About the Author
A professor of history and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University, Lori D. Ginzberg has written several books on women's history, including Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York. She lives in Philadelphia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 THE TWO WORLDS
OF ELIZABETH CADY
(1815-1840) To hear Elizabeth Cady Stanton tell it, Johnstown, New York, where she was born in 1815, was a place of comfort and convention, privilege and patriarchy. Her parents, Daniel and Margaret Livingston Cady, were devoted to family, tradition, and the Federalist Party. They were strict and stodgy, and their children were raised according to old-fashioned norms of childhood, religion, class--and, especially, gender. Church, school, and family taught only "that everlasting no! no! no!" and conspired to enforce "the constant cribbing and crippling of a child's life." It struck the young Elizabeth Cady that "everything we like to do is a sin, and . . . everything we dislike is commanded by God or someone on earth." Only with her sister Margaret's complicity was she able to get over her "infantile fear of punishment" in order to have fun.1 It was a perfect setting against which to rebel, and, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled fondly, she rebelled with gusto.
Provincial it was, but the world of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's birth, while it seemed only to reinforce the traditional, pastoral life her father enjoyed, was far from static. The inhabitants of the town, an 1824 gazetteer reported, "seem to be very industrious and intent on keeping pace, in every improvement, with the progress of things around them" and, indeed, Johnstown was a local center for the industrial changes that had skirted other small towns. The nation's .rst glove and mitten factory had been founded there, in about 1808, and manufacturing was at the heart of Johnstown's economy; the very air of Stanton's childhood must have smelled of progress.2 Nor was the local elite of long standing. The family and Episcopal church congregation of Johnstown's founder, Sir William Johnson, all Loyalists, had left for Canada after the Revolution, leaving an open door for the likes of Daniel Cady.
For all their sense of established respectability and community leadership, the Cadys were, like most white residents of Upstate New York, new blood. Daniel Cady had been born in Columbia County in 1773, studied law in Albany, and moved the forty miles to Johnstown in 1798. Margaret Livingston, a dozen years his junior, had been born in the Hudson Valley to Revolutionary War hero James Livingston and his wife, Elizabeth Simpson Livingston. Although their own Elizabeth believed that the laws, norms, and values that structured men's and women's lives in her childhood were unchanging and unchallenged, Daniel and Margeret Cady had already seen changes of various kinds. Not all of these were progressive in nature. Churches that had shown some openness to women's speech in the mid-eighteenth century were, by the early nineteenth, reasserting traditional forms of male authority. Near Margaret Cady's birthplace, Dutch traditions that had given married women greater property rights had been largely superseded by more stringent English common law that declared the whole of a woman's inherited property her husband's. Even in politics, the barriers of sex had been less rigid, less seemingly absolute, in 1800 than they would be during Elizabeth Cady's youth. In New Jersey, women who owned property could vote until 1807, when the legislature restricted suffrage to white men, re.ecting a growing consensus that women had no role in political life. Indeed, the Revolution itself, while underscoring the political equality of greater numbers of white men, saw a narrowing of elite women's conventional access to public authority. Daniel Cady, stubbornly conservative, wished to hold on to what authority he had gained (cultural, familial, political, and economic) as long as possible.3
Historians tend to mark 1815, the end of the War of 1812, and the year of Elizabeth Cady's birth, as the start of a new era in American history. It was a time that would, before too long, seethe with changes in law, religion, trade, politics, transportation, class structures, and, of course, ideas about women. Vast changes would take place that the Cadys could not possibly imagine or predict. Indeed, among Elizabeth Cady Stanton's generation of Americans would be the .rst women to attend college, once Oberlin formally admitted them in 1837; the .rst female doctors, once sisters Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell earned their medical degrees; and an astonishing array of female speakers, antislavery reformers, writers, editors, labor activists, educators, and, of course, advocates of woman suffrage.
But before imagining the change that would occur, consider the world, and the rules, into which these women, citizens of the United States, were born. In 1830, when Elizabeth Cady was .fteen, the common-law notion of coverture--that is, the idea that wives were "covered" by their husbands' protection--virtually de.ned the laws of marriage. Once they married, women could not own or inherit property, sign a contract, or pursue their business interests in court. Although women tended to bear somewhat fewer children than they had a century earlier, childbearing was still frequent and deadly. Legal divorce, as opposed to less formal desertion, was rare, and custody of minor children went to the husband, who essentially "owned" their labor. The opportunities for middle- and upper-class women to live independently of men--whether husbands, fathers, or brothers-- were few indeed, and it would not be until the very late nineteenth century that signi.cant numbers of them could do so. Unmarried women paid taxes just as men did, but they could not vote for the representatives who set their tax rates or give advice about how those taxes were spent. Women could not serve on a jury, though they were tried often enough for crimes; nor could they speak out about such crimes in most religious assemblies. They were barred both from men's colleges and from a wide array of occupations--and not surprisingly, those they dominated, such as domestic service and prostitution, were among the lowest paid. In cities, new commercial markets presented both opportunities and pitfalls for women; they ran shops and small manufactories, operated millinery businesses, opened schools, and did the grueling work that the growing upper classes expected of seamstresses, servants, and nursemaids. But if these enterprising women married, their wages were no longer their own, but their husbands'. Over the next century, much of this--.rst and mostly among the upper and middle classes--would change. In the meantime, for all the rhetoric about the common man, Elizabeth Cady's world was in many respects characterized by greater restriction, reinforced hierarchies, and frequent declarations that what America needed was more stability and tradition, not less.
The Cadys, who married in 1801, when Margaret was sixteen, .ourished in Johnstown and in this larger world, living in a large house on a corner of Main Street. Aided by his ties to Margaret's brother-in-law, the fabulously wealthy Peter Smith, Daniel Cady established himself as a lawyer, landowner, state legislator, and judge. In the year of Elizabeth's birth, his neighbors elected him to Congress, where he served one term. The couple had eleven children, of whom only six would survive childhood; the only son among those, Eleazar, would die at twenty.
The Cady family's economic privilege and social authority are nearly invisible threads running through Stanton's recollections, unquestioned and, to Stanton, unproblematic. It was, rather, her father's intransigence about gender that formed the core of the story Elizabeth Cady Stanton told about her childhood. Her most vivid, and oft-repeated, story was that of a brilliant, boisterous, rebellious little girl, eleven years old, whose only living brother, Eleazar, had just died. How dark the household must have seemed. Distraught, she crawled into her father's lap, seeking to give and receive comfort. But her grieving, distracted father put his arm around her and sighed, "Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!" The sting of the father's remark, whether spiteful or unfeeling or simply careless, lingers. Every girl who has yearned to impress an accomplished or demanding father, every woman who has felt the slight of being thought less promising than her brothers, can relate to the insult. Elizabeth Cady, as it turned out, had more than enough reserves of self-esteem to survive the slap, though she never forgot it; not only was she as brilliant as the boys and men around her, but she knew it. She was, as one historian puts it, "singularly unaf.icted with psychological insecurity," and she quickly put her extraordinary self-con.dence to work.4 The child, as the woman later recalled, vowed to make her father happy by being all a son could have been, thus providing a rationale for her grand ambitions. But the political moral that she took from this childhood affront was the germ of something even larger: her recognition that society's preference for and pride in boys dwarfed girls' lives, limited their opportunities, and were used to justify the denial of woman's rights. She took this insult very personally indeed.
Is it possible to sympathize, however grudgingly, with Judge Cady? There is every evidence that he loved his daughters, and even in sighing over the limitations of Elizabeth's sex, he surely knew that this one was especially bright. But the man had just lost his only living son, at an age when the young man's promise was evident but his path not clearly marked, and at a time when a man such as the judge could reasonably rest his ambitions for succession only on boys. Surely he envisioned Eleazar, who had just graduated from Union College, following in his footsteps, perhaps joining him in the law of.ce or at court. It is possible to read Daniel Cady's comment to his daughter not simply as a putdown, though it surely was that, but also as an acknowledgment that her intellect and her wit would in fact have found more expansive arenas if she had been a boy. Elizabeth's father was neither so wrong nor uniquely old-fas...
