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Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays
More than one hundred years after her death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stands—along with her close friend Susan B. Anthony—as the major icon of the struggle for women’s suffrage. In spite of this celebrity, Stanton’s intellectual contributions have been largely overshadowed by the focus on her political activities, and she is yet to be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the nineteenth century.
Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton’s thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women’s subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton’s numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton’s own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton’s views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition.
Barbara Caine, Richard Cándida Smith, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Kathi Kern, Michele Mitchell, and Christine Stansell.
Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton’s thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women’s subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton’s numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton’s own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton’s views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition.
Barbara Caine, Richard Cándida Smith, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Kathi Kern, Michele Mitchell, and Christine Stansell.
- GenresHistory
328 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2007
22 people want to read
About the author
Ellen Carol DuBois
94 books16 followersEllen Carol Dubois is a distinguished professor of history and gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her bachelor's degree at Wellesley in 1968 and her Ph.D. from Northwestern in 1975.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 27, 2022
The title of the book I finished drives me crazy: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker. I recognize the editors’ goal of exposing Stanton as more than a protester, but Stanton deserves better. She was an intellectual juggernaut who used her words, written and spoken, to question authorities and traditions about why American women in her time weren’t allowed to vote. And she was complicated (as we all are); she was full of contradictions and changed her thinking over her lifetime.
The greatest contradiction in her efforts was more of a nuanced argument. Yes, Stanton argued against the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. That’s the one that prevents state and national governments from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. However, it did not extend suffrage to anyone who didn’t share basic characteristics with the people who could vote at that time. In other words, black men who met all the other requirements for voting at a given polling place were able to vote, but women were not. Stanton was disgusted that more men were granted suffrage before women; she wanted all adults to be granted suffrage simultaneously. She knew that language mattered, and invoked racial terms in the attempt to enfranchise all, but that choice seems to have backfired because of the economic deafness of the white upperclass men who governed from the legislature and the pulpit.
The book has two sections: a collection of essays written by scholars about Stanton and a collection of Stanton’s essays and speeches. Both sections are useful in understanding this leader in women’s and human rights who was ahead of her time in many ways (and still would be ahead of her time today on some topics).
I was most surprised by and engaged with Stanton’s arguments regarding marriage and women’s rights. She advocated for divorce as a way to improve the rate of loving, mutually beneficial unions and eliminate women’s subordination, which too often led to legal prostitution, to use her term, broken families, and death. She also argued that until women had the right to refuse their husbands sexually, wives could never truly consent. She was sharing these arguments of power differentials and privilege in the 1800s, arguments that remain relevant today.
This book is dense. It is intellectually engaging but also difficult at times (in both sections). Don’t bring it poolside, but if you are interested in this juggernaut of human rights, it’s a great starting point.
The greatest contradiction in her efforts was more of a nuanced argument. Yes, Stanton argued against the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. That’s the one that prevents state and national governments from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. However, it did not extend suffrage to anyone who didn’t share basic characteristics with the people who could vote at that time. In other words, black men who met all the other requirements for voting at a given polling place were able to vote, but women were not. Stanton was disgusted that more men were granted suffrage before women; she wanted all adults to be granted suffrage simultaneously. She knew that language mattered, and invoked racial terms in the attempt to enfranchise all, but that choice seems to have backfired because of the economic deafness of the white upperclass men who governed from the legislature and the pulpit.
The book has two sections: a collection of essays written by scholars about Stanton and a collection of Stanton’s essays and speeches. Both sections are useful in understanding this leader in women’s and human rights who was ahead of her time in many ways (and still would be ahead of her time today on some topics).
I was most surprised by and engaged with Stanton’s arguments regarding marriage and women’s rights. She advocated for divorce as a way to improve the rate of loving, mutually beneficial unions and eliminate women’s subordination, which too often led to legal prostitution, to use her term, broken families, and death. She also argued that until women had the right to refuse their husbands sexually, wives could never truly consent. She was sharing these arguments of power differentials and privilege in the 1800s, arguments that remain relevant today.
This book is dense. It is intellectually engaging but also difficult at times (in both sections). Don’t bring it poolside, but if you are interested in this juggernaut of human rights, it’s a great starting point.
March 15, 2023
Interesting collection of essays by and about one of the most prominent feminists in American history. Stanton's life work centered around challenging the three institutions responsible for women's inequality: citizenship, marriage, and religion. She believed that women's responsibilities as mothers, bread-winners, and both protectors and defenders of children make her morally and intellectually superior to men and should raise women up as teachers and rulers of men.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews