00:04:46.840So, I'm coming in with, obviously, an association with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention,
00:04:52.040which I think was sort of her brainchild, the fight for suffrage,
00:04:56.180which she was one of the main leaders of,
00:04:58.220the partnership over decades, I think, with Susan B. Anthony,
00:05:01.980And then I guess this newspaper they started together, The Revolution, but she died, I think, in the 20th century, right?
00:05:08.160She's sort of a defining figure of 19th century feminism, but died, in fact, I don't know exactly when, but like in the aughts, right?
00:05:16.920Died 1902, so a little less than 20 years before women's suffrage was actually achieved, right?
00:05:23.800So, yeah, Stanton is best known for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first organized convention relating to women's rights in American history.
00:05:33.260She is known for demanding the vote for women at that convention, which was really out there at the time.
00:05:39.340Even the like more militant advocates for women's rights, which was sort of like bubbling up as an idea, particularly like in the abolitionist movement and in like various radical and reform movements in 19th century U.S.
00:05:51.400Even the people who were like pretty on the far revolutionary vanguard of that movement did not women have the right to vote. That was crazy. And so she really had to bring people along there and persuade it. And it was 72 years before it actually happened.
00:06:06.060So we talk about the women's suffrage movement. I think people imagine that this was an idea that's like Alice Paul had in like 1915. And then they got it basically five years later. And that's just not true. Right. It was a 72 year long struggle that had a ton of internal contradiction and fights. It had victories and defeats. It would come to prominence and then be rejected.
00:06:30.400and then a new generation of activists would take it up again.
00:06:33.300It was a really, really, really long fight.
00:06:36.840And the other thing, of course, is that she's engaging in this fight
00:06:39.740at a time when the expansion of the franchise sort of was part of what people
00:06:44.880sort of thought of as historic progress.
00:06:46.420That is to say, across Western democracies or among Western countries,
00:06:50.920the range of people who were able to vote throughout the 19th century
00:06:56.600In the United States, obviously, the most important step in that0.97
00:06:59.640were the Reconstruction Amendments and the enfranchisement of black men.0.76
00:07:03.460But similar things did take place in other countries.
00:07:05.960And then the question of, like, how women related to that expansion0.99
00:07:09.060also enmeshed the fight for a woman's right to vote
00:07:12.380with all these other social questions, right?0.66
00:07:15.200Like extension of franchises into the working classes, etc., etc.
00:07:18.460Yeah, and this was interesting because, as you mentioned, Adrienne,
00:07:21.660the franchise was being expanded both in the U.S. and in other Western countries,
00:07:26.480but it had never been expanded to women.
00:07:28.000Like, even the Jacobins of the French Revolution did not entertain this as a serious possibility, right?
00:07:34.120So you have all of these Enlightenment ideas talking about, like, individual rights and the dignity of humanity and what it means for government to be just.0.89
00:07:43.560And there's this glaring, or there's several glaring emissions and hypocrisies in that project, and one of them is the exclusion of women, right?0.88
00:07:52.400This untenable reality that women are, like, evidently, if you know any, men's equals in intellect and dignity, right?
00:08:23.760She died thinking that she had failed.
00:08:26.720And she also had, as I think many lives have in retrospect, sort of a confrontation with history in the aftermath of the Civil War, in the Reconstruction era, which is a moment when in America, the notion of what a United States was going to look like after slavery and without the institution of slavery was really very much in question.
00:08:49.620And Stanton was absolutely outraged that the Reconstruction amendments did not grant the vote to women.
00:08:58.860It sort of gets pop historicized as she opposed the extension of the franchise to Black men.
00:09:06.120What she wanted was what she called universal suffrage.0.99
00:09:09.100Her line was votes for all or votes for none.1.00
00:09:11.300So she wanted to leverage the political moment of Reconstruction to try and get both Black and women's suffrage into the Constitution, and she failed.
00:09:22.400And as she was failing, she took comfort in hierarchy and started expressing her rage and resentment at that failure in slur-laden, extremely condescending, wildly racist terms.
00:09:39.580Wow. And that is now her legacy. That's what she's known for. Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:43.760So when you talk to these younger feminists, when you read their books, like a bunch of these books came out in the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Stanton gets posited as the origin point for mainstream feminism sins of exclusion and like recapitulation of other hierarchies. Right.1.00
00:10:03.700She's like a cautionary tale of what happens when feminism is insufficiently tempered with other commitments or becomes too animating a force in a woman's intellectual life.1.00
00:10:14.040And they posit Santan is patient zero of mainstream American feminism's racism.
00:10:20.220So you'll hear this argument that she and her activist partner, Susan B. Anthony, are like symbols of all of feminism's sins.0.82
00:10:29.780So Kyla Shuler, who is the author of, like, The Trouble with White Women, one of the most prominent of a bunch of these, like, post-2020 leftist books on feminist racism, says that Stanton, like, invented white feminism.
00:11:03.960And later in life, she also frankly had some kind of weird ideas about gender too.
00:11:09.420She became like weirdly essentialist about like women's nature and women's impulses in this way that feels like a sincere departure from what she was doing earlier in her life.
00:11:20.000And I find it like weird to square with her ongoing commitments to women's liberation.
00:11:26.900Frankly, she used a lot of different slurs for a lot of different groups of people.
00:11:30.620In addition to harboring a clear sense of, like, her own personal superiority to Black men, especially, like, formerly enslaved Black men, she spoke disparagingly of Chinese people, of German people, and also of the Irish.
00:11:44.720Oh, so she would not have been a fan of this podcast, yeah.
00:11:47.320Yeah, I was like, oh, we are also going to catch strays in this.
00:11:50.260She actually really, really hated the Irish for reasons that we're going to get into.
00:12:35.200And her ideas about citizenship and the franchise and what they meant, towards the end of her life, those really were shaped by the sense of like wounded narcissistic supremacy.
00:12:47.000What I kind of want to push back on, though, is what I sometimes think can be a tendency to flatten these characters from the feminist past by making them into symbols of all the rifts and disaffections and failures within feminism.
00:13:01.320I think that can tend to obscure some of the specifics of who these women were, of what they were responding to in their own time, of what shaped their thinking both for good and for ill.
00:13:14.340Because when we identify somebody like Stanton as a boogeyman for like everything that's ever gone wrong within feminism, we set her apart from us.1.00
00:13:23.460We make her this like monstrous stand in for these like evil forces.0.64
00:13:27.940And I think when we look at her more closely as a real person, we can see her less as, like, this cartoonishly evil monster and more as somebody who is made intellectually weak by her experiences and her character flaws.
00:13:41.280And that, I think, is where the lessons are.
00:13:43.320I think the lessons of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's story are how, like, very, like, human flaws can lead to some really, like, disproportionate responses and actions.
00:13:54.760And that's like the more disturbing and challenging exercise, because that's how we see Stanton not just as this like evil figure of a bad past or like a kind of feminism that we can shun, but as somebody whose flaws might remind us a bit of our own.
00:14:09.320And then she's more of a warning that way.0.81
00:14:17.620As you said, Adrienne, Stanton is best known as one half of a pair.
00:14:22.020So she partnered with Susan B. Anthony, and together, the two of them were the most visible and prominent American advocates for women's rights in the 19th century.
00:14:32.160She sort of enters, I feel like, into most U.S. history textbooks with Seneca Falls.
00:14:49.060And that is when Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized a convention in the town where she was living in, which sounded like western New York by the Finger Lakes.
00:15:21.000No, but like seriously, people were like, we can't go there.
00:15:24.160And she had to work to get the crowd on her side.
00:15:27.920And that gathering got publicized in newspapers back when there were newspapers all around the country and actually set off this firestorm of women's rights meetings.
00:15:38.120So it was like a really influential moment, even in its own time.
00:15:42.500It's not something where we look back retrospectively and are like, oh, that actually was the beginning of something crazy.
00:15:47.400At the time, it set off this big firestorm.
00:15:49.840Just for my own sort of inner timeline, how many months was it before Caitlin Flanagan published Has the Seneca Falls Manifesto Gone Too Far?
00:16:02.900The moment the telegraph arrived in Brooklyn, she was like, hello, Atlantic?
00:16:08.780There's been a thing happening, and I think I can write an article about how it's gone too far.
00:16:13.480Right, so she was already having success in 1848.
00:16:16.020She set off this, like, first wave of women's rights activism.
00:16:21.440But she becomes a lot more famous and a lot more effective, frankly, as a political strategist when she meets Susan B. Anthony three years later.
00:16:30.060because Susan B. Anthony is going to lend Stanton's passion and vision
00:16:34.720this, like, real intense discipline and organizational prowess.
00:16:38.520So they're remembered together, but their pairing was really asymmetrical.
00:16:44.120Elizabeth Cady Stanton was about five years older than Susan B. Anthony0.85
00:19:03.680She had had, like, a mental health crisis as a teenager, like, Who Among Us.0.53
00:19:07.880And the object of that had been this, like, paranoid fantasy that she was going to go to hell for being a sinner.0.62
00:19:13.640And so she emerges on the other side of that at the end of her adolescence and is like, religion is bad for me and I think it's bad for all women.0.57
00:19:19.980So she's not, as some of her peers are doing, like the Grim K sisters or Lucretia Mott, like, really operating in, like, a Quaker tradition.0.75
00:19:28.620She is like a purely secular thinker, and she's reading Enlightenment political philosophers.
00:19:34.700So she comes up through a lot of abolitionism.
00:19:37.240And maybe for our listeners that are not from the United States, when Moira is sort of drawing the distinction to the Quakers, that would be the classic abolitionist who is deeply humanistic, but is deeply humanistic out of a religious impulse.
00:19:50.400It's an abolitionism that is founded in natural law traditions around the dignity of every human being.
00:19:59.640No, Stanton is coming from a different set of beliefs.
00:20:03.360And she really understands herself to be elaborating upon and like taking to the logical conclusion the secular thinkers of the American and French revolutions.
00:20:12.880her mother was from this like very old Dutch New York family and her ancestors on that side had
00:20:20.420fought in the American Revolution which wasn't like that long ago you know it's like it's in
00:20:25.160living memory for these people there's like old people around who fought in the revolution or
00:20:29.900witnessed the revolution and so the principles of that war and the rhetoric of that war and the
00:20:36.660sort of ideals of this very young country are still at the front of people's minds and Stanton
00:20:41.280is really using that rhetoric for her own ends. And Susan B. Anthony is just not on that level,
00:20:47.160right? Like she was a really good administrator. She was really good at organizing people,
00:20:52.700Susan B. Anthony was. She was good at getting them to keep their promises and imposing like
00:20:57.040organizational discipline. She was not good at like writing speeches or like thinking through0.92
00:21:02.440the implications of a new demand. So Susan B. Anthony really thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
00:21:38.660And biographers talk about her remarkably intact ego, which really does set her apart from other women of her age.0.98
00:21:46.580Like, other women didn't act like this.
00:21:47.940She was conspicuous in her confidence.
00:21:51.640And that really was accompanied by this, like, lifelong sense of purpose and destiny that Stanton had.
00:21:59.460And also, she seems to have been pretty unimpressed with just about everybody else, like, especially the activists and intellectuals of her era.
00:22:05.480It's not just that she thinks she's a genius.1.00
00:22:08.560She sees herself as a genius surrounded by idiots.1.00
00:22:21.280But so the other thing that's interesting here is that the psychological structure you're describing and the liberalism sort of are of one piece.
00:22:28.660What I mean by that is in advocating for women's suffrage in the 19th century, there were two objections to it.
00:22:34.940One had to do with the supposed natural inferiority of women.
00:22:38.260The other had to do with the fact that women already do vote through the paterfamilias,1.00
00:22:42.520through the unit of the household.0.99
00:22:44.060And that's in itself a deeply illiberal or anti-liberal understanding of society.
00:22:50.760It's saying there are parts of society where not everyone's equal
00:22:53.660and where there are these organically grown things.
00:22:56.160And the family, being all about biology, is one of those.
00:22:59.840And her kind of anti-social streak goes very nicely with the rejection of that,
00:23:04.160with saying, hey, no, like, you know, a man cannot express the view of the household the way
00:23:10.800some Enlightenment thinkers thought and a lot of 19th century thinkers thought. No, that guy might
00:23:15.240be a complete jabroni. They both need to be able to vote. And so already, I think you're queuing
00:23:20.700into how her psychological makeup and her politics really challenge the dogmatic understanding of the
00:23:28.160family and of the state at the time that often enough, even people who we would think of today
00:23:32.800as sort of arguing from a feminist perspective would share.
00:23:36.000Yeah, and I think that something you have to understand about Stanton1.00
00:23:38.520is that she did not have, as some people still have,
00:23:44.180that sense of like a curtain drawn around private life, right?
00:23:48.040She had a fundamental sense of human rights,
00:23:51.000like what we would now call human rights.
00:23:52.560It like sort of precedes social configuration or ordering.0.99
00:23:56.120And she saw the family as a tool of tyranny.
00:24:02.460She was a person who had a lot of profound experiences witnessing the injustice that is meted out upon women in the so-called private sphere where there is no law and so the strong rule, right?
00:24:19.120So, like, we talked about her, like, disdain for the Irish a little earlier. Part of what happened was that when she moved to Seneca Falls in her, like, youngish adulthood, she was living on this street where there were a lot of, like, Irish immigrant families.
00:24:33.900And she witnessed these, you know, Irish men get drunk and beat the shit out of their wives. Like she saw that happening. And she saw these women, her neighbors, these immigrant women, who would be left alone with no education, no ability to work really, and then tons of kids to take care of.0.97
00:24:53.100While their husbands just abandoned them, right? So this acute awareness of the dependence of women in marriage and the vulnerabilities that that dependence created was extrapolated in her mind to the condition of women's citizenship, right?
00:25:09.480Like, we actually need individual rights recognized and enforced by the state for people to have basic safety and dignity.
00:25:16.720And that's not something where she was, like, willing to concede a difference in the marital realm or the family realm.
00:25:25.160And that makes her even more radical than somebody like Betty Friedan 120 years later.
00:25:31.180So the idea that the privacy of the home or of the marriage is kind of a trick of patriarchy, though, Margaret Fuller does that too, right?
00:25:39.240woman in the 19th century. So this is an idea that's around and often, I think, is sort of
00:25:45.000informed not so much by Enlightenment philosophy, but really by kind of emerging communist and
00:25:50.460socialist theorizing. Is there any of that in her background? Did she read a sort of social
00:25:55.860utopianism or did she read early socialist literature? Yeah, she seems to have been
00:26:01.160really influenced actually by her cousin Garrett. And this might be a good time to turn to Garrett
00:26:08.880Smith. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is born in 1815 in Johnstown, New York, sort of upstate New York.
00:26:16.900She is one of many, many daughters born to Daniel Cady. Have you ever heard of this guy?
00:26:23.540No. Daniel Cady was a very famous New York State jurist. He was a judge for a long time.
00:26:29.620He was briefly in the House of Representatives, like Nepo baby, right? Like she is the daughter0.98
00:26:35.380of a wealthy father and he was working as a lawyer during her childhood this is kind of like a famous
00:26:41.020story where this woman comes to their house to talk to stanton's father and she's like look i
00:26:50.320managed to get some paid work i saved up a lot of my own money and i bought myself a house
00:26:56.160and my husband just died and in his well he left my house to his brother oh wow who now wants me
00:27:06.680to move out and this house that i bought with my own money i have no legal rights to because i'm a
00:27:11.860woman and i was married and i cannot hold property so like legally now this house has been stolen out
00:27:17.340from under me because of the coverture law right the the status of women and young elizabeth who's
00:27:25.440like 10 ish at the time overhears her dad telling this woman who's come to visit like i'm sorry
00:27:31.780there's nothing i can do for you this is what the law says and young elizabeth little baby girl
00:27:37.780elizabeth marches into her father's office goes to one of his statute books finds this statute0.99
00:27:44.320in the book that says that women's property belongs to their husbands and cuts it out or0.94
00:27:50.340moves to cut it out before he comes in and tells her she's not allowed to do that nice so it's like
00:27:55.440early feminist consciousness and early, like, alertness to the injustice of legal misogyny.
00:28:01.820It's also a really formative relationship that Stanton has with her father. Her father is an
00:28:08.000intellectual. He's a respected man. He has a job that as a woman, she is not able to be eligible
00:28:14.220for. Like, she just cannot get the education to practice law or minutes in the bar to practice1.00
00:28:20.540law or the ability to stand for election. These things that this man she really admires is able
00:28:25.400to do. And also, she can't make him think of her as serious. So throughout her childhood,
00:28:33.980Elizabeth's father is telling her that she's really smart. It's true. He's right. She is very
00:28:37.780smart, right? He's also telling her all the time that it doesn't matter. Oh, wow. His recurring
00:28:43.240line to her is, I wish you'd been born a boy because you're so smart. This guy has a bunch
00:28:47.900of daughters. Daniel Cady does. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's mother basically goes to bed
00:28:52.960during her childhood and is overcome with depression and just basically never gets up
00:28:57.200again. She gave birth 11 times and six of those kids died. Oh, God. Five when they were very,
00:29:04.120very young, like infancy. And then the sixth, the only son to survive childhood was this boy,
00:29:10.960Eliezer. And he died when he was 20, which is when Elizabeth was 11. And the mom just kind of
00:29:17.820like never got up again right so the mom is like depressed out of the picture but elizabeth goes
00:29:23.600into her father who's like looking over her dead brother's body in the living room and she's like
00:29:27.900i will be for you everything that a son would have been i will live up to all the expectations
00:29:34.760you put in my brother i will be good enough and he's like no you can't do that oh man she never
00:29:40.000gets her father's approval by the way she grows up and becomes this activist and he's like what
00:29:44.140are you doing it's just like absolute tragic failure to fulfill this inheritance and like
00:29:52.900restore the wounded parents right she cannot do it and that said when she's growing up like her0.88
00:30:01.400dad is a judge and a congressman her mom is sort of like debilitated by depression her primary0.74
00:30:07.500caregiver is a man named Peter Tebout, who is Black. And Peter Tebout was almost certainly
00:30:15.220enslaved. So in the 1820 census that was taken when Elizabeth was five, her father is listed
00:30:23.940as enslaving two people and of having a free Black child living in his home, right? So he's
00:30:30.260listed as enslaving one Black man, one Black woman, and then is living also in his household,0.96
00:34:55.140She talks about like crying, listening to this woman talk about her experiences of sexual violence.
00:35:00.360She understands that as a woman, she's implicated.
00:35:03.120And this is how she describes it, right?
00:35:04.780She's like, the enslaved are women, they are vulnerable as women in a way similar to how I am vulnerable, and therefore I have an obligation to them.
00:35:12.240At the same time, what's making her vulnerable in upstate New York, which at this point no longer has slavery, is of course are the fugitive slave laws and that kind of stuff. So you also get the sense that like, you know, this isn't about personal morality. This is about how to change a government. This is something that is a problem that comes from the federal government at that point in the United States, and that can only be addressed through that.
00:35:36.880So this is an interesting point you make because she marries a guy pretty soon thereafter, like within a year of this encounter in the attic.
00:35:43.500She gets married to a guy named Henry Stanton.0.99
00:35:46.380And Elizabeth's father fucking hates this guy.0.99
00:36:00.800Whomstam on them has not been thrown out of the—
00:36:03.260Well, I guess you don't get thrown out.0.98
00:36:04.580You have to be real corrupt to get thrown out of—I mean, that's George Santos shit, but the slogan should be, New York politicians, don't ask where the pool came from.0.99
00:36:14.280This is like 20 years after they got married.0.99
00:36:16.220He had this job at a custom house, and they caught him taking bribes.
00:36:19.400And he was like, I thought that was the point of having a job at a custom house is you take bribes to let stuff in that shouldn't come in.
00:36:24.340But then, like, when he got caught, he threw their oldest son under the bus.
00:36:27.620He was like, my son who was working for me, it was him who did it.1.00
00:36:29.980And you're like, this fucking asshole.1.00
00:36:31.700For the last couple decades of their lives, he and Elizabeth will live separately, and Elizabeth becomes this, like, great advocate for divorce reform.
00:36:40.720She, like, forwards every article, like, by the way.
00:36:45.840But, like, he's there, right? He's, like, a friend of Cousin Garrett's. He's, at the time, an abolitionist speaker. He has no source of income, and it pisses off her dad that he's an abolitionist.
00:36:56.000Her father, the slaveholder, you'll be shocked to learn, is not an abolitionist.
00:36:59.720But Elizabeth really risks her family and her inheritance and consigns herself to what she thinks is going to be a life of permanent poverty to marry this guy.
00:37:09.280Largely because he promises her that if they get married, he will take her to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
00:37:20.440Ladies, have you ever gotten married for a free trip?
00:37:22.740because elizabeth gets married to this guy so that she can travel with him1.00
00:37:29.420to london to this global abolitionist conference with abolitionists from the uk from the u.s
00:37:38.760a couple people from france a couple people from the west indies like they're all gathering in
00:37:43.680london in 1840 in the summer and elizabeth really wants to be there and two things happen
00:37:50.280at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London,
00:37:53.920where Elizabeth goes on her honeymoon.
00:39:23.420So at the London conference, all of these American women have been elected as delegates by the American abolitionist groups that they already lead, right?
00:39:33.220They've saved up money or had to raise money in a lot of cases.
00:41:38.200This is also the sect that wants to include women, by the way.0.99
00:41:42.640Elizabeth Cady Stanton's husband, Henry, is the leader of a group that, like, now gets shorthanded as the politicos, who were like, that's stupid, actually.0.98
00:41:53.480You can't kumbaya yourself into the end of a system that is making people rich.0.89
00:42:01.220What you have to do is use the levers, the existing levers of power, to try and move policy towards your desired goal.
00:42:09.220It might be obvious from the way I'm discussing these people who I think was right in this.
00:42:14.600Yeah, speaking of which, Maura, happy Confederate Surrender Day.
00:42:18.380We're recording this on April 9th.1.00
00:42:21.880You lost. Well, now you run the government, but you'll lose again. You rose again and you will lose again.
00:42:29.180So Elizabeth is like really torn. On the one hand, she really admires the Garrisonians for their principled gender inclusion.
00:42:37.860But on the other hand, she thinks that their theory of change is bullshit and it's not going to work.0.82
00:42:42.960And what you need to do is the hard political work of organizing people and not this like sort of, you know, handholdy moral suasion argument.0.98
00:44:05.780They're living in Boston just briefly, just for a couple of years at the beginning of their marriage.
00:44:10.000And when she's there, that's when Elizabeth Cady Stanton meets what's going to be one of her best friends for a long time, Frederick Douglass.
00:44:17.680I was going to ask, her I'm smarter than everyone policy must have had a Frederick Douglass exemption, right?0.99
00:44:30.200She thought he was like a unique genius, right?
00:44:32.820So the way she thought she was better than everybody, she thought she had found somebody who, like her, was marked by destiny and, like, meant to change the course of the nation and the course of history.
00:44:46.400When she met Frederick Douglass, like, got to hand it to her.
00:44:51.140Do you want to, like, gloss for anybody who doesn't know just, like, the basics of Frederick Douglass?
00:44:54.620Yes. So Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in the early 19th century, escaped to Maryland in the 1830s, and essentially then became one of the great promoters of the abolitionist cause, mostly, I think, in New York and New England, and was, yeah, was just, I mean, you're welcome to pull up any of his speeches.
00:45:20.440they are phenomenal. He really was able to bring it. Wrote, I believe, no less than three memoirs.
00:45:27.960Is that right? Yes. He wrote a bunch of memoirs. His first one is the best. If you're going to
00:45:32.340read any of them, the first one is his best. But he, yeah, he escaped. He was born into slavery,
00:45:37.640taught himself to read as a child, basically by like bribing these boys who were working with him
00:45:44.260at the docks in Baltimore to teach him to read. And he marries a free Black woman in Baltimore,
00:45:50.560and she helps him escape north to freedom, where he sets about becoming a public intellectual.
00:45:57.500And he settles first in Boston, but then like Stanton, he moves to like Western New York. So
00:46:02.380he settles in Rochester, which is like 20 miles away from Seneca Falls. Not too, too far, way less
00:46:09.040far now than it was then. But they meet in Boston. And the thing about Frederick Douglass is when he
00:46:14.880comes north and he encounters white abolitionists in the north, he is really disappointed by how
00:46:21.620racist they are. So for our purposes, we do a lot of shorthanding of the abolitionists as the good
00:46:26.900guys. But it is perfectly possible and was perfectly possible then to have a personal
00:46:35.800investment in white supremacy and racism and still think slavery was egregious.
00:46:51.940And he writes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she is like the least racist white person0.98
00:46:56.600he's ever met, which like, oh, poor Frederick.
00:47:00.440You're going to have to set back that counter in a little bit, buddy.
00:47:03.420But he says she has uncommon contempt for racial prejudice. So at this point in her life, she's in her 20s, like later 20s at this point. And she's a really radical committed abolitionist. She is invested in intra-abolitionist frischers, and she is forming her own political philosophy in response to what's going on within the abolitionist movement.
00:47:26.320and she is evincing a sort of personal disdain for anti-Black racism
00:47:31.980that is manifested at least on one level in her relationship with Frederick Douglass,
00:48:22.180I think that's a really tempting metaphor to buy into.
00:48:25.720Again, I'm going to ask us to try and see them as people here rather than symbols, but that's almost an impossible ask with figures of this much significance.
00:48:37.840She moves to Seneca Falls where her dad, like, owns a house that he kind of gives them because her husband's not really good at making money.
00:50:07.980It starts when in the course of human events.
00:50:10.020It has, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, right?
00:50:18.160She's very, very deliberately evoking this tradition.
00:50:23.260I'm going to read just a little bit of this.
00:50:24.920She says, the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
00:50:35.280To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
00:50:38.640He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.0.91
00:50:44.880He has compelled her to submit to laws, a formation of which she had no voice.
00:50:48.460Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
00:50:56.660He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead.
00:50:59.580He has taken from her all right and property, even to the wages she earns.
00:51:27.860It's usually what you send to a sovereign over you
00:51:30.980before things get choppy, before the guillotine comes out.
00:51:34.820So, like, this is not a petition so much as, like,
00:51:37.660or else. Like, not only does she commit attendees to women's suffrage, but really sort of to the
00:51:45.440revolutionary project. Yeah. And it's maybe because of that militancy, in part, that people
00:51:51.660at Seneca Falls, the actual gathering in the church of a couple hundred people, are really
00:51:57.440iffy on this. Yeah, it's like a third of them signs it, right? Yeah. And you know what persuades
00:52:02.700more of them to come over to her side, is that Frederick Douglass, who has come all the way from
00:52:08.660Rochester to be there, stands up and speaks in favor of it. Elizabeth Keady Stanton becomes a
00:52:13.900much more powerful public speaker later in her political career. But at the time, she's actually
00:52:18.480kind of nervous. Like for somebody who's so confident in her intellectual prowess, she's
00:52:22.820apparently like kind of afraid of public speaking. Oh no. But Douglass is there. He's the only black
00:52:28.360person in attendance, one of very few men in attendance. And he lends his support to women's
00:52:34.240suffrage. And that is what gets the rest of the white women to come on board. So this sets off a0.60
00:52:40.180firestorm, a flurry of women's rights initiatives come forward. She winds up kind of traveling the1.00
00:52:47.320country a lot. She'll testify towards like legal reform, trying to get women property rights.1.00
00:52:52.560Anthony was really pushing her to get, like, women's wages because she was, excuse me, Anthony was really concerned for, like, working women as opposed to those who were just trying to inherit property.
00:53:30.360And the abolitionists are worried that he's going to chicken out and not make it permanent or not extend it to the union.
00:53:39.240So also, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susie B. Anthony have heard that Southern women have formed a pro-slavery organization, Southern white women.
00:53:52.380So they form what is called the National Women's Loyal League, which is meant to petition Lincoln to make emancipation universal and permanent, right?
00:54:04.040And they put up 400,000 signatures for permanent emancipation.
00:54:10.240That's one in about 24 citizens of the U.S. at the time.
00:54:14.320It is a shocking proportion of the population that they get to sign this thing.
00:54:17.820And that really creates the political will to pass the 13th Amendment. This is like one of their biggest first wins.
00:54:26.620And after the Civil War, you get, as we say, this real like heady time when people are thinking about what America is going to be, what a more equal country is going to be like, right?
00:54:42.040Like, okay, we have to take the promises of the Declaration seriously enough at least to not have slavery anymore, right?
00:54:52.100How far are we going to carry that thought?
00:54:57.220In 1866, she and Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association, which is designed to push for universal suffrage for Black people and for women.0.99
00:55:08.280And that's the votes for all, votes for none.0.71
00:55:10.120Votes for all or votes for none, right? It is a position that is, I gotta say, really unpopular.
00:55:18.900Yeah. Well, precisely because so much abolitionism comes out of church traditions which, you know, hold up the family and hold up essentially the unequal gender system that sustains it, right?
00:55:31.840Well, I mean, this isn't just within abolitionism. This is everywhere.
00:55:35.480At this point in 1866, Stanton has been advocating for women's suffrage and a broad array of other women's rights issues for like 18 years.
00:55:46.440But that doesn't mean that most people are on her side.
00:55:50.440Women's suffrage remains a fringe movement for which there is not a lot of political support, including among women, right?
00:56:22.380And among other things, it's really hard for her to get funding.
00:56:25.320So these abolitionist organizations that would normally participate in fundraising for these
00:56:29.680kind of campaigns are not giving her money. They're like, no, we think your women's suffrage0.70
00:56:36.460plank is actually going to sabotage the black male suffrage plank, or we just don't like it.0.87
00:56:42.880We think you're going too far. And this is when she meets a guy named George Train. Have you ever0.50
00:56:49.660heard of George Train? I have not. George Train is a aptly named railroad entrepreneur.
00:56:55.540Oh, right. He's the one who funded the revolution. Yes.
00:56:58.700Yes. He's kind of like a 19th century Elon Musk. He's a really weird guy. He's got like these kind of esoteric, nonsensical set of political commitments. Like for one thing, he's really, really super racist. He is always saying in public that he thinks black people are not as smart as other people.
00:57:15.580So like not a egalitarian guy, but he believes very strongly in an independent Ireland for some reason and women's suffrage.0.96
00:57:27.300Does he have a very mobile right arm?1.00
00:57:30.940He reminds me a lot of Elon Musk because he's also really vulgar and annoying and saying stupid shit in public.1.00
00:57:38.320And he's always doing this weird stunts like trying to circumnavigate the globe and getting sick.1.00
00:57:42.940So everybody finds him really annoying and cringe.
00:57:45.580And they don't like him. They don't trust him. But Elizabeth and Anthony start taking his money because they're like, we'll take money from anybody who will help us do this.
00:57:55.520And the other thing you have to understand at this point is that male suffrage, like black male suffrage, has a clear political valence. That is a winner for the new Republican Party, right?
00:58:08.280The Republican Party really wants black male suffrage for that reason, not just a principled reason, but also because they think it's going to benefit them electorally, right?
00:58:18.140Nobody knows what women's suffrage would do politically.1.00
00:58:21.560That's just doubling the electorate.1.00
00:58:24.560And nobody knows how it's going to shake out or how it's going to function in a partisan fashion.
00:58:29.480The theories we have about women voters and how they differ from male voters and how they understand their own interests, none of that exists yet.
00:58:35.680So nobody's like, oh, a lot of more women voters, like women voters will be good for X party or women voters will be good for X cause.
00:58:43.560So people are really, really wary about that just in self-interested reasons.
00:58:47.720Yeah. Plus, I mean, their sexism might tell them, and I mean, realism, too, that abusive husbands could, of course, use that to just vote twice.
00:58:59.700It doubles every constituency that you might be trying to make some calculation about as a politician now has twice as many votes.
00:59:07.840Which is why the history of women's suffrage in the late 19th century, of course, is one of these kind of piecemeal victories where it's often stuff like, oh, you can vote in local elections.
00:59:57.260Yeah. So she's taking money from this guy, George Train, who's funding her to like go campaign for these two ballot initiatives in Kansas, where it's like women's right to vote in one initiative and black men's right to vote in another initiative or like on the basis of sex in one and on the basis of race in the other.
01:00:19.220and she had wanted them to just be one ballot initiative and then the local people had split
01:00:24.340them and like one theory for like the anti-women's rights campaign at this point was like oh we can
01:00:31.460use the women's rights initiative to make black men's suffrage look less radical right and like
01:00:36.980people will vote down women and then vote in black men to the franchise that doesn't work in kansas
01:00:43.140they both get voted down but he's funding that and then he funds her like substack basically her1.00
01:00:48.820newsletter called The Revolution. But basically, she's already pissing off a lot of her old0.90
01:00:55.000allies in the abolitionist movement by trying to tie women's suffrage to black men's suffrage.
01:01:00.440They're like, you're making us look bad. You're asking us to do something there's not actually
01:01:03.920political will to do. We feel like you're risking our political movement. And her universal suffrage
01:01:11.960association, the American Equal Rights Association, has this big showdown over two of its annual
01:01:18.360meetings, first in 1868 and then in 1869, where the membership is basically exploding in anger
01:01:27.880at Stanton and Anthony for this position. So at the 1868 meeting, Frederick Douglass shows up
01:01:34.080and he gives this whole big speech about how like black men need the vote more than women do
01:01:38.400because women are not killed for being women. And then like the crowd of mostly women has to like
01:01:44.680correct him. Like, no, actually, we're murdered for being women all the time. It's like kind of
01:01:48.920a weird L for Frederick Douglass. But he has his position, right? He's like, I think we need to do
01:01:53.920what's politically feasible. I mean, I'm guessing what Douglass fails to grasp there is that like
01:01:58.240violence against black men in the 1860s in the Reconstruction South is like super public,
01:02:05.080super violent terrorist attacks. And he probably thought of anti-women violence as happening inside
01:02:11.580the home being private and, like, you know, an altercation between married partners.
01:02:16.340We once again get into this whole, like, public-private distinction that he accepts and that she does not, right?
01:02:21.800Right. Also, Frederick Douglass, famously not a very good husband.
01:02:25.200So around this time, he's also, like, moved his white mistress into the house with his black wife,0.68
01:02:32.620and his wife doesn't know how to read, and, like, he never teaches her,0.66
01:02:36.520and he's, like, very clearly carrying on with all these white abolitionist women, including, like, one from Germany.
01:02:41.580who he literally moves into her house.
01:02:43.620Frederick Douglass's children were so pissed at him
01:02:45.760for the way that he treated their mother, actually.
01:04:49.760So this is when Stanton is absolutely at her nadir of my sympathy, right?
01:04:57.020She is absolutely as gracious as she's going to get right now.
01:04:59.880So she starts giving tours and, like, committee testimony on this issue where she is contrasting the dignity of educated upper-class white women like her.
01:05:10.540Remember, she comes from, like, you know, an American revolutionary family.0.99
01:05:15.300And she's contrasting that with, like, the ignorant male masses who she does not want integrated into the franchise ahead of her.0.54
01:05:22.540She goes – I'm quoting her here.0.99
01:05:24.640American women of wealth, education, virtue, and refinement.1.00
01:05:27.260If you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters, demand that women, too, shall be represented in government.0.98
01:05:38.780That sounds to me like European anti-Muslim racism of today, right?0.99
01:05:44.600Like, look, these immigrants are culturally backward and we need to exclude them.0.98
01:05:50.380This is kind of also the beginning of the anxieties about immigration that shaped so much of the racism and the sexism of the late 19th century, which are all about like, oh, they're not ready for democracy and therefore we have to exclude them from it.1.00
01:06:03.700Also, the advent of abortion bans comes from this panic in the 1860s over the influx of mostly Catholic immigrants from other parts of Europe who are, like, outbreeding the Protestant natives, right?
01:06:17.560This sense that, like, these people are coming and that's scary is also very much used to oppress women.
01:06:25.040Like the justification for this Du Bois biography was that she discovered some letters by Elizabeth Cady Stanton that have bearing on her reproductive rights politics.0.81
01:06:36.480Because Stanton and really specifically Anthony have been used as these puppets by the anti-abortion movement who like to claim that they were anti-abortion.
01:06:44.900And then Du Bois found these letters from Elizabeth Cady Stanton being like, infanticide is not that bad in context.
01:07:06.140So one question I had was like, what do black women think about this?
01:07:11.240Because something really annoying about the story of this debate is that everybody's talking as if women and black people are two separate categories.
01:07:22.340Well, Stanton has that one line where she's like, do you think all the black people are men? And that's like, it's kind of a gotcha, right? It's like kind of this rhetorical cudgel. And very few people are really thinking about what it would mean for black women to have a full citizenship, what it would mean for the rights and privileges of citizenship to overcome like both of these structures, as they are deployed simultaneously in the lives of like this, like quite large, at this point, section of women.
01:07:49.920And the truth is that black women don't all agree with each other either.0.79
01:07:54.060So there's Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who's a very famous abolitionist and poet at this time.0.98
01:07:59.300She's a freeborn black woman from Baltimore.
01:08:02.060And she is in the American Equal Rights Association at this time.0.64
01:08:06.320She's like one of the few black women who has an officer role.
01:08:09.480And she's like very much against Stanton on this.0.72
01:08:12.720She says, when is a question of race, I let the lesser question of sex go.
01:08:16.340But then against the Jordan R-Truth, a friend of Stanton's and a women's rights activist and a formerly enslaved black woman also from upstate New York, she's taking Stanton's side.0.74
01:08:26.240She says if colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women and it will be just as bad as it was before.
01:08:35.340So you have some people being like we need to do what is politically feasible and some people being like that will create more problems.
01:08:42.520And you have some people being like, I am getting at what is this public question of racial dignity, and I will deal with sex later. And then you have some people being like, actually, the private sphere will continue to oppress us in ways that we can't get over.
01:08:57.740I feel like the way it worked out has like vindicated the pro-black male suffrage crowd, right?
01:09:05.940Because we know that women get the right to vote a few decades after this.
01:10:23.740Neither of them is accomplishing anything. It's a real moment of like backlash and dissolution and alienation for this women's rights struggle that had been so flourishing and had so much potential when Stanton was young.
01:10:36.720And, like, I think this is the lesson of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It's like, what do you do with political disappointment? Which I think a lot of us have plenty of right now, right? It's like, what do you do with defeat? What do you do with all your anger when an injustice is ignored and the people you thought were your allies disappoint you, right?
01:11:01.260One thing to do with that, I think, is to get angry at everybody.
01:11:07.140And the other thing to do with that is to try and have a commitment to what's right that is greater than your own sense of woundedness at what's wrong.
01:11:17.880And I think that's where Stanton failed.
01:11:19.920And that's where I think we can use her most productively as a cautionary tale.
01:11:30.980This woman is fucking batshit, dude. I get so mad at her. And then also she's so brilliant. I think the Declaration of Sentiments is actually a really beautiful and incendiary document. And then it's nuts that that comes out of the same mouth as he's like racial slur-filled diatribes just like two decades later. And I think it's really sad.1.00
01:11:55.040I mean, I think you're right the way you framed it in closing, right? That it is a question of how to deal with, right, you have a sense of how history is supposed to go. And then the narcissistic wound that comes from the world not moving in that direction. And like, the way we hold up under that pressure, that pressure is real, that disappointment is real, that hurt is real. The way we deal with it is where we're tested and where we sort of prove ourselves, it seems to me.
01:12:20.660Yeah. So hang in there, guys. Don't go racist when you don't get your way. And thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.