The Elizabeth Cady Stanton Bicentennial: A Missed Opportunity for Study and Reflection
The Elizabeth Cady Stanton Bicentennial: A Missed Opportunity for Study and Reflection
November 12 was the bicentennial of the birth of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of America’s most prominent and extraordinary women’s right leaders. The event passed largely un-noticed. We missed a chance to pause and reflect on her leadership and also on the issues she wrestled with, some of which are still with us.
Stanton deserves more recognition. She was, of course, the main organizer of the famous Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848, which issued a ringing declaration demanding the right to vote. But there are several other reasons for studying her career.
A brilliant document with staying power. The Seneca Falls convention report, drafted on the fly by Stanton and her colleagues in a few days before the convention and revised and fleshed out during it, is one of the most carefully written and eloquent documents in U.S. history. It has two parts. The first, “Declaration of Sentiments,” sets forth issues and problems. It paralleled the Declaration of Independence in wording, substituting men in general for the tyrant King George III, and toting up the grievances, for example, “He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.” The second part, a series of resolutions, blended principles, demands and goals. The resolutions demanded the franchise but also equality before the law, in the church and in the arena of public debate: “It is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause, by every righteous means.” Women’s rights advocates drew on, cited and quoted from the declaration for the next half-century.
Multiple dovetailing reforms. Stanton’s reform issues were broad-scale. She saw the right to vote as essential, in part because it would lead to other things. She was an advocate of temperance reform, a campaigner for abolition of slavery, a crusader for legal equality (including full rights to inherit, own and bequeath property and serve as business proprietors), equal partners with men in marriage and legal right to divorce. She also wanted better pay for women.
A flair for communication. Stanton was a frequent and forceful public speaker and a prolific writer. She had a flair for blending eloquence, drama, logic, humor and appeals to history in hundreds of letters to the editor, speeches, tracts and articles over the half century after Seneca Falls. In a speech to the New York State Legislature in February 1860, she compared women’s status to that of slaves, a jarring comparison at a time when slavery was being intensely debated just before the Civil War. At the National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City later the same year, she denounced inequality in marriage, asserting that “there is one kind of marriage that has not been tried, and that is a contract made by equal parties to lead an equal life with equal restraints and privileges on either side.”
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/11/20/the-elizabeth-cady-stanton-bicentennial-a-missed-opportunity-for-study-and-reflection/
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