In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton Read Free Page B

Democrats to introduce the petitions, they further angered the Republican majority and undercut any chance they might have had for success.
    The argument that black and white women deserved the vote as much as freedmen had few advocates. The insistence of abolitionists and Republicans that black male suffrage take precedence over female suffrage enraged Stanton. In defense she adopted an antiblack, antimale, profemale argument. According to Stanton, it was better and safer to enfranchise educated white women than former slaves or ignorant immigrants. The same women she had previously found small-minded and superstitious were now more intelligent and more noble than most men. “The best interests of the nation demand that we outweigh this incoming pauperism, ignorance, and degradation, with the wealth, education, and refinement of the women of the republic,” she declared. Her elitist, racist, nativist appeal appalled even her most stalwart friends. Mrs. Mott was ashamed of Stanton’s lack of “sympathy for Sambo” and bluntly asked her to justify herself. 15 Stanton responded by claiming that without votes or influence, her only weapon was to attack those who opposed her.
    In their effort to rally the support of women’s rights advocates and the reform community, Stanton and Anthony announced the first women’s rights convention since the war, “to reconstruct a government on the one enduring basis that has never been tried—Equal Rights to All.” But because their opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment was well known, few people respondedto their call. One who did was Sojourner Truth, the former slave famous for her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. She attended the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention and stayed with the Stantons. 16 The majority of reformers agreed that it was “the Negro’s hour.”

     
    Judge Daniel Cady. From an oil painting.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     

     
    Margaret Livingston Cady. From an oil painting.
Courtesy of Vassar College Library
.
     

     
    Cady mansion, Johnstown, New York.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     
    Elizabeth Cady, age twenty.
Courtesy of Brigham Young University Photoarchives
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    Emma Willard,
c
. 1830.
Courtesy of Emma Willard School, Troy, New York
.
     

     
    Gerrit Smith. From an oil painting by Daniel Huntington, 1874.
Courtesy of the Madison County Historical Society, Oneida, New-York
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    Henry Brewster Stanton, at age eighty, in 1885.
Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society
.
     

     
    The Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, 1851. BACK ROW: Mary Grew, Edward Davis, Haworth Wetherald, Abbey Kimber, J. Miller McKim, Sarah Pugh. FRONT ROW: Oliver Johnson, Margaret Jones Burleigh, Benjamin Bacon, Robert Purvis, Lucretia Mott, James Mott.
Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College
.
     

     
    Susan B. Anthony,
c
. 1850, about the time she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Courtesy of Vassar College Library
.
     

     
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton with her son; Henry and Daniel,
c
.1848.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton with young Henry,
c
. 1855.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     

     

     
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s middle children: Margaret, born 1852, and Theodore, born 1851.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     

     
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton with her second daughter, Harriot, age three and a half months, 1858.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     

     
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton, shortly after she organized the National Woman Suffrage Association, 1869.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     

     
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,
c
. 1870.
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C
.
     

     
    Stanton’s daughters, Margaret and Harriot, in Johnstown with their Cady aunts, Harriet Eaton, Tryphena Bayard, and Catherine Wilkeson,
c
. 1870.
Courtesy of Rhoda Barney Jenkins
.
     

     
    George Francis Train.
Courtesy of the Library of