Art and Politics / Politics and Art

Poem for Elizabeth Cady Stanton

12 Poem for Elizabeth Cady Stanton On the Occasion of Naming 250 West Ninetyfourth Street, “The Stanton,” November 11, 2007 I stand where you stood, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, foremother extraordinary, born in Johnstown, New York, November 12, 1815, daughter of Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady, eighth of eleven children, five of whom died in infancy. You were the guide of our painful footsteps to women’s suffrage. For yourself you wanted a full, woman’s life and more, and you made it to your own unique measure, bearing seven children, making speeches for women’s rights when they had none, and writing, writing, writing after all that reading in your father’s law library as a young girl. Early on you debated legal issues with his law clerks: how the law favored men in all matters, how married women had paltry rights over property, income, employment, or even custody rights over their own children. A female, you could not attend Union College, like your brother Eleazar. He died at age twenty, before graduation. Comforting your father, you told him you would try to be all that your brother would have been. “Oh, my daughter,” he cried. “If only you were a boy.” Decades later, in your memoir, you wrote of your pain. Still, you were formally educated, at Johnstown Academy and the Female Seminary at Troy. Revivalists 13 abounded. One terrified you with fires of damnation. Rescued by father and brother-in-law, you journeyed to Niagara Falls. Held in its thundering sunlight you received the healing mists of Nature. Pretty and lively and smart, you met Henry Stanton, shared his Abolitionist views and on everything except women’s rights. Yet you married him and honeymooned abroad. London, 1840: The International Anti-Slavery Convention. There you met Lucretia Mott. Women, you could not participate, sat in a roped-off section, feeling oppressed. Eight years later, with Mott, you organized the first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, drafted a Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence. Frederick Douglass, the famed Black Abolitionist orator, supported you, spoke. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” you wrote, “that all men and women are created equal.” You met Susan B. Anthony. Ideas meshed. You wrote her speeches. She traveled to deliver them. When you exchanged your hearth for hazards of audiences, you worked with Anthony to organize women, publish a newspaper, The Revolution. You championed labor’s right to strike, called for equal pay for equal work. You journeyed together by train across country, speaking, earned money to help educate your children. Dauntless and witty, you dared to be outrageous. 14 With Anthony, you wrote The History of Woman Suffrage. You testified in the Senate for the Sixteenth Amendment, granting suffrage without regard to sex. The amendment never left the committee. Weary of “wandering” you lectured; exhausted, you worked with Anthony on volume 2 of The History. Soon as the last proofs were read, daughter Harriot took you to Europe. In Paris, you lived with son Theodore and family. In London, with Harriot and hers. Alert to new ideas, you learned about Fabian socialism and British secularism. Enjoyed your family; forged international suffragist connections. In 1891, you returned home—this time to New York: the Stuart Apartments, 250 West 94th Street. You lived with daughter Margaret, widowed like you, and your youngest son, Robert. What did you see from your window, Elizabeth? Sight failing after the years of intense study and writing. Did you hear the ships on the Hudson? Voices of women— strong, laughing, shouting, women marching with colored banners, holding aloft their aspirations on signs: “Votes for Women.” As you sat by the window of your study, at your slant-top desk, leather-bound books in cases, among heavy Victorian furnishings, you drifted toward images of home upstate, young children running, boisterous, free. As women were not. 15 Your eightieth birthday. Six thousand cheered your speech at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The day after, you sat at your piano and sang “the old old songs” of your youth. “Bob,” you remarked, “life is a great mystery.” But the past held no pace for your journey. Two weeks later you published The Woman’s Bible, a feminist critique of Scriptures. And still you wrote. Susan B. Anthony was planning to attend your eighty-seventh birthday. Instead, desolate, she came to...