America's Feminist First Family

An interview with Coline Jenkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's great-great granddaughter

Coline Jenkins (left) with the first statue of real women in Central Park —and she helped make it happen! It features her great-great grandmother Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth.

I recently had the great honor and pleasure to speak with Coline Jenkins, the great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragist who sparked the women’s rights movement in America. Coline comes from a long line of forward-thinking and forward-living women. Elizabeth’s daughter, Harriot, helped finish the Suffrage fight. Her daughter Nora, was among the first female civil engineers. Nora’s daughter, and Coline’s mother, Rhoda was an architect. Coline is keeping the family legacy alive—she founded the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust, which houses a collection of over 3,000 items of suffrage memorabilia. She was also a driving force to get the first statue of real women in Central Park; thanks to her efforts there is a now statue of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth (pictured above).

Our conversation was full of wonderful stories of Elizabeth and her family. Here are some snippets, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

On Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s real legacy:

Do you know her book Eighty Years And More? Online it’s word searchable. I did a word search for a law and the old book lights up like a Christmas tree. law, law, law. Particularly the first part of it, which really shapes her life.

I think one of the most important things is the connection between women and law. Elizabeth Cady Stanton really made that connection. She grew up in a soup of law. Her father's office was connected to their home [He was a judge and lawyer]. Law students clerked with her father and baited her.

She had gotten a coral necklace as an eight year old as a Christmas present. And one of the law clerks said, “who owns that? She said, “It’s mine.” Then he said, “Well, you grow up and get married, your husband will own it, and if he wants, he can swap it for cigars and it'll go up in smoke.”

I just love that type of story, because it really speaks to anybody from kindergarten up to adults. I like the fact that you don't have to be forty-years old, or you don't have to be eighty years-old, but you can be eight years-old, and it's the same visceral reaction right to something that you think you own but law dictates otherwise.

On Elizabeth appealing to modern women:

She's definitely somebody that's ahead of her time in many different ways. I think she's also appealing to modern day women, because she actually got married and she had seven children. I know that when Ken Burns made the film Not For Ourselves Alone, I got some feedback that she's appealing because that’s what modern women are grappling with: motherhood, jobs, etc. Whereas a lot of the suffragists never got married, never had kids. Which I can understand if you would want to keep the rights that you would lose if you got married.

On one of her favorite letters from Elizabeth:

We have a letter that was written just like a month before she died, and it's to President Roosevelt. I like to provoke people to think “well, what are you going to do on your dying bed?” And so she’s there, writing a letter to President Roosevelt, basically giving another powerful argument. The last paragraph of the letter says “Surely, there is no greater monopoly than that of all men in denying all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey.” Period. I just think that's so powerful.

On writing the Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848:

[Elizabeth, Lucretia Mott and three other women called the Seneca Falls convention on a whim—read more about that here.]

You've called a convention—but what are you going to present the world? They didn't have an answer. But they thought and thought and thought, and finally they said, “We're going to take the Declaration of Independence.” Everybody knew about it because 1776 was still fresh. Her grandfather had fought in it. They’re in touch with it, they know what it’s about it, and know it’s a revolution.

And so they took that, but they also took the logic of the revolution. The revolutionaries were overthrowing an autocratic King of England. And so they said, “Well, we're going to overthrow the autocratic rule of males so and then we're going to list our grievances, and then we're going to commit to changing them.”

It's emotional, but it's it's also grounded in how Americans are defining themselves. And so it's basically using the force of the ideas of 1776 and saying, wait a minute.

I like the way she thinks, she's provocative, but she's really well grounded in her thought.

On letters between Elizabeth and her husband Henry Stanton:

Most of [the letters] have gone down to the Library of Congress, but one we’ve kept is really kind of funny. So there's a letter from his from Henry, written from Washington, D.C.—so you know he's not around. And you know that if you have an issue with your husband, you don't run it through your kids. You deal with it as adults.

So anyway, this letter is written to one of the daughters, and he's basically saying, “Margaret, can you please tell your mother to write me?” And you can assume that there's no problem with Elizabeth writing speeches, writing letters.

This guy's basically going through his kid and I think the kid is almost pre-literate, so she can't read the letter, so somebody's gonna have to read the letter to her. I thought that was interesting and funny.

On another special letter written by Elizabeth:

Well, there's one letter that was kept—we've shared it, it's published—and it's when Elizabeth had her first daughter. She has all these sons and she has her first daughter. She's absolutely ecstatic that she has a girl. This written to Lucretia Mott, and it's postpartum. The letter says : “I am at length the happy mother of a daughter.”

And then she tells quite personal stuff, like how she changes the bandages. I mean, she's literally just given birth and then, and she's writing this letter to Lucretia Mott and and then after a while, she starts talking about something political. And then, you know, and then she doesn't really miss a beat with this whole delivery process, and she just goes on to talk about some other strategy thing.

[Note from Maya: the letter ends with “I must write about my daughter to a dozen other friends.”]

That daughter was Margaret and she grew up to have her mother’s confidence and wit:

Margaret did gymnastics or something like that at Columbia University. She was in a courtyard, doing her exercises. One of the professors told her later that she shouldn't be doing it there. He said, “You're very distracting to the students.”

And this is so typical of the response. Rather than saying, “Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, how could I forget about you? I will move. We will never do it again” Margaret basically tells him “Well, your students will go forth in their lives, in contact with women, and they're going to have to learn how to concentrate in the presence of women.”

Elizabeth with her daughter Harriot and granddaughter Nora.

On Nora Stanton Blatch Barney:

So Nora is Elizabeth's granddaughter, my grandmother, and so Nora becomes the first female civil engineer to graduate from Cornell (in 1905). She was very high in her class at Cornell in civil engineering. Then she went down to New York to get jobs. This is from a two-page letter from the president of some tunnel company— because they were boring holes for subways, for aqueducts, there was a lot of tunneling going on in New York—the two-page letter begins “Dear Miss Blatch, the reason you didn't get the job is because tunnel boring is an inherently man's work with muscles”—I’m paraphrasing. But she's drafting. She's an engineer. She's not digging dirt, right?

[The letter continues]…and another reason you're not getting it is because there's a superstition within tunnel boring that if a woman goes through a tunnel within twenty-four hours there will be an accident. And then he's really benevolent or patriarchal, he says, “you're not getting the job, but if you have any questions, bring your Father to the office, and we can discuss it.” And right in the middle of the sentence, F is spelled with a capital, which means God our Father. So anyway, if that had that been written today, there'd be so many lawsuits. So things change, things progress.

Nora does get a job. But she confronts more sexism when she goes out to lunch:

She went to Delmonico’s Steakhouse. And the Maitre’D says “how many” and she says “myself.” And he says “I’m sorry, we cannot seat you.” Because she was a woman alone. So what she do? She went out in the vestibule called Western Union and had a delivery guy sent over. And so then she goes back to the Maitre’D with the delivery guy, and says, “I have my gentleman.”

On what Elizabeth would be writing about and what causes she’d be taking on if she were alive today:

I think the Equal Rights Amendment is important. The 19th Amendment doesn't guarantee equal rights for women, it’s just the right to vote. I think that had she grown up in this time, she would have been a judge. Or a politician [Elizabeth did run for congress in 1866!]. She also poked a lot. She would be on the vanguard of poking officials or policy. She'd be very outspoken.

She would definitely be using contemporary media to communicate. And I think that she would have a large following too. She's so well spoken. Her arguments are right on. She is witty. She doesn't back down.

On Elizabeth’s Image:

The imagery is all wrong. She was a radical at 32 years-old [at Seneca Falls] and that’s important to know. I dealt with the Encyclopedia Britannica that had a picture of her as an older, white-haired woman, but she was young when she was doing this, and she had kids when she's doing this.

This picture of Elizabeth dates from 1848, right around the time of the Seneca Falls convention.

This is one of the more common images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton as an older woman.

On Elizabeth’s most scandalous work, The Woman’s Bible:

She felt that churches and institutionalized religion was a big hindrance for women's advancement, and so she addressed it. She gathered a group of people to be on an Advisory Committee for The Woman’s Bible. They were basically looking at the Bible, taking out excerpts and analyzing them directly, assuming that it’s God's word, and not through the interpretation of a minister, priest, a rabbi, or something like that. Then they published.

A minister that declared that it was the work of the devil. And Elizabeth says, “No, the advisory Advisory Committee consisted of women. He was not there.”

Isn't that brilliant? Rather than getting argumentative, you just slice them off at the ankles.

On the friendship of Elizabeth and Susan:

Well, you know, I think somebody called it friendship, but I'm not sure it was. Lesbians try and say that it was a lesbian relationship. I mean, everybody kind of uses it for their own means, but basically, I think that they were sort of a yin and yang that one had this strength, one had that strength. They complemented each other. They worked together, but they worked to each other's strengths.

Elizabeth was the philosopher, the very good writer, and Anthony had a certain amount of mobility that Stanton didn't have during childbearing years. Anthony was very disappointed when she [Elizabeth] got pregnant again. She [Anthony] would come from Rochester and say, “Elizabeth, you go write a speech and I will mind the children and stir the pudding.” It’s like “get down to business.”

They were successful in accomplishing something and probably divided. Together, they accomplished quite a bit.

Elizabeth and Susan got a lot done.

On her favorite object in the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust, which houses over 3,000 items of suffrage memorabilia.

I think it's really important to know that to have a mass movement, you just can't talk about some leaders. You have to have somebody who basically wakes one day, and decides, “I’m going to make black stockings that say Votes For Women at the ankles.”

At the time, the dress [style] meant ankles were kind of sexy. So where do you put your message? Where the sexy part is. I just love that. I don’t know who did it or why they embroidered it. But to me, that's an individual act: “I’m going to say this, and this is how I'm going to do it.” And you don't change the constitution without a mass movement.

It evolved. For instance, with Stanton, we [have] letters, newspapers, speeches, which are very black and white. Whereas with this second push in the early 1900s, it became very visual, and everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. Like GE has [an ad with] a woman at a switch. She's turning on lights—enlightenment! Campbell’s Soup has has a a little boy with some type of rhyme about suffrage. How [suffrage] became popularized is very interesting. All of this is applicable to today. That what's so great—to take ideas from there and apply them for today.

Someone woke up and embroidered this on their stockings. How cool! Below are the two advertisements mentioned.

On why Sojourner Truth is included in the statue with Elizabeth and Susan in Central Park.

I was involved with putting the first statue of real women in Central Park. The New York City Parks Department says that if you’re putting statues up, try and put the statue where something happened. [The Mayor’s office also suggested that it include a woman of color].

Good idea. [We thought] it shouldn’t be somebody from the 1900’s or somebody from the 1700’s, they should be contemporary [to Susan and Elizabeth]. Sojourner Truth was a brilliant thinker and speaker. She had wonderful speeches at these different conventions.

During one of the conventions in New York, Sojourner Truth stayed in the Stanton home. Harriot [Elizabeth’s daughter] was told to read for Sojourner. Harriot asked her, “Why am I reading to you? You can see.” So Sojourner said to Harriet, “I don't read those itty bitty characters. I read men's souls.”

Since they were all basically at the same place, in the Stanton home in New York, near the convention site, it was logical that we put them there.

On whether she feels pressure as a descendent of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the women’s rights movement:

I don't feel pressure. It's just like you. It's something attractive. I want to know more. It's like a mosaic. I get a little piece here, you have a little piece there, a little piece here, and it's like an unending puzzle and somehow things start fitting together. It’s important and fascinating to me.