Feminist Gadfly

...clearly Stanton enjoyed the privileges of wealth inherited from her eminent upstate New York family of judges, lawyers, and real estate dealers...

...her mentor and model, Lucretia Mott...

...Her one-time ally, Garrison, later called her "untruthful, unscrupulous, and selfishly ambitious" when she opposed suffrage for black males, after the Civil War, because women were not included...

...Yet she took pleasure in earning her own way, later in life, through lecturing and writing, and strongly advocated many radical reforms, such as pro-labor laws, free kindergartens and adult education, free admission to cultural and educational events and institutions...

...When she returned (whether from a walk in the garden or a trip abroad) there were no apologies or explanations...

...Arotund revolutionary who loved to laugh, joke, eat, keep her hair stylishly curled, and play games with her grandchildren...

...Elisabeth Griffith has vividly chronicled Stanton's life in a scrupulous account that documents her greatness as well as her weaknesses...

...William Lloyd Garrison, and other friends and notables of their day—their focus as a team was increasingly on women's rights, the formation of women's organizations to achieve those rights, and the writing of The History of Woman Suffrage...

...This final salvo nearly isolated her from the increasingly conservative women's organizations she had helped form and nurture through several decades with the strong organizing hand of Susan B. Anthony...

...Until her death, StanBOOKS ton played gadfly to the women's movement...

...Anthony served as a kind of gray eminence, inspiring and encouraging Stanton to stick to the cause despite all the distractions of motherhood and upper-middle-class society and social reform...

...Since their meeting after the Seneca Falls convention for women's rights in 1848 (instigated mainly by Stanton and Mott), Anthony and Stanton had become an almost inseparable team...

...Two decades after Stanton's death in 1902, women were given that right...

...Stanton was most "revolutionary" in her challenge to male-run institutions and all forms of patriarchy...

...The splits that occurred in the women's movement throughout the latter half of the century, not unlike those of today, derived largely from differing emphases...

...she picked up and carried on...

...Generally Stanton's way of dealing with conflict was to say her piece and then withdraw—as she sometimes did from Anthony, and from her own organizations...

...Anthony was one of the few who seemed to conform to the stereotype of the spinster suffragist that much of the male-dominated establishment liked to deride: serious, intense, dedicated to the cause, unmarried throughout her life...

...But the photos, even in this delightfully myth-eroding book, are deceiving—especially in the case of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, along with Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, became one of the three major "foremothers" of the women's rights movement...

...For Stanton, education was the key to progress, but she was not willing to wait until everyone was educated before demanding drastic changes in the power structure...

...Hardly the sort of woman we generally infer from the grim old photos of stern-faced, strait-laced Nineteenth Century suffragists...

...Who exuberantly dispensed recipes, baby-care advice, and autographs—not to mention stunning salvos against entrenched institutions...

...As some groups now focus on passage of the ERA and downplay other issues, so in Stanton's day did "conservatives" want to focus on voting rights and soft-pedal the more "radical" issues that Staton insisted on writing and speaking about...

...When Stanton's more "radical" group, the National Woman Suffrage Association, finally reunited with the conservative American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American, she became its nominal head...

...Frederick Douglass...

...In the end, lofty and largely isolated from the groups speaking in her name, she nearly approximated the androgynous deity which was the only one she deigned to recognize...

...While both Anthony and Stanton strongly supported abolition of slavery— as did Stanton's lawyer husband Henry...

...Playing her role as mother and grandmother to the hilt in a Victorian age when motherhood was sacrosanct, Stanton almost single-handedly tackled every touchy issue of the time: abolition^of slavery, labor legislation, women's right to vote, to be educated, to own property, to be financially independent, to refuse a husband's sexual advances, to divorce...

...She was also a bit of a curmudgeon, at times hard to get along with...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and peace activist...

...In addition to insisting on the complete social, economic, and political equality of women, Stanton took on the Bible as well...

...Stanton became both the expansive mother-figure idealized in her era and a brilliant rights advocate...

...But the broader struggle for genuine equality of men and women for which Stanton had long fought dwindled through several decades of depression, war, and postwar adjustments—until the reemer-gence of the women's movement in the 1960s...

...Stanton, by contrast, was sociable, articulate, the mother eventually of seven children, and an apparently accomplished and happy homemaker, although she often complained in private of the strictures that young children put on her public life...

...but in fact Susan Anthony, along with their old rival Lucy Stone and a newer one, Carrie Chapman Catt, came to control it, narrowing its aims down to the one they believed they could finally win: woman suffrage...

...In her later years, she published The Woman's Bible, a book which challenged the subordinate role assigned to women in the male-written Bible...

...She was favorably impressed by such intentional egalitarian communities as Brook Farm, which she visited in the 1840s as a young matron, and the Utopian community established by Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana...

...Biographer Elisabeth Griffith, a young historian and lecturer on women's issues, never states that Stanton, however, advocated outright socialism...

...She was strong-willed, buoyantly self-confident, sometimes bigoted and inconsistent, convinced of her lightness in almost everything...

...As biographer Griffith reveals, Stanton was not just a benign old rebel with ideas ahead of her time...