The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"It’s a lovely short book, beautifully written, more of a meditation on history than an original history. It concerns Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the organizers of the original Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton was a towering, pioneering leader of the 19th-century women’s rights movement. She remained active in the women’s rights movement from the 1840s all the way to the end of the 19th century. This book starts at a moment of crisis and isolation late in the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She’s aged and become alienated from a movement to which she has given her life. The author, Vivian Gornick, is a contemporary feminist and journalist—not to mention an exquisite writer. Gornick works backward from a speech that Stanton gave in 1892 to the newly unified woman’s suffrage movement, where Stanton talked about the loneliness of the self in finding a course in life. The book is very much a biography and, at the same time, a broader essay about Stanton’s engagement with the problem of discrimination against women, her involvement in the anti-slavery movement, her loving and conflictual friendships with other movement leaders like Susan B Anthony and Lucretia Mott. Gornick walks us through these stories through letters and other primary documents about all of the leading lights of the 19th-century women’s movement—from their growing understanding of the need for women’s equality, through their leap to the radical step of demanding the right to vote, to their fight for marital property. Stanton is among the most radical of the 19th-century feminists in her vision of women’s individual autonomy and Gornick teases out where that radicalism comes from and its implications for Stanton’s life. The 19th-century women’s movement was inspired in part by white and black women’s engagement with the anti-slavery movement, which put forward a host of ideas about the equality of every human soul before God. A vision of Christian equality was important to activists in this period. The struggle for African-American freedom in the 1830s was fundamental to women’s political activism, awareness and organizational skills. Ideas about human emancipation from these anti-slavery battles were carried forward into the women’s movement. Those same processes unfolded in the 1960s, when a burgeoning feminist movement came of age in the context of the black freedom struggle. Many white women were animated by that vision of equality to envision their own equality. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There is a longstanding tradition of African-American women advocating for women’s rights. African-American women were drawn into the women’s movement of the 19th century, but for many African-American women, the advocacy of women’s rights could never be separated from racial uplift. African-American women were very conscious that black men were systematically degraded, and that they needed to lift up black men at the same time as themselves. A very complicated and sometimes vexed dynamic unfolded. The conflict over post-Civil War amendments became a particularly bitter historical moment. Suffrage for black men was advanced at the same time that the word ‘male’ was introduced into the Constitution for the first time. Black women (and their white supporters) saw granting suffrage to formerly enslaved men as a fundamental need, whereas many white women’s rights activists were horrified when the insertion of the word male into the amendment made clear that women were not afforded constitutional rights. Moreover, in the campaign for women’s suffrage in the early 20th century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself voiced the sentiment: ‘Why am I, an educated, native-born citizen, being denied the right to vote when so many others with less education, not native born, are being granted those same rights?’ The rage many white women felt at their lack of such basic rights became intertwined with the endemic racism of the period, leading many white suffragettes to exclude black women. It’s a very bitter betrayal of the highest ideals of the movement, but very much in keeping with racial thought of the period, as well. Yes, I think that’s fair. Stanton expressed elitist and racial sentiments frequently. But to have Stanton alone—and that moment of betrayal—emblematize the entire story of the history of women’s activism is to do two things. One is to miss the many times where white and black women forged working relationships as allies to achieve goals, and the many times when white women committed themselves to racial justice and equality. For instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself had a lifelong friendship with Frederick Douglass, and a lifelong commitment to the advancement of black people. That doesn’t excuse her—it just contextualizes her amid the intersection of race and politics in that period. Second, to have Stanton’s betrayal emblematize the early women’s movement also erases the many black women (and other women of color) who were participants, leaders and founders of organizations often dismissed in contemporary discourse as ‘white feminist’ organizations. For example, to talk about the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a ‘white feminist’ organization erases Aileen Hernandez, the African-American President of NOW who played a pivotal role in shaping the women’s movement in the years after Betty Friedan. It also erases the brilliant black women who led black women’s suffrage organizations in the fight for the 19th Amendment. I become concerned that in the interest of speaking truth to power about racism and speaking honestly about the genuine failures of feminism, we might miss the history of shared work between white women and women of color and their underlying commitment to justice and equality."