Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family

As a young woman, Elizabeth Cady met Henry Brewster Stanton through her early involvement in the temperance and the abolition movements. Henry Stanton was an acquaintance of Elizabeth Cady's cousin, Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist and member of the "Secret Six" that supported John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Stanton was a journalist, an antislavery orator, and, after his marriage to Elizabeth Cady, an attorney. Despite Daniel Cady's reservations, the couple was married in 1840, with Elizabeth Cady requesting of the minister that the phrase "promise to obey" be removed from the wedding vows. She later wrote, "I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation." The couple had six children between 1842 and 1856. Their seventh and last child, Robert, was an unplanned baby born in 1859 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton was forty-four.

Soon after returning to the United States from their European honeymoon, the Stantons moved into the Cady household in Johnstown. Henry Stanton studied law under his father-in-law until 1843, when the Stantons moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where Henry joined a law firm. While living in Boston, Elizabeth thoroughly enjoyed the social, political, and intellectual stimulation that came with a constant round of abolitionist gatherings and meetings. Here, she enjoyed the company of and was influenced by such people as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Throughout her marriage and eventual widowhood, Stanton took her husband's surname as part of her own, signing herself Elizabeth Cady Stanton or E. Cady Stanton, but she refused to be addressed as Mrs. Henry B. Stanton. Asserting that women were individual persons, she stated that, "he custom of calling women Mrs. John This and Mrs. Tom That and colored men Sambo and Zip Coon, is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all."

The Stanton marriage was not entirely without tension and disagreement. Henry Stanton, like Daniel Cady, disagreed with the notion of female suffrage. Because of employment, travel, and financial considerations, husband and wife lived more often apart than together. Friends of the couple found them very similar in temperament and ambition, but quite dissimilar in their views on certain issues including women's rights. In 1842, abolitionist reformer Sarah Grimke counseled Elizabeth in a letter: "Henry greatly needs a humble, holy companion and thou needest the same." However, both Stantons considered their marriage an overall success, and the marriage lasted for 47 years, ending with Henry Stanton's death in 1887.

In 1847, concerned about the effect of New England winters on Henry Stanton's fragile health, the Stantons moved from Boston to Seneca Falls, New York, situated at the northern end of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes found in upstate New York. Their house, purchased for them by Daniel Cady, was located some distance from town. The couple's last four children—two sons and two daughters—were born there, with Stanton asserting that her children were conceived under a program she called "voluntary motherhood." In an era when it was commonly held that a wife must submit to her husband's sexual demands, Stanton firmly believed that women should have command over their sexual relationships and childbearing. As a mother who advocated homeopathy, freedom of expression, lots of outdoor activity, and a solid, highly academic education for all of her children, Stanton nurtured a breadth of interests, activities, and learning in both her sons and daughters. She was remembered by her daughter Margaret as being "cheerful, sunny and indulgent".

Although she enjoyed motherhood and assumed primary responsibility for rearing the children, Stanton found herself unsatisfied and even depressed by the lack of intellectual companionship and stimulation in Seneca Falls. As an antidote to the boredom and loneliness, Stanton became increasingly involved in the community and, by 1848, had established ties to similarly-minded women in the area. By this time, she was firmly committed to the nascent women's rights movement and was ready to engage in organized activism.