Stay-at-home mom starts a revolution
That time Elizabeth Cady Stanton vented to her friends and started a revolution to smash the patriarchy. In 1848.
In the summer of 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a wife and mother at home alone with her three rambunctious boys under the age of ten who did things like tie corks to the baby to see if he would float in the nearby river. Her husband had an exciting career as an abolitionist speaker and was often away traveling.
There is a picture of her from around this time (above) and in it I see (recognize?) the frazzled tension of a woman who has been alone with small children for too long and who has Had Enough. (Sit still already!!!) Or, in Elizabeth’s own words, the “weary, anxious look” on the majority of women she saw out in the world.
Elizabeth was all of us wives and moms, trying to keep everyone clean, fed and alive without forgetting ourselves. And it was hard! In her words:
Cleanliness, order, the love of the beautiful and artistic, all faded away in the struggle to accomplish what was absolutely necessary from hour to hour. Now I understood, as I never had before, how women could sit down and rest in the midst of general disorder.
Elizabeth described herself as suffering from a “mental hunger” due to the overwhelmingly tedious duties of keeping house and rearing children, combined with a lack of books or intellectually stimulating companionship. One afternoon, she got a break and went to visit some old friends. Over tea, she shared “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.”
Who among us has not gone to visit friends and vented about husbands and kids and the state of the world?
The difference is that on that day, at that meeting, that group of friends—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt, Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann McClintock and her daughter Elizabeth—decided to do something about it. “Having bestirred themselves,” Stanton’s biographer writes, “the women did what any self-respecting reformers would do: they called a meeting.”
That meeting was the Seneca Falls Convention. They put an advertisement in the local newspaper. On the appointed day—July 19, 1848—about 300 people turned up to discuss women’s rights. Many people trace the start of an organized movement for women’s rights to this meeting in Seneca Falls.
The audience was a mix of men and women (mostly women) and one person of color (renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass). They rallied around the Declaration of Sentiments, a rousing cry for rebellion based on the Declaration of Independence. They resolved to fight for women’s education and career opportunities, to change the standard of morality so a woman could do things like speak in public without getting pelted with rocks and eggs, or to divorce an abusive husband without ruining her reputation. They declared they would take on the government, the church and public sentiment.
In short, they wanted a complete overhaul of a society. To do that, women needed to be allowed to vote and this occasion was one of the first major calls for women to be enfranchised. It was a radical proposal that caused an uproar at the convention. Lucretia Mott worried it would make them ridiculous. Elizabeth’s husband left town, fearing embarrassment. But Elizabeth was determined.
The fight for women’s suffrage—the right to vote—was the largest, non-violent, slow-burn revolution in history. I don’t use the term “revolution” to be cute. Elizabeth would go on to call her home in Seneca Falls “the center of the rebellion” and the Suffragists would draw heavily on Revolutionary war language and philosophy in their arguments (ahem: “no taxation without representation”). These women (and some men) believed they were on a morally righteous and totally radical quest for equality. They wanted the vote, but it was never just about the vote—they fought hard for women’s freedom and opportunities. They had to change how the world thought of women—and to do that, they even had to change how women thought of themselves. It would take a revolution to effect all this change. Elizabeth, a mother of seven, was one of its leaders and would be for decades.
She looks a bit like you!