Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Later Years

Later Years

In the decade following ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, both Stanton and Anthony increasingly took the position, first advocated by Victoria Woodhull, that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments actually did give women the right to vote. They argued that the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizens as "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," included women and that the Fifteenth Amendment provided all citizens with the right to vote. Using this logic, they asserted that women now had the constitutional right to vote and that it was simply a matter of claiming that right. This constitutionally-based argument, which came to be called "the new departure" in women's rights circles because of its divergence from earlier attempts to change voting laws on a state-by-state basis, led to first Anthony (in 1872), and later Stanton (in 1880), going to the polls and demanding to vote. Despite this, and similar attempts made by hundreds of other women, it would be nearly 50 years before women obtained the right to vote throughout the United States.

During this time, Stanton maintained a broad focus on women's rights in general rather than narrowing her focus only to female suffrage in particular. After passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 and its support by the Equal Rights Association and prominent suffragists such as Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, the gap between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other leaders of the women's movement widened as Stanton took issue with the fundamental religious leanings of several movement leaders. Unlike many of her colleagues, Stanton believed organized Christianity relegated women to an unacceptable position in society. She explored this view in the 1890s in The Woman's Bible, which elucidated a feminist understanding of biblical scripture and sought to correct the fundamental sexism Stanton believed was inherent to organized Christianity. Likewise, Stanton supported divorce rights, employment rights, and property rights for women, issues in which the American Women's Suffrage Association (AWSA) preferred not to become involved.

Her more radical positions included acceptance of interracial marriage. Despite her opposition to giving African-American men the right to vote without enfranchising all women and the derogatory language she had resorted to in expressing this opposition, Stanton had no objection to interracial marriage and wrote a congratulatory letter to Frederick Douglass upon his marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman, in 1884. Anthony, fearing public condemnation of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and wanting to keep the demand for female suffrage foremost, pleaded with Stanton not to make her letter to Douglass or support for his marriage publicly known.

Stanton went on to write some of the most influential books, documents, and speeches of the women's rights movement. Starting in 1876, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage collaborated to write the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, a seminal, six-volume work containing the full history, documents, and letters of the woman's suffrage movement. The first two volumes were published in 1881 and the third in 1886; the work was eventually completed in 1922 by Ida Harper. Stanton's other major writings included the two-part The Woman's Bible, published in 1895 and 1898; Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences 1815–1897, her autobiography, published in 1898; and The Solitude of Self, or "Self-Sovereignty," which she first delivered as a speech at the 1892 convention of the National American Women's Suffrage Association in Washington, D.C..

In 1868 Stanton, together with Susan B. Anthony and Parker Pillsbury, a leading male feminist of his day, began publishing a weekly periodical, Revolution, with editorials by Stanton that focused on a wide array of women's issues. In a view different from many modern feminists, Stanton, who supported birth control and likely used it herself, believed that abortion was infanticide, a position she discussed in Revolution. At this time, Stanton also joined the New York Lyceum Bureau, embarking on a 12-year career on the Lyceum Circuit. Traveling and lecturing for eight months every year provided her both with the funds to put her two youngest sons through college and, given her popularity as a lecturer, with a way to spread her ideas among the general population, gain broad public recognition, and further establish her reputation as a pre-eminent leader in the women's rights movement. Among her most popular speeches were "Our Girls", "Our Boys", "Co-education", "Marriage and Divorce", "Prison Life", and "The Bible and Woman's Rights". Her lecture travels so occupied her that Stanton, although president, presided at only four of 15 conventions of the National Women's Suffrage Association during this period.

In addition to her writing and speaking, Stanton was also instrumental in promoting women's suffrage in various states, particularly New York, Missouri, Kansas, where it was included on the ballot in 1867, and Michigan, where it was put to a vote in 1874. She made an unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Congressional seat from New York in 1868, and she was the primary force behind the passage of the "Woman's Property Bill" that was eventually passed by the New York State Legislature. She worked toward female suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, and California, and in 1878, she convinced California Senator Aaron A. Sargent to introduce a female suffrage amendment using wording similar to that of the Fifteenth Amendment passed some eight years previously.

Stanton was also active internationally, spending a great deal of time in Europe, where her daughter and fellow feminist Harriot Stanton Blatch lived. In 1888, she helped prepare for the founding of the International Council of Women. In 1890, Stanton opposed the merger of the National Woman's Suffrage Association with the more conservative and religiously based American Woman Suffrage Association. Over her objections, the organizations merged, creating the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Despite her opposition to the merger, Stanton became its first president, largely because of Susan B. Anthony's intervention. In good measure because of The Woman's Bible and her position on issues such as divorce, she was, however, never popular among the more religiously conservative members of the "National American".

On January 18, 1892, approximately ten years before she died, Stanton joined Anthony, Stone, and Isabella Beecher Hooker to address the issue of suffrage before the United States House Committee on the Judiciary. After nearly five decades of fighting for female suffrage and women's rights, it was Elizabeth Cady Stanton's final appearance before members of the United States Congress. Using the text of what became The Solitude of Self, she spoke of the central value of the individual, noting that value was not based on gender. As with the Declaration of Sentiments she had penned some 45 years earlier, Stanton's statement expressed not only the need for women's voting rights in particular, but the need for a revamped understanding of women's position in society and even of women in general:

"The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself ."

Lucy Stone was so impressed with the brilliance of Stanton's speech that she published The Solitude of Self in its entirety in the Woman's Journal, leaving out her own speech to the committee.

Stanton strongly supported the Spanish-American War in 1898, writing: "Though I hate war per se, I am glad that it has come in this instance. I would like to see Spain . . . swept from the face of the earth."