"She Always Played to Win"

The Young Elizabeth Cady (1831–1922)

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In their 1922 memoir of their mother, Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch (1856–1940) and Theodore Weld Stanton (1851–1925) characterized what was for them the unique significance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's early and late delight in dancing, music, and competitive games; that innate joy in artistry, physical activity, and spirited rivalry, they maintained, sharpened her activism. This insightful assessment was likely informed by their own rich experiences with suffrage and labor agitation in England, France, and America. Importantly, however, because both children married abroad after traveling to Europe, they were themselves instrumental in connecting their mother to the transcontinental woman's rights reformers through whom she would extend the reach of her influence in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1880 Theodore and Harriot journeyed together to Germany, where he was to take a position in Berlin as a correspondent for the New York Tribune. The next year he married Marguerite Berry in Paris; shortly thereafter, Harriot met the British businessman Henry Blatch, whom she married in 1882. Theodore and Harriot would ultimately settle in Paris and Basingstoke, England, respectively, and as a result England and France became new hubs for their mother's leadership.

Theodore Stanton edited The Woman Question in Europe (1884), "the first English-language study of the women's rights movement in Europe," and in his later career as a journalist he continued to write about the transcontinental woman's movement. In another first, feminist author, editor, and socialist activist Harriot Stanton Blatch became "America's first second-generation feminist leader," in England and then in America, where she returned after her husband's death. Her achievements were emphatically shaped, claims Ellen Carol DuBois, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "deliberate feminist mothering." After her husband's death in 1915, Blatch regained her American citizenship and dedicated herself to woman's suffrage, authorship (Mobilizing Woman-Power, 1918, and A Woman's Point of View, 1920), the Socialist Party, and world peace.

Thirza Lee (later Tilton) (1801–1877), an art teacher at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, produced an evocatively concentrated portrait of the teenaged Elizabeth Cady during her student years there — one that contributes to biographical treatments of the youthful woman's rights leader as well as to analyses of the calculated rhetorical ways in which the older Stanton portrayed that time in lectures and in her autobiography. The fifteen-year-old Cady entered the seminary sometime between the winter of 1830 and January 1831, when Lee was establishing herself as a newly accredited teacher. Her selection, revealing the significance of religious teachings in Lee's own life, is both brief and telling: the concerned teacher penned merely a few lines in Cady's commonplace book, a notebook that also displays extracts from other teachers, students, and friends written before and after Stanton's marriage. Nonetheless, with this concise and pious admonishment Lee amplifies a period that Stanton later identified as crucial to her development as a religious skeptic and cultural critic.

In Eighty Years and More, Stanton recalled that during her time at Willard's Female Seminary, the great evangelical revivalist Charles Grandison Finney spent six weeks in Troy, where in emotional mass meetings he forcefully dramatized the dire wages of sin. As she described that time, Troy students attended every session, daily, over the six weeks' duration, and fatefully, Elizabeth Cady was "one of the first [of Finney's] victims." The adult Stanton depicts the popular evangelist as a dangerous "epidemic," to which her "vivid imagination" was particularly susceptible; during one of these sessions, she remembered, Finney conjured a terrifying vision of hell, brimming over with "the burning depths of liquid fire" and fearfully punctuated by "the shouts of the devils echoing through the vaulted arches." Pointing excitedly to the ceiling, Finney exhorted prospective converts to witness, as he could, the encroaching demonic cavalcade. Over the course of weeks, claimed Stanton, Finney worked Cady into such an unstable state of mind that she could actually envision the fiends. Moreover, "the picture glowed before my eyes," she wrote, "and remained with me for months afterward. ... Mental anguish prostrated my health. Dethronement of my reason was apprehended by friends." So overcome was young Cady that she retreated to Johnstown to recover. Fearing for her mental and physical welfare, so the story goes, in June her father, sister, and brother-in-law embarked upon a six-week scenic trip to Niagara Falls. Over the course of that vacation, readings in and conversations about rationalist philosophy restored her physical and mental health. "I found my way out of the darkness into the clear sunlight of Truth," Stanton recollected. "My religious superstitions gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and ... I grew more and more happy, day by day." In this telling, her usable past illustrates the woeful effects of religion upon young women, even upon those as strong-minded as Elizabeth Cady. As Kathi Kern suggests, however, although this "failed conversion ... played a shaping role in her politics[,] ... the trouble is, in some sense, it may not be true." In point of fact, during Stanton's seminary years Finney only appeared twice; his first, quite brief visit to the area occurred in July 1831, a month after her restorative Niagara Falls vacation.

We may never fully identify the authentic life events that shaped this narrative, but her art teacher's commentary may provide a slender thread of evidence that illuminates its themes and import to her later anticlerical positions and critiques of the cultural sources of women's subordination. In the pages of Cady's commonplace book, Thirza Lee responded directly to the actions and behaviors of a younger and less scripted version of the woman's rights advocate; and her extract and commentary produce another angle from which to view her religious experience at Troy Female Seminary. Lee signed and then dated her entry as "March — 1831," approximately six weeks before Stanton located Finney and his six-week revival in Troy.

In an apparent attempt to instruct or chastise Elizabeth Cady, Lee quoted from John Angell James's The Christian Father's Present to His Children; its chapter "On Female Accomplishments, Virtues, and Pursuits" addresses pedagogical objectives for...