American Lit

145

“The New Woman” Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) along with Lucretia Mott and several

others met in Seneca Falls, New York, to draft the first public protest against

women’s political, social, and economic oppression. Included in this “Declaration

of Sentiments” was the demand for the right to vote, a cause to which Stanton

would devote her life, becoming the first president of the National American

Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890 at the age of seventy-five. But

Stanton went further than fighting for the franchise. She denounced the Bible

and most clergymen for fostering contempt for women and, with a women’s com-

mittee, published feminist biblical commentaries. The Woman’s Bible appeared

in 1895. 1

The Stanton article reprinted here originally appeared in the November 30,

1899, issue of the Independent (New York) as a reply to former Kansas senator

John J. Ingalls’s attack on women’s claims to equal rights. The article was later

published by the Woman’s Standard (1886–1911), the monthly newspaper of the

Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, based in Des Moines. Mary Jane Whitely

Coggeshall, whom Carrie Chapman Catt called “the Mother of Woman Suffrage

in Iowa,” served as its first editor.2

The masculine and feminine forces in social life are like the positive and negative electricity, the centripetal and centrifugal forces in the material world.

Now suppose it were possible for us to suspend the equilibrium of these forces for one-half hour; the result would be material chaos.

Oceans and lands, planets, suns, moons and stars, leaving their boundaries and elliptics, would rush into one conglomerate mass. Fortunately, no man has the power to precipitate such a collapse.

Woman’s Standard, Jan. 1901.

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The present confusion in our social life, the corruption in politics, the dissen- sions in the church, the divisions in the home, the antagonisms in the world of work, are all the result of the masculine and feminine forces being thrown out of their equilibrium. The uprising of woman is nature’s effort to restore this equilib- rium of sex, which, for a true civilization, must ultimately be attained.

Churchmen and statesmen, presidents and professors, may all sharpen up their pens for their pronounciamentos against the “new woman”; they may denounce her on the platform, and in legislative halls, but nature, in her onward march, will leave them all as helpless as Dame Partington in beating back the Atlantic Ocean.3

There cannot be, in the nature of things, any real rivalry and antagonism between men and women. Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters are bound together by the most tender sentiment, in most cases.

The great moving passion in the world is love, and mother-love in freedom binds all humanity together.

You might as well talk of rivalry between positive and negative electricity as between the masculine and feminine elements. Senator Ingalls complains that we are not alike! It is a blessed thing for the race that we are not: in our differences we supplement each other. And because the sexes are different, one is not necessarily inferior to the other.

Is woman necessarily inferior to man because she could not give the world a Socrates, a Plato, a La Place, a Shakespeare, and Goethe and Scott? Or is the mother necessarily inferior to her sons because she has not produced a system of philosophy, of mathematics and astronomy, great tragedies and comedies, or the Waverly novels?

Are the brave deeds and courage of the soldier on the battle field more admirable than the tender ministrations of woman to the wounded and dying, supporting the weary head, and penning the last messages of love to the dear ones far away?

Difference does not argue disability. Nature knew what she was about when she made man and woman to differ: if the masculine and feminine elements, the posi- tive and negative electricity, the centripetal and centrifugal forces, were alike, in the order of creation, they would have been of no use whatever.