In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (57 page)

Train, George Francis, 129-31, 132, 133, 136, 148

Trials: Beecher-Tilton scandal, 156-58

Hester Vaughan, 159

Laura Fair, 150

McFarland-Richardson, 159-60

Troy Female Seminary.
See
Emma Willard School

Truth, Sojurner, 125

Union Association, The 142

Unions, for women, 119, 137-38, 142

Vassar College, x, 161, 174, 195

Willard, Emma Hart, 10, 18-19, 63, 224

Willard, Frances, 192-93, 194

Wilkeson, Catherine Cady (Mrs. Samuel) (sister), 6, 8, 226-27

Weld, Angelina Grimké, 34, 37, 68, 112, 221

Weld, Theodore, xiv, 26, 27, 32, 34

Woman Suffrage Association of America, 119, 135, 141

Woman’s Bible, The
, ix, 164, 165, 187, 191, 210-13

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 192, 193, 194, 208

Woman’s Journal, The. See
National American Women Suffrage Association

Woman’s legal status, 11, 31, 41, 83, 100, 102, 103, 123, 159.
See also
Married women’s property rights; Suffrage

Women’s movement, 63, 92

during reconstruction, 118-19

finances, 92, 106, 128, 179.
See also
Seneca Falls convention; Suffrage; Woman’s legal status;
Women’s rights national conventions;
women’s rights organizations by name

Women’s rights national conventions (1848–66), 39, 59, 63, 92

First (1848), 51-60

Second (1851, Worcester, Mass.), 65

Third (1852, Syracuse, N.Y.), 77-78

Fourth (1853, Cleveland, Ohio), 79

Seventh (1856, New York City), 94

Eighth (1858, New York City), 92-93

Tenth (i860, New York City), 100, 101-2, 103

Eleventh (1866, New York City), 124-25.
See also
NAWSA; NWSA, meetings; Seneca Falls convention; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, meeting attendance

Women’s Rights National Historic Park, 49n

Woodhull, Victoria, 147-49, 151-52, 181.
See
Beecher-Tilton scandal

Worcester meeting.
See
Women’s rights national conventions, Second

Working Women’s Associations, 119

World Anti-Slavery Convention, 32, 35-37, 50

Wright, Martha Coffin, 51, 68, 75, 106, 110, 124, 137

*
Initial efforts to record the lives of eminent American women were made in the 1890s, as the first generation of college-educated women sought to identify women of achievement in an earlier era. They established archives for research and wrote biographies of colonial and contemporary women, like Abigail Adams and Susan B. Anthony. Organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution related their members to a past that provided proud models of accomplishment. The second surge of biographies came with the renaissance of women’s history in the late 1960s.

*
Alma Lutz (1890–1973) was a lifelong member of the National Woman’s party, its national secretary, and a contributor to its paper,
Equal Times
. A graduate of Emma Willard and Vassar (1912), she wrote magazine and newspaper articles and biographies of Emma Willard and Anthony as well as Stanton.

*
The question of how to address the female subjects of biography raises issues of style and substance. Biographers of great men never had to worry about what to call their protagonists, who had the same name all their lives. One’s subject could age gracefully from “young John” to “Adams” to “the president” without confusing the reader. Biographers of great women have a more awkward nomenclature if their subject married, or married more than once. How should one address Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Using her first name or nicknames seems juvenile, too familiar, even disrespectful. Using her family name, Cady, is only appropriate for the period before her marriage, since she did not keep her name as Lucy Stone did. Using her full name is cumbersome but emphatic. For the most part this biography will refer to her as Stanton or Mrs. Stanton, following general newspaper practice. (The
New York Times
still insists on “Miss” or “Mrs.” always; “Mr.” is used only for “men of good standing,” except on the sports pages.) Her husband Henry will be identified as Mr. Stanton or by using his first name. The younger Mr. Stantons, of whom there were five, will be distinguished as necessary. Other women will also be referred to by last names: Susan B. Anthony will be Anthony or Miss Anthony, rather than the more familiar Susan or “Aunt Susan.”

*
Genealogical sketches of the Livingston-Cady family and Cady-Stanton family appear in apps. A and B.

*
Oberlin (1834) was the first institution to offer women a collegiate education; the first woman graduated in 1841. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown were Oberlin “coeds” during that decade. Mount Holyoke (1837) and Elmira College (1855) aspired to offer advanced courses in a single-sex setting.

*
Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870) was born on a Connecticut farm into a family of sixteen children. Her father encouraged her appetite for education. She began teaching at age fifteen and soon began to explore academic opportunities for women. She was the head of a school in Vermont in 1807. Two years later she married John Willard, a physician and widower with four children. Their only child, John Hart Willard, was born in 1810. Denied the privilege of attending classes at Middlebury College, Mrs. Willard taught herself collegiate subjects and then taught her pupils. Inspired by her success, she presented her plan to the New York legislature. She ran the Troy Female Seminary singlehandedly after her husband’s death in 1828. In 1838 she turned over its management to her son. After a disastrous second marriage ended in divorce, she returned to Troy and died there. In 1895 the Troy Female Seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School.

*
Henry Brewster Stanton was born June 27, 1805, in Pachung, Conn., the second of six children and first son of Joseph and Susan Brewster Stanton. His youngest brother died during a cholera epidemic at the Lane Seminary. His distinguished ancestry included Revolutionary officers, members of Congress, an Indian negotiator, and several judges. Henry described his mother (1781–1853) as an “intelligent, high-spirited, and pious” woman who disdained “nerves.” She moved to Rochester after Joseph’s bankruptcy and death in 1827.

*
Theodore Weld (1803–95) came from a family of ministers in upstate New York. In 1825 he joined Finney’s Holy Band and converted to abolition in 1830. Although he retired from active antislavery and revival preaching after his marriage, he did organize a protest against the gag rule in Congress. Eventually the Grimké-Welds became schoolteachers and administrators, first in New Jersey and later in Massachusetts.

Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–79) and Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) were daughters of a Charleston slaveholder. Both emigrated to Philadelphia and became Quakers and abolitionists. In 1836 Angelina published
An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South
and became an antislavery agent. At first she spoke only to small groups of women, chaperoned by her sister. The novelty of a Southern lady preaching abolition drew men as well as women. In 1837 Angelina became notorious for addressing a “mixed” audience. The criticism of churchmen prompted the sisters to publish another pamphlet,
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women
(1838). Angelina married Theodore Weld in 1838 and bore three children. Sarah lived with them for the rest of her life. Later the sisters joined the women’s movement. B. Thomas,
Weld;
Katharine Lumpkin,
The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1974); Gerda Lerner,
The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

†
Sylvester Graham (1794–1851) was the father of Graham crackers. An orphan suffering from ill health, shuffled among relatives, he had a poor education. After his marriage he became a preacher and a temperance agent. His study of physiology and dietary habits led to a career as a popular lecturer. He marketed Graham flour, made from whole wheat, and established Graham boardinghouses.

*
Ernestine Potowski Rose (1810–91) was a Polish Jew. When she inherited property from her mother, her father, a rabbi, contracted to give it to an older husband as a dowry. She took him to court and won her claim and the inheritance. In 1827 she gave the money to her father, renounced her religion, and left Poland. She traveled around Europe, supporting herself. In 1836 she married William Rose, a silversmith and a disciple of Robert Owen, and emigrated to the United States. She became active in women’s rights, free thought, and temperance.

Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis (1813–76) was a frontier child. Raised in western New York, she rebelled against orthodox Presbyterianism, underwent several revivals, and planned to become a missionary to Hawaii. Instead she married Francis Wright, a wealthy merchant, in 1833. Together they became active in abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. After her husband died in 1845, leaving her independently wealthy, she lectured on female physiology and shocked her audience by using a manikin to demonstrate.

*
Theodore Parker (1810–60) was the precocious offspring of distinguished Massachusetts forebears. After Harvard and a brief teaching career, he became a minister, graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 1834. His marriage to Lydia Cabot caused him to rethink his theology, making it more humane. He resigned from his first church and became active in improvement and antislavery, eventually becoming a member of the Secret Six.

*
Since 1980 Stanton’s Seneca Falls house and the Wesleyan Chapel are a part of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.

*
Jane Master Hunt (1812–89) and Richard Hunt (1797–1856) chose to pursue Hicksite reforms rather than women’s rights. Nor were Thomas McClintock (1801–76) and his wife Mary Ann prominent after 1848.

†
The table, which also stood at the head of Stanton’s casket during her funeral, is now on display at the Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

*
In a “Discourse on Women” (1849), Lucretia Mott argued that unequal education, wage differentials, job restrictions, and the denial of political rights were responsible for female bondage. She emphasized the connection between economic and political freedom. Equality in the marketplace would result in equality in other spheres.

*
Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–94), born in Horner, N.Y., was a teacher before she married Dexter Bloomer in 1840 (without the word “obey”). In 1853 she moved to Ohio and in 1856 sold the
Lily
. After doing relief work during the Civil War, she became president of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Society and helped enact married women’s property rights there.

*
Lucy Stone (1818–93) was born on the family farm near West Brookfield, Mass., to a well-to-do farmer and tanner with
Mayflower
connections. Lucy, who resented her mother’s subordinate social and domestic position, became a teacher and continued her education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and Oberlin College, graduating with honors in 1847. She became one of Garrison’s AASS agents and soon was making women’s rights speeches as well. An organizer of the 1850 Worcester convention, she traveled widely, advocating women’s rights and wearing bloomers.

Henry Blackwell’s sisters Elizabeth and Emily were pioneer women physicians; his sister-in-law, Antoinette Brown, was the first woman ordained a minister in America.

*
Jackson’s daughter, Eliza Eddy, had lost her children when her husband seized their two young daughters and took them to Europe without her consent. The episode prompted Jackson to support women’s rights. Mrs. Eddy also left a bequest of fifty thousand dollars to be divided between Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone.

*
After Stanton’s death in 1902 only her family and closest friends commemorated her Seneca Falls connection. In May 1908 the New York Women’s Political Union, of which Stanton’s daughter Harriot was a leader, unveiled the tablet that today marks the site of the 1848 meeting. Part of the program was led by Elizabeth Smith Miller.

*
The house still stands on Highwood Avenue; it is privately owned.

*
Theodore Tilton (1835–1907) was hired by Horace Greeley to report for the
Tribune
. He married a Plymouth Church Sunday school teacher in 1855 and became a protégé of the minister Henry Ward Beecher. After publishing Beecher’s sermons, Tilton took over the
Independent
and supervised the Sunday school. In the aftermath of the Beecher-Tilton scandal (see chap. 9), Tilton lived in Paris until his death.

*
George Francis Train (1829–1904) was America’s “Champion Crank.” A merchant and promoter, he made and lost fortunes in American shipping and British streetcars. An orphan who had worked since he was fourteen, he lived a sensational life marked by scandals and arrests. He was married in 1851 and had four children.

*
Parker Pillsbury (1809–98), a Massachusetts reformer, was a farmer and a wagoner before becoming a minister in 1838. Encouraged by his wife, he served as an antislavery agent and newspaper editor.