Always “Susan” and “Mrs Stanton” in their letters, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are fundamental in the conversation of women’s rights, both in the USA and the rest of the Western World. Individually, they were influential, but their partnership is widely regarded to be a turning point in the women’s rights movement.
This profile considers briefly these women individually before discussing their partnership, and the impact it had.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the daughter of a wealthy landowner was remarkably privileged in her upbringing, receiving an extensive education, including tutoring in Greek and advanced mathematics and learning law from her attorney/justice father. Stanton’s memoir gives insight into just how extensive the family’s wealth and precedence in New York was, she recollects three black male servants during her childhood, one of whom has been confirmed to be a slave. Stanton appears to have been fairly aware of the problem of her gender from an early age, writing that her father exclaimed that he wished she were a boy upon the death of her last surviving brother. However, she was not greatly affected during her early schooling, later, she inevitably encountered institutionalised gender differences when she was unable to attend university, as women were prohibited. The school she eventually was able to attend, the Troy Female Seminary, Stanton would go on to criticise for an over-reliance on the preaching of religion.
Her beliefs for the rights of women were established fairly early, and are seen throughout her marriage; her vows omitted the word obey and pregnancies seem organised via some sort of birth control method, although the couple still produced seven, something which meant that the often restless Stanton was kept at home whilst her husband, a lawyer and abolitionist, travelled without her.
It is on her honeymoon to England in 1840 that we can most clearly see the seeds of Stanton’s ‘feminism’. Here the couple attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London (I know, classic honeymoon antics…). Stanton wrote that she was appalled by the male delegates, who voted to prevent women from participating, even if they had been voted to be delegates of their respective abolitionist societies. In fact, these male delegates required the men to sit in a separate section, hidden by curtains (excusing William Lloyd Garrison, who disagreed with the ruling, and instead sat with the women).
Stanton was the primary author of the 1848 Seneca Fall’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, modelled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. This list of grievances included the wrongful denial of women’s right to vote, something which several co-organisers, including Lucretia Mott and Stanton’s husband, were concerned would ruin the meeting. However, approximately 300 men and women attended the convention, and Stanton’s Declaration, although controversial became the leading factor in spreading the women’s rights movement from 1848 onwards. Following this convention, Stanton would speak at the Rochester Women’s Rights Convention in New York two weeks later, an event organised by women who had attended the Seneca Falls convention. Also, in Stanton also participated in the 1850 National Women’s Rights Convention in the form of a letter “Should women hold office”. It was then tradition to open the convention with a letter from Stanton, who herself did not attend the convention until 1860.
Susan B. Anthony, born into a Quaker family who shared a desire for social reform was almost predestined to become the face of the women’s rights movement. Susan’s early life followed tolerant teachings of her father’s religion (her mother was a baptist), and her parents specifically encouraged all of their children to be self-supporting, teaching them business and giving responsibilities at an early age. For one term, she attended the Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, which her biographers have described as an unhappy period thanks to a strictness and humiliating atmosphere. This education ended according to the financial downturn of her family with the ‘Panic of 1837’. The family consequently sold most of their belongings at auction and Susan began teaching to provide another income.
Unlike Stanton, Susan B. Anthony was not yet a fully established reformer by the time of their friendship. Introduced by a mutual friend, Amelia Bloomer (for whom “Bloomers” were actually named) Stanton and Anthoney are claimed to have immediately hit it off and as well as working together on reform, the pair became almost inseparable friends. In fact, Stanton’s biographers conclude that Stanton had spent more time with Anthony than with any other adult, including her husband, and their children actually came to think of Anthony as another mother. This was largely due to her consistent presence in the Stanton’s homes over the years, often caring for them to allow her friend to work in peace. In every home that the Stanton’s moved to after their move to New York City in 1861, a room was always set aside for Anthony.
The pair’s success as coworkers is attributed, by biographers and the women themselves to their oppositional and thus complementary skills, Stanton would describe her and Anthony as complementary, where Anthony was an organiser and critic, Stanton was “rapid” and an intellectual writer. Throughout their close friendship, Anthony would regularly defer to Stanton, refusing to take office in any organisation which would place her above her friend.
Throughout their partnership, Stanton and Anthony’s activism was unlike any others. Individual efforts for abolition, temperance and women’s rights within marriage took the forefront in the 1850s. Both women supported reform concerning women’s rights if their husbands were alcoholics (she had little opportunity for legal recourse even if he was abusive and left the family destitute, he could still win sole custody of any children upon separation). Together Stanton and Anthony formed the Women’s State Temperance Society in 1852. Stanton as President and Anthony ‘behind the scenes’. In support of alcoholism reform, Stanton publically criticised the reliance on religion in women’s marital lives, something which arguably led to her and Anthony’s ousting from the organisation a year later.
Their move from temperance led to a focus on Women’s rights, and more specifically than that, Stanton and Anthony turned their attention to the recently passed Married Women’s Property Act, as a basis for further reform for women’s equality. This act intended to reform women’s rights upon their marriage. Existing matrimonial law meant that a woman effectively ceased to exist upon marriage, becoming an extension of her husband, a law set by English Common Law. The Act reformed this, meaning that women were able to retain identity, but still not properties. The pair petitioned the Judiciary Committee and the legislature was passed in 1860. Also throughout the 1850s both supported dress reform, citing practicality, although they, like many other women abandoned efforts to modernise dress to not draw attention from the movement itself.
In 1860 Stanton again supported a women’s right to divorce, and further antagonised traditionalists with a pamphlet from the imagined perspective of a female slave, ‘The Slaves Appeal’. Anthony similarly engaged in anti-slavery activity throughout this period and both women were threatened by violence on their lecture tours. For the pair, anti-slavery and women’s rights came hand in hand, both seeing the legal status of women, especially those in marriage to have a similar grounding in male ownership. It is unsurprising that the two women were at the forefront of reviving the women’s rights movement as the Civil War ended.
In December 1861 they submitted the first women’s suffrage petition directed to Congress during the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment, challenging the use of the specification ‘male’. In reaction to Congress refusing to permit women a space, Anthony announced her candidacy to run for Congress in October 1866. Largely unsuccessful, Anthony’s efforts did bring national attention to their efforts for women’s suffrage.
In the same decade, the pair produced, edited and published a newspaper for women, The Revolution, from 1868-1870 and in 1869 formed the National Women’s Suffrage Association, then on travelling together to promote women’s rights.
The pair weren't exactly popular with everyone though; this cartoon, produced in 1896 mocks Stanton and Anthony for being as important as George Washington, ironically, these women have been called the foremothers of Women’s equality.
The decades of these women’s fight for women’s equality battled at times with society’s focus on the abolitionist movement, which many considered more important than women’s rights. For example, Stanton’s husband was an abolitionist but not a suffragist, whilst Horace Greeley as US Representative for founder and editor of the New York Tribune pleaded that women, “Remember that this is the Negro hour and your first duty is to go through the state and plead his claims.” This is despite many of the suffragists working for both purposes. They were told to wait until after the civil war and the enfranchisement of black people before pursuing women’s suffrage. However, several of these women, including Anthony and Stanton were unwilling to forget their own efforts, they saw an opportunity in this time of change, specifically in the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave the due process and equal protection under the law to “persons” without qualifications such as gender. When women attempted to vote under this rule, their votes were simply put into another box and not counted, or, as in Susan B. Anthony’s case in Rochester in November 1872, they were arrested. Acting on the basis of Anthony’s lawyer, she and her sisters successfully cast votes, they were arrested two weeks later. Trying to find a loophole by refusing bail in order to challenge the proceeding in court (under ‘federal habeas corpus’ which allows prisoners to challenge to cause of their arrest).
Following this event, in December 1872, Stanton and Anthony wrote their New Departure Memorials to Congress, and although both were invited to read their memorials to the Senate Judiciary Committee (the group of senators who effectively judge the legality of pending legislation before it goes to Congress), it was rejected but again brought the issues to the forefront of politics.
The next two decades of the women’s rights movement in the U.S. are complicated, divisions arose in the movement largely in part to the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, whilst Stanton and Anthony led a group (the NWSA) which pushed for total enfranchisement of all women (and people) regardless of race as well as a wide range of women’s issues, including divorce reform and equal pay. The alternative side, (the AWSA) did support the Amendment but argued that the enfranchisement of women was more beneficial than that of black men and that the movement should focus on women first. Failure of the Amendment to provide either meant that the two organisations merged in 1890, becoming the National American Women Suffrage Association, of which Stanton was initially president, then Anthony from 1892.
The pair's lasting legacy is the drafting of the act which would eventually become the Nineteenth Amendment, which enfranchised women. The act was colloquially known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment and was passed in 1920, fourteen years after the death of Susan B. Anthony and eighteen after the death of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Their professional partnership gives insight into the reliance of women in the domestic sphere, just as Stanton fought for women’s liberty she was also homebound with seven children. Unmarried and childless, Anthony provided both intellectual aid and practical support to her friend and mentor. Perhaps without Anthony’s’ support, and without Stanton’s guidance, neither woman would have been able to have achieved half of their efforts for the rights of women.
Sources
Michals, Debra, ‘Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)’, National Women’s History Museum, (2017), < https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/elizabeth-cady-stanton>, [25/02/2023]
Hayward, Nancy, ‘Susan B. Anthony, (1820-1906)’, National Women’s History Museum, (2018), < https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/susan-b-anthony>, [25/02/2023]
‘Susan B. Anthony’, HISTORY, (09/03/2010 - 29/08/2022), < https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/susan-b-anthony>, [25/02/2023]
June-Friesen, Katy, ‘Old Friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Made History Together’, National Endowment for the Humanities, Vol.35, No.4, < https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/old-friends-elizabeth-cady-stanton-and-susan-b-anthony-made-histo>, [25/02/2023]