See That the World Is Moving

The Complex Legacy of Elizabeth Cady Stanton

BY KAITLIN RESLER

On August 26, 2020, coinciding with the centennial anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, a bronze statue was unveiled in Central Park. In the park’s 167-year history it is the first to feature three real, historical women: Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Troy Female Seminary alumna Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1832).

As a leading activist and intellectual of the 19th century women ’s rights movement, Stanton’s unwavering commitment to securing the rights that would establish women as equal and independent citizens alongside men made her an iconic presence in American history. Introducing contemporary readers to Stanton in Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, Lori D. Ginzberg characterizes her as “to many, a dangerous radical, whose words threatened the stability of marriage, the sanctity of religion, and men’s exclusive control over politics” (3). Stanton changed the rights of citizenship for American women with an important caveat—for women who were most like herself: educated, white, middle class. Her vision, and the rhetorical choices in those early days of the women’s rights movement, set the foundation for both the good and regrettable facets in the feminist movement of our own era.

Born in 1815 in Johnstown, NY, the experiences of her early life certainly set the tone for her activism: biographers consistently describe a staunch, determined child and adolescent. Though excluded from attending Union College, she benefited from changes in girls’ education that were popular during the earlier part of the century and attended the Troy Female Seminary, now our own Emma Willard School (in her Reminiscences, she dismisses her years at school as ‘fashionable,’ despite the quality of the education, even as she writes with admiration of Madame Willard herself). The Declaration of Sentiments, penned for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, shows off her sharp intellect and linguistic boldness. Her text mirrors the language of the Declaration of Independence, a move that underscores the unquestionable tradition of rights owed to both women and men. The document contains a resolution that speaks directly to “the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” Not permitted to vote, she declared herself a candidate for Congress in 1866 (the first woman to do so) against both the Democatic and Republican candidates. She received 24 votes.

Suffrage was not the singular goal of the convention, or of Stanton, who denounced the many ways she was disenfranchised: from owning or purchasing property, signing a contract, serving on a jury, and the overall rarity of a woman able to live without reliance on a man (father, brother, husband). However, acquiring the vote became the defining feature around which the early women’s movement coalesced and where the eventual schism began. The difference in how the right to vote was viewed by Stanton versus by Black suffragists illuminates the profound way in which race, class, and life experience shaped her priorities when it came to the fight for equal rights. For Stanton

the vote was a symbol of true citizenry illustrating that, as written in the Declaration of Sentiments, “men and women are created equal.” For formerly enslaved people however, suffrage was an urgently needed tool that could empower Black communities in the face of the violence they experienced during reconstruction (all of which continues far beyond that era, but the immediate protection the vote could provide was particularly important in the discourse surrounding suffrage at the time).

The divide in the suffrage movement grows out of Stanton’s rejection of the 15th Amendment. She had been an ardent supporter of the abolitionist movement, but her priorities were singular when it came to women’s suffrage. “Asked straight out whether she were ‘willing to have the colored man enfranchised before the woman,’ she answered ‘no; I would not trust him with all my rights: degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are’” (Ginzberg, 122). The harm of those words, choosing to appeal to an unquestionable racism towards Black men (the full text includes a slur, and her posture towards Black women is dismissive when not actively offensive), set the early women’s rights movement on a course towards a feminism based on race, class, and respectability centered on the white woman’s experience above all others. In 1869, two competing organizations emerged: the National Women’s Suffrage Association (formed by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, alongside others) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (joined by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and other abolitionists).

How does an institution like Emma Willard School celebrate the legacy of one who, even as she dedicated her life to gender equality, so unflinchingly excluded Black women from her vision? Tomisin Akinyemi ’16, is one of many alumnae grappling with this difference. “It’s difficult, and certainly something to struggle with,” she says of the dissonance between aligning oneself “with feminist ideals that find their roots and history in someone that would not support me.”

That questioning and acknowledgment of disconnect, Akinyemi says, is key to growth. We have to “see people as not just good or bad, and not place them on pedestals. That allows you to push forward,” adding that confronting this difficult history is one way to help prevent it from being repeated. It is a history that, she observes, hasn’t been fully grappled with until more recently. A foray into the school archives unearths various publications on Elizabeth Cady Stanton as an alumna, but most of them don’t engage with the threads of her story that fail to align with the mythology of one who advocated for all.

Investigating the decisions of one of the founders of the women’s movement allows us to ask questions as we shape our own activism: What compromises are worth the achievement of a more immediate goal? How do race, class, and gender influence the leaders of a movement? Emma Willard School’s recent undertaking to set the institution on a more equitable course through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and antiracism initiatives requires an in-depth examination of our history to foster real growth and transformation.

To bolster that systemic change, there must be action beyond professing awareness of the faults found in an individual or institution. That act alone does not take away the power exerted over the historically vulnerable. Awareness alone does not absolve. The work—to use a vague, but popular, phrase—is much harder, continuing, and will involve not only the acknowledgement of racist words and behaviors, but tangible actions and choices to make true equality a possibility. As a radically outspoken woman driven by her own sense of worth and a commitment to her larger ideals, her contributions seen as pivotal though not inclusive, Stanton challenged the country to think of women’s rights in a new way and became an inspiration for generations of activists to continue in fighting for the rights of all.

Eunice Newton Foote and the Convention

The Declaration of Sentiments was signed by another Troy Female Seminary alumna: Eunice Newton Foote (1838). A member of the editorial committee for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, she was one of the five women who prepared the text detailing the event for publication, though her contributions extend beyond her presence at that important meeting. In 1856, her paper Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays reported the results of her elegant experiment on the influence of the sun’s rays on different gasses: a cylinder filled with moist air and carbon dioxide became warmer than one with dry, regular air and also took more time to cool. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote, theorizing that changes in carbon dioxide could affect the Earth’s temperature.

The experiment focused on the visible spectrum, and later scientists would go on to use technology that allowed them to measure the infrared spectrum (producing a more accurate reading of exactly how this warming would happen). Their research never referenced Foote; most likely, they had not even come across her work. Although she is finally being recognized for her theory in recent years, the omission of her contribution underscores the work across generations of women that is overlooked and lost. As the first person to note her observations that higher carbon dioxide levels contribute to a warmer planet, Eunice Newton Foote’s experiments in climate science links her to recent alumnae, and current students, working and advocating in climate activism at Emma Willard School.