Votes for Women!: Chapters 2–4

She reported that she “fully understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with...the chaotic conditions into which everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women.”

Stanton spoke freely about her own situation, griping about the challenges of raising children and running a household.

“I poured out...the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself as well as the rest of the party to do and dare anything,” she later wrote.

“I poured out...the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself as well as the rest of the party to do and dare anything,” she later wrote.

When Stanton shared the first draft of the document with the other women, even Mott balked at the suffrage resolution.

She also may have felt ambivalent about the suffrage issue because she was a Quaker; many Quakers refused to vote because they did not want to participate in a government that waged war.

Eventually, they turned to Lucretia Mott’s husband, James, and asked him if he would preside over the meeting.

“I should feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time,” she began, “having never before spoken in public, were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty, did I not feel that the time had come for the question of woman’s wrongs to be laid before the public, did I not believe that woman herself must do this work; for woman alone can understand the height, the depth, the length, and the breadth of her degradation.”

She told the listeners: “Strange as it may seem to many, we now demand our right to vote according to the declaration of the government under which we live....The pens, the tongues, the fortunes, the indomitable wills of many women are already pledged to secure this right.”

The disparaging reports caused some of those who had signed the Declaration of Sentiments to have second thoughts.

It declared, in part: “The legal theory is, marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband....Women of Ohio!...Slaves we are, politically and legally....If men would be men worthy of the name, they must cease to disfranchise and rob their wives and mothers, they must forbear to consign to political and legal slavery their sisters and daughters. And we women...must cease to submit to such tyranny.”

It declared, in part: “The legal theory is, marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband....Women of Ohio!...Slaves we are, politically and legally....If men would be men worthy of the name, they must cease to disfranchise and rob their wives and mothers, they must forbear to consign to political and legal slavery their sisters and daughters. And we women...must cease to submit to such tyranny.”

Truth spoke in a deep voice, loud enough to reach “every ear in the house and away through the throng at the doors and windows,” according to Gage.

“There she stood,” Stanton wrote, “with her good, earnest face and genial smile...I like her thoroughly.”

Anthony’s Quaker upbringing also had discouraged interest in partisan politics and women’s suffrage, so she focused on working with the temperance movement.

As pacifists, many Quaker men refused to vote, as a protest against government engagement in war.

She was immediately chastised.

Stanton also offered practical advice: “I have no doubt a little practice will make you an admirable lecturer. Dress loose, take a great deal of exercise & be particular about your diet, & sleep enough, the body has great influence upon the mind. In your meetings if attacked be good-natured & cool, for if you are simple & truth loving no sophistry can confound you.”

Stanton also offered practical advice: “I have no doubt a little practice will make you an admirable lecturer. Dress loose, take a great deal of exercise & be particular about your diet, & sleep enough, the body has great influence upon the mind. In your meetings if attacked be good-natured & cool, for if you are simple & truth loving no sophistry can confound you.”

Some criticized her for joining the lofty cause of temperance with what they considered to be vulgar appeals for women’s rights.

One of the small ways Stanton showed solidarity with her feminist friends was to wear “bloomers,” the controversial new fashion, a below-the-knee skirt worn over loosely fitting pants.

Bloomer replied: “I feel no more like a man now than I did in long skirts, unless it be that enjoying more freedom and cutting off the fetters [chains] is to be like a man.”

Both Stanton and Anthony backed the resolution, believing that the men “would modestly permit women to continue the work she had so successfully begun.”

Instead, the men in the organization staged a coup.

“It seems to me you fail to comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which you complain,” Anthony said. “Do you not see that so long as society says woman has not brains enough to be a doctor, lawyer or minister, but has plenty to be a teacher, every man of you who condescends to teach, tacitly admits...that he has no more brains than a woman?”

She organized a group of sixty women who canvassed the state of New York, collecting ten thousand signatures on petitions.

Despite the demeaning response, Stanton and Anthony considered the speech a victory: Women had spoken before the legislature.

“I passed through a terrible scourging when last at my father’s,” Stanton wrote in a letter to Anthony several months after the speech.

“In writing we did better work than either could do alone. While she is slow and analytic in composition I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric....Our speeches may be considered the joint products of our two brains.”

In an interview later in her life she said, “I’m sure no man could have made me happier than I have been....I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealth, she became a pet and a doll. Just think, had I married at twenty, I would have been a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it!”

Stone grew up on a four-hundred-acre farm in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, with an overbearing father who drank too much.

As part of their unconventional wedding ceremony, Blackwell renounced his legal privileges as husband, and Stone announced that she would keep her own name.

Stone finally called out Anthony and asked her to use the name Lucy Stone, and Anthony relented.

“Imagine me,” she said, “day in and day out, watching, bathing, dressing, nursing, and promenading the precious contents of the little crib....I pace up and down these two chambers of mine like a caged lioness longing to bring nursing and house keeping cares to a close.”

Stanton wrote to Anthony. “Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The sooner the present generation of women die out the better. We have jackasses enough in the world now without such women propagating any more.”

Three times she was hung in effigy.

Reporters called her “a reformatory Amazon” and “an ungainly hermaphrodite, part male, part female with an ugly face and shrill voice.”

Stanton, who had always been proud of her resilience following childbirth, complained that the baby “seemed to take up every particle of [her] vitality, soul and body.”

Stanton, who had always been proud of her resilience following childbirth, complained that the baby “seemed to take up every particle of [her] vitality, soul and body.”

“All alike say ‘Have no convention at this crisis!’...‘Wait until the war excitement abates.’ I am sick at heart, but cannot carry the world against the wish and will of our best friends.”