ousted within a year by conservative opponents. The episode solidified their partnership: Anthony drew Stanton into sustained activism, while Stanton liberated the feminism in Anthony. Their early letters reveal complementary temperaments and personal costs. Stanton describes opposition from her father and husband, writing, "Sometimes, Susan, I struggle in deep waters." Anthony pleads with Stanton to draft speeches: "Now will you load my gun, leaving me only to pull the trigger and let fly the powder and ball?"

Part Two covers 1861 to 1873. After the Civil War, the debate over Black suffrage strengthened the case for woman suffrage but also created a crisis. Stanton and Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 to unite both causes, but abolitionists and Radical Republicans, the antislavery wing of the Republican Party, refused to link them. Stanton and Anthony broke with long-time allies and began building an independent women's movement, but Stanton deployed racist arguments, contending that educated white women were more deserving of the vote than formerly enslaved men and asking how "Saxon girls" will fare in courts with "judges and jurors of negroes."

Freed from abolitionist alliances, Stanton turned to questions of marriage and divorce, arguing that indissoluble marriage "is slavery for woman." Anthony focused on the economic realm, forming a pioneering organization of working women in 1868 and arguing that women needed "honorable independence." Together they expanded the demand for the vote into what DuBois calls "a radical and multifaceted feminism." In 1871, activist Victoria Woodhull argued before Congress that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments already enfranchised women. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), founded by Stanton and Anthony in 1869, adopted this argument, and hundreds of women attempted to vote. Anthony voted in Rochester in 1872 and was arrested on federal charges. The 1875 Supreme Court ruling in Minor v. Happersett held that suffrage was not a right of national citizenship, forcing suffragists to pursue a separate constitutional amendment.

Part Three covers 1874 to 1906 and traces the divergence between Anthony's organizational consolidation and Stanton's increasingly radical stance. Anthony worked to unify women's reform organizations around the demand for the vote, accommodating conservative views about women's domestic role. The 1888 International Council of Women, organized by the NWSA, brought together representatives from more than 50 organizations and nine countries. In 1890 the rival National and American suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Stanton, elected NAWSA's first president, found herself at odds with the organization she nominally led. Her speech "The Solitude of Self," delivered at the 1892 convention where she resigned the presidency, argues that "the individuality of each human soul" is the strongest reason for granting women complete equality, because every person faces life's crises alone and to rob any individual of natural rights is "the height of cruelty." Her growing conviction that Christianity was at the root of women's oppression led to the 1895 publication of The Woman's Bible. At the 1896 NAWSA convention, delegates voted to disavow any connection with the book. Anthony left the chair to defend Stanton, declaring that "the one distinct feature of our association has been the right of individual opinion for every member." The resolution passed nonetheless.

Letters from 1895 to 1902 reveal an enduring bond alongside deepening political disagreement. Anthony urges Stanton to concentrate on suffrage, while Stanton insists the movement must "consider the next step in progress," identifying economic cooperation and socialism. Anthony condemns contemporary racial discrimination, while Stanton advocates "Educated Suffrage" requiring English literacy, a position reflecting her anxiety about immigration. In Anthony's final letter, written shortly before Stanton's death in October 1902, she accepts that "we shall be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women."

The eulogies that close the collection capture the contrast between them. Anna Howard Shaw, a fellow suffrage leader and close Anthony associate, describes Anthony's deathbed scene in 1906: The dying organizer murmured the names of women who had worked with her in "an endless, shadowy review." Helen Gardener, a secularist writer and Stanton ally, praises Stanton's intellectual breadth and radical independence, while Stanton's daughter Harriot describes her mother's final hours: Insisting on standing, Stanton drew herself up erect and stood for several minutes, "steadily looking out, proudly before her." Harriot believes her mother was mentally composing a final address. DuBois concludes that Anthony's strategic path, unifying women around the single goal of the vote, triumphed within the movement. Yet Stanton's defeat illuminates the movement's limitations: the inability to sustain a comprehensive program for women's emancipation, and the rapid dissolution of organized women's political power once the vote was won.