In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (4 page)

Not yet eleven years old when her only brother died, Elizabeth remembered the event vividly. Eleazar’s death became the centerpiece of her childhood. In her recollection, the sound of funeral bells reverberate. The sudden loss of her beloved brother and the morbid graveyard visits of her father set off a preoccupation with dying that fueled two decades of religious inquiry.
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Eleazar’s death also resulted in dramatic changes in her life. Her father was incapacitated by his grief, her mother retired into pregnancy and depression, and the Bayards replaced her parents.

The impact of Eleazar’s death on the preadolescent Elizabeth was decisive. In the midst of her grief, fear, and insecurity, Daniel Cady expressed his disappointment in daughters and his desire for sons. As Stanton remembered in her autobiography:

I still recall . . . going into the large, darkened parlor to see my brother and finding the casket, mirrors, and pictures all draped in white, and my father seated by his side, pale and immovable. As he took no notice of me, after standing a long while, I climbed upon his knee, when he mechanically put his arm about me and, with my head resting against his
beating heart, we both sat in silence, he thinking of the wreck of all his hopes in the loss of a dear son, and I wondering what could be said or done to fill the void in his breast. At length he heaved a sigh and said: “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!” Throwing my arms about his neck I replied, “I will try to be all my brother was.”
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This melodramatic scene is recreated in every Stanton reminiscence.

At a time when Elizabeth was grief stricken and vulnerable, when she wanted to comfort her bereaved father, when she sought his attention and affection, these circumstances combined to encourage her to behave like his son. She resolved to do everything she could to be “manly,” which to her meant becoming “learned and courageous.” She decided “to study Greek and learn to manage a horse.” Her actions, and the reactions of the adults who were important to her, did change her behavior. She learned, performed, and maintained new roles that affected the course of her life. “They were resolutions never to be forgotten,” she recalled, “destined to mold my character anew.”
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The Cadys’ neighbor, Rev. Simon Hosack, tutored Elizabeth in Greek, mathematics, and chess. Her brother-in-law Edward Bayard schooled her in equestrian arts and philosophy. The law clerks teased her with legal riddles and challenged her to debate. Allowed to read whatever she wanted in the Cady library, Elizabeth met the test. She succeeded in what were then considered masculine fields: she won second place in the Johnstown Academy Greek competition, she learned to jump four-foot fences, and she became a skilled debater. More important, her intellect was ignited. Her curiosity, wide-ranging reading, and analytic skills became lifelong habits. Like her father, she enjoyed an independent intellectual life.

Of all the Cady daughters, Elizabeth was the one with the opportunity and talent to succeed in these fields. Tryphena, just married, was twelve years older and mathematically inclined. Harriet was too frail for sports and uninterested in academics. Margaret and Catherine, nine and six years old respectively in 1826, had the athletic potential but lacked the intellectual enterprise. Daniel Cady’s expression of sorrow and frustration to Elizabeth—“I wish you were a boy!”—may not have been random. The choice of Elizabeth may have been made in recognition of her superior talents, or it may have been “self-selection” by his daughter. She wanted to fulfill his ambitions as much as he wanted them fulfilled.

Judge Cady’s reaction to Elizabeth’s academic and athletic achievements changed as she grew older. Initially permissive, he allowed her to undertake masculine activities. He did not forbid her to spend hours in the library or in his law office, to attend court sessions, or to ride any horse in the stable. On occasion he actually encouraged her to compete and perform, and he took pride in the outcome. Interrupting her watercolors or
embroidery, he brought her lawbooks to study so that she would be able to participate in dinner table debates with his law clerks or guests. Yet when she won the Greek Prize, her father’s only reaction was to reiterate his disappointment that she was not a boy.
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If Elizabeth had been a boy, her father would have been proud of her. But she was not a boy, and her father’s reserve served to reinforce a sense of inadequacy based only on her gender. Having proved herself just as smart, able, and athletic as her brother, she resented the conclusion that she was not just as good as a boy. She longed for her father’s approval but seldom received it. Yet her satisfaction in her own achievements, her pleasure in learning and riding, and her resentment that her successes were not appreciated by her father served to reinforce her commitment to these interests.

Judge Cady was caught between encouraging his daughter’s intellectual potential and condoning uncustomary behavior in a young female. He allowed Elizabeth to go away to finishing school, but he forbade college. The more she did, the more she wanted to do, the more her father could no longer allow her to do. Her successes became embarrassments to him because they were inappropriate activities for daughters. Her interests were outside the “sexual sphere” of females, as defined by social conservatives, Presbyterians,
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, and the “cult of true womanhood.” Within five years his permissiveness changed to prohibition. For the rest of his life he would criticize as unseemly behavior he had initially tolerated. As Elizabeth would recount to her friend Susan Anthony in 1855, “To think that all in me of which my father would have felt a proper pride had I been a man is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.”
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Others in her extended family circle continued to encourage her untraditional achievements. Rev. Simon Hosack and Edward Bayard applauded her success. Hosack was especially important to her. His love and respect, she recalled, “cultivated in me a good deal of self-respect. I can remember beginning to think myself of some value from the way he used to prize me and talk to me.” As a child, she visited him every day to give him a kiss and help him in his garden. When he died, the poor minister willed her his Greek texts.
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The reactions of her mother have not been recorded. Elizabeth’s attempt to win her father’s approval coincided with the period of her mother’s withdrawal from the family circle, but even in confinement Mrs. Cady served as a model. Because Stanton’s descriptions of her parents and her relationship with each of them changed as she got older, it is difficult to assess their influence on her early development.

From her middle daughter’s perspective, Margaret Cady was powerful, stern, and withdrawn. Confinement on account of pregnancy, the intervention of servants in child care and household management, and her depression
after the deaths of both Eleazars removed Mrs. Cady from the adolescent Elizabeth. In Stanton’s recollection of her childhood, her mother functioned as a demanding and disapproving disciplinarian. “Whenever there was a great deal of noise or confusion in the house or any mischief going on my mother always imagined that I was at the head of it.” Stanton remembered that to her mother “everything I liked and enjoyed was messy or injurious; and . . . everything I disliked was just the thing.”
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Supposedly her mother, between pregnancies a horsewoman, even disapproved of outdoor sports for her daughter. When she misbehaved, the recalcitrant Elizabeth was sent to her father’s office for discipline. According to Stanton’s one-sided autobiography, Mrs. Cady emphasized domestic occupations. She expected her daughters to be housewives and trained them accordingly. Elizabeth had to clean her room, care for her clothes, practice handwork, and learn to cook. Yet the Cadys’ status and servants cushioned all the daughters from more onerous tasks. Mrs. Cady prepared them for marriage and motherhood only within an upper-class cocoon.

Allusions to her mother in Stanton’s autobiography are spare. Margaret Cady is neither as vivid nor as affectionate in her daughter’s memory as in her grandchildren’s. But in every description of her mother Stanton repeats the adjective “queenly.” The word encompasses the authority and superiority of her mother’s position in the Cady household and in the community. The connotation was not necessarily negative. “Queenly” was an adjective reserved for the powerful women Stanton came to admire: her mother, the educator Emma Willard, the abolitionist Lucretia Mott, and in her old age, herself.

Sovereignty was not the only characteristic mother and daughter shared. In one typically brief autobiographical passage, Stanton recalled that her mother, “a tall, queenly looking woman, was courageous, self-reliant, and at her ease under all circumstances and in all places.”
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Other than height, Stanton exhibited all of these traits, but she never directly acknowledged their source in Margaret Cady. The self-confidence of mother and daughter, whether derived from social status or innate ability, was another common characteristic Stanton chose to ignore.

Despite their seemingly similar and sympathetic interests as adults, Elizabeth never gave her mother credit for providing a model of independence in marriage or leadership in the community. Rather, Stanton repeatedly tried to identify ways in which she resembled her father, despite the friction between them as adults. Indeed the only time Stanton directly affirmed her mother’s influence was to connect herself to her father. Stanton offered the “prenatal influence” of her mother’s interest in her father’s congressional campaign as the root of “the strong desire that I have always felt to participate in the rights and duties of government.” So eager was Stanton to
associate herself with her father that she set the congressional election in 1815, the year of her birth, instead of 1814. She was quick to note the influence of other fathers on the lives of exceptional daughters.
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Despite Stanton’s eagerness to portray her father as benevolent and supportive, the evidence indicates that he opposed her desire for higher education, her interest in reform, her marriage, and her public activities on behalf of women’s rights. There is no doubt of his influence, but considerable doubt about how positive it was.

Stanton often repeated another childhood incident involving her father that she believed was as formative as Eleazar’s death. Sitting in her father’s office, Elizabeth heard the complaints of many weeping women. Her father had a client named Flora Campbell, who supplied the family with farm produce. When her husband died, his property passed to their son, who then treated his mother unkindly. Judge Cady had no remedy. Despite her tears, Mrs. Campbell’s situation was neither illegal nor uncommon. Elizabeth realized “the cruelty of the laws”; “they kept me in a constant condition of wrath.” She decided to get a scissors and cut every law unfair to women out of her father’s statute books. When he discovered her plan, Judge Cady had to explain that such laws could only be changed by the legislature. He supposedly said, “As soon as you get old enough you can do that.” Although Stanton frequently cited this incident as the stimulus for her reform career, it is unlikely that it occurred as she recalled it. In an unpublished, later account, she also noted that the event marked her first awareness of her father’s fallibility and impotence.
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In writing about her childhood, Stanton chose to juxtapose her parents. She contrasts her tall, assertive, authoritarian mother with her diminutive, modest, and merciful father. After both of them were dead she confided to a contemporary biographer:

My father was truly great and good—an ideal judge; and to his sober, taciturn and majestic bearing he added the tenderness, purity and refinement of a true woman. My mother was the soul of independence and self-reliance—cool in the hour of danger, and never knowing fear. She was inclined to a stern military rule of the household—a queenly and magnificent sway; but my father’s great sense of justice, and the superior weight of his greater age . . . so modified the domestic government that the children had, in the main, a pleasant childhood.

Both parents were perceived as powerful people: her mother as “queenly,” her father as “majestic.” What is striking about the description is the opposition of traditionally masculine and feminine adjectives: he is gentle, she is brave; he is just, she is stern. Stanton’s view of her parents is not corroborated by any other source. Her mother was powerful and commanding, but she was also charming, winsome, and high spirited. Judge Cady
was retiring by nature, but other attorneys found him secretive, taciturn, wary, and “a most dangerous opponent.”
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The image of her mother that prevails in most of Stanton’s recollections is of a woman without warmth or humor or compassion, who lacked the standard female qualities, including subservience. Although Stanton claims to have been influenced more by her unassuming, intellectual father, as an adult she had much more in common with her mother. In both parents she had models of leadership and political style. Despite her own rhetoric and recollection, in reality, in example after example, Stanton patterned herself after her mother.

Stanton’s early independent ambitions were undoubtedly if indirectly related to her mother’s example. Not until her father began to criticize his adult daughter did Stanton begin to appreciate her mother’s individuality or admit the strengths they shared. Unable to acknowledge her mother’s influence when it either dominated or was withdrawn from her childhood, or while her father was alive, Stanton came to accept it as an adult. She began to view her mother as a silent but sympathetic ally. After Judge Cady’s death the two women spent more time together. Mrs. Cady frequently cared for Stanton’s children, enabling her daughter to travel and lecture. As a widow, Margaret Cady signed suffrage petitions, housed Elizabeth’s reform friends, and contributed money to the cause. After her mother died, Stanton claimed that she had supported suffrage wholeheartedly. In her mother she had a female role model of unusual influence, yet it remained difficult for Stanton to acknowledge publicly or privately the role her mother had played.