Raising “Our Girls”

This chapter addresses Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s feminist views on maternal custody and parenting. She advocated granting legal rights of child custody to mothers in the event of separation or divorce. Stanton challenged the separate spheres ideology and argued for women to work in paid employment as well as to have pecuniary and social power in the home. To bring about this transformation of gender roles, Stanton articulated feminist parenting ideals of reconstructing gender by raising the next generation of boys and girls in equal moral, educational, and social ways. She took this message to the populace in speeches on the Lyceum tour over eleven years. Ultimately, as this chapter concludes, Stanton argued that religious doctrine must be reformed in order to transform the gendered social roles of women and men, as she articulated in the feminist theology of her Woman’s Bible.

The “Incidental Relation” of Mother

This chapter explores Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s views on women’s reproductive rights. It traces the voluntary motherhood movement among women’s rights activists and social reformers, which endorsed women’s singular right to choose sexual relations and procreation. Stanton took this concept a step further, advocating eugenic ideas of enlightened motherhood as a method of birth control. The chapter juxtaposes Stanton’s work for reproductive control against the abortion movement of the latter nineteenth century, which eventually criminalized abortion in all states. Following Stanton’s interest in the trial of Hester Vaughan for infanticide, the chapter reveals how Stanton used the trial to expose gendered inequalities of the law, including women’s exclusion as judges, lawyers, legislators, and jurors.

“Divorce Is Not the Foe of Marriage”

This chapter explores Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s public advocacy of liberal and no-fault divorce. Stanton reframed divorce as a remedy for women and an escape from harmful marriages. Beginning with her work in the temperance movement, Stanton articulated the need for divorce to protect women from domestic violence. Like social purity reformers, she attacked the double social standard that allowed men, but not women, to easily divorce for adultery. Stanton drew on the public obsession with the infamous McFarland versus Richardson trial to illustrate her liberal divorce views to the public. When conservative forces near the turn of the twentieth century proposed a federal marriage amendment restricting divorce, Stanton resurrected her arguments in support of divorce.

“The Pivot of the Marriage Relation”

This chapter delves into Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s critique of marriage and its resulting gender inequality. Contradicting Victorian notions of sentimental marriage, Stanton exposed the way legal and religious marriage, with its headship of man, victimized and subordinated women. She compared women’s treatment in monogamous marriage to polygamy, radically opposing the hypocrisy of the anti-Mormon polygamist movement. Using the metaphors of abolition, Stanton depicted marriage as slavery, decried the duty to obey and take a husband’s name, and sought women’s freedom. She opposed common law marriage and breach-of-promise actions, and supported higher age requirements for marriage. The chapter concludes with Stanton’s reconstructive solutions for marriage, consisting of “free love," legal construct as contract, and economic partnership of full equal rights and autonomy for each partner.

Introduction

This chapter introduces Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the principal feminist thinker and women’s rights leader of the nineteenth century. It summarizes Stanton’s background, her work for suffrage with Susan B. Anthony, and modern backlash against her opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. The chapter discusses Stanton’s complex philosophy of multiple feminisms, including liberal, cultural, and radical thought. It then focuses on Stanton’s work for family equality, integrating her feminist thought into a legal history of the family.

Conclusion

The conclusion reveals how Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s proposed reforms for gender equality in the family were achieved by the late twentieth century. It traces the movements in second-wave feminism and developments in family law, such as no-fault divorce, that came almost sixty years after Stanton. It shows how Stanton’s feminist legacy has been misappropriated, such as by anti-abortion advocates like the group Feminists for Life, who claim Stanton as an arch pro-life advocate. The chapter concludes by showing the persistence of cultural ideals of women’s domestic roles and the resistance to full gender autonomy and equality in the family, which Stanton envisioned.

“What Do You Women Want?”

This chapter traces Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s earliest legal advocacy for marital property rights. It discusses Stanton’s deconstruction and critique of coverture, the law of legal disability and loss of rights for married women. It begins by outlining the women’s rights Declaration of Sentiments and Stanton’s work for reform of married women’s property acts and dower. Then, by exploring property as citizenship right, it identifies Stanton’s constitutional thought on the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.