Religion, Suffrage, and the Complexities of Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Host David Myers welcomes historian Ellen DuBois to discuss her recently published book about the life, legacy, and contradictions of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Ellen emphasizes Stanton’s central role in launching the women’s suffrage movement alongside Susan B. Anthony and her enduring relevance to modern debates over women’s rights, religion, and democracy. Ellen explores Stanton’s partnerships with Anthony and Frederick Douglass, her disappointment during Reconstruction when women were excluded from expanded voting rights, and her increasingly controversial critiques of organized Christianity through works like The Woman's Bible. The conversation also confronts Stanton’s racist and nativist rhetoric, with Ellen examining how her elite class background and the prejudices of 19th-century America shaped some of her most troubling views. Ellen argues that Stanton’s vision of women’s equality, bodily autonomy, and expanded democracy remains deeply connected to present-day political struggles over issues such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, conservative Christian activism, and modern “household voting” proposals.

Dr. Ellen DuBois is a Distinguished Research Professor of United States History at UCLA. Ellen earned her B.A. in History from Wellesley and her PhD from Northwestern University. She taught at the University at Buffalo before joining the UCLA faculty until her retirement in 2017. She has published many works, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life (Hachette 2026), Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote (Simon & Schuster 2020), Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America 1848–1869 (Cornell 1999), and Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (Yale 1997) which won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association. 

Transcript

Narrator 0:11

Welcome to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Lutzkin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Hello, this is David Myers, host of today's episode of the History Politics Podcast. I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Helen Du Bois, distinguished research professor at UCLA and renowned scholar of U.S. and international women's history. Professor Du Bois is the author of a number of major works over the course of her prolific career, ranging from Freedom and Suffrage in 1978 to Suffrage, Women's Long Battle for the Vote, 2020. Most recently, she has published a new biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the well-known and controversial leader of the American women's movement in the latter half of the 19th century. Our conversation with Ellen Du Bois focuses on this new book, her motivations for writing it, the challenges of capturing Stanton's character, and where the women's movement stands today, a century after the passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for women in the United States. Welcome to the podcast, Ellen.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Thank you. Great to be with you, David.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

So, um, Ellen, we have a number of major of my biographies that have been written about Elizabeth Cady Stanton over um the years. Why did you decide to write a new one?

SPEAKER_02 1:54

A couple reasons. One is uh I've been living with this woman since I was in graduate school, and I thought it was time for me to I I've written a biography about her daughter. She's uh surfaced in most of my books about the history of women and women's politics. Uh, and I thought it was time uh as I near the years that she wrote her autobiography to uh write a biography of her. Um uh above and beyond that. Uh I the biographies of her uh have some of them are very good, but they have some limitations. They don't really deal a lot with the last 25 years of her life, which are very interesting. Um they uh don't profit from the collection of her documents that uh has been done over the last two years uh with, by I might add, federal support. And uh finally uh well, two related issues. One is that she's been somewhat canceled of late uh because of uh racist language she used in very heated moments, uh particularly uh in the midst of Reconstruction, having to do with uh enfranchising black men but not enfranchising women. And then on the other hand, so much about what she has has to say, including why it's important for women to vote, but also, for instance, the issue of her last years, uh the impact of uh uh conservative Christian uh theology and uh hierarchy on American politics. These are oh, and finally, of course, women's autonomy of their bodies. Um all of these remain extremely uh uh current issues. And so much about the history of woman suffrage with which she's rightly identified, uh treats it as something in the past done and finished. And uh I think that that's uh a misstatement of who she is, and above all, it um it leads, it makes for a uh it leads us to ignore what she has to contribute to contemporary life.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

So there's a lot in what you've just said in that opening answer, and I want to go back to the very beginning um when you noted that uh you wrote this biography around the time that she wrote her autobiography and ask you about your own sense of self-identity, your own sense of identification with uh the subject of uh this piece of work. Um, and more generally about a biographer's sense of identification with the with the object of research. So how do you in particular relate to her? I mean, what is your um connection, feeling, sensibility toward and about Elizabeth Cady Stanton? And how has it changed over the course of your writing the book?

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Yes, it has. Well, I'll start with the end, which is doing a full biography, living for four years with everything you can find out about the person, uh uh sort of temp in my case, uh I still admire her greatly, uh, but it has tempered my identification with her. You might say it makes sense. The more I learn of who she is, the more I um appreciate who she is in her own sense rather than my projection of her.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

How did she come to her fierce commitment to women's equality? Um, what in her background helps us understand uh how she became who she became?

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Well, I guess I would say two things. One is um the accident of her birth. She was just, there is no way around it. She was born with a tremendous intelligence, curiosity, capacity to learn, uh, all of which uh uh made her uh eager and capable of going out of the domestic life and into uh public life. Um secondly, crucially, uh she met in her in uh 1851, that was in her uh late 30s, um Susan B. Anthony, who became her um partner. Uh her uh there's actually few partnerships in American political history that come that even begin to equal this in terms of its length and its intimacy. And uh while Elizabeth was busy raising seven children, she had seven children, uh, and uh Susan remained single all her life and was dedicated uh to uh she was an organizer. And so Elizabeth says that if it hadn't been for Susan, she describes herself with with uh uh humorous humility as being uh satisfied to sit in her armchair and read novels all the time. Uh but Susan transformed Elizabeth's sense of her own individual uh capacity and dare I say superiority to an identification with women as a whole. And it's that that made her a feminist, not her own sense of her capacity, but her identification with women of all sorts.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

Yeah, I mean her relationship with Susan B. Anthony points to the complexity of her personality, um, as does her relationship to another towering figure in 19th century U.S. history, Frederick Douglass. Uh, these two relationships are anchors of the book and tell us a lot about uh about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I wonder if you can sort of unpack some of the complexity of the partnership that you described with Susan B. Anthony. They they weren't always on the same page as I described. And then we'll get to Frederick Douglass. But if you could help us understand the complexity of this character, who seems both uh intriguing and flawed, um, and in some cases even tragic, um especially in her interpersonal challenges, shall we say, most significantly exemplified um in her relationship with Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. But maybe you can start with talking about the complexity of the relationship with with Susan B. Anthony.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

Okay, I just want to correct one thing. Uh she uh she was a deliberately charming person. And actually, uh uh I don't think many people, uh, despite her um exceptional qualities, uh, most people were sort of charmed by her. And she that was a very deliberate uh use of her capacity. So that's what I'll say. And I'll come back especially to Douglas, which is a very interesting relationship. As for Susan, uh in the uh, let's say first part of their relationship, uh, between the year when they met and the end of the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction, which is the period that most biographies concentrate on, they were, with uh little bit of an exception, uh, of one mind. And that mind was, and what they agreed with was that uh as uh the United States had gone through uh a terrible trial and had survived uh, moreover, uh to be able to take steps forward in its uh democracy, um they really believed and hoped that this would be a kind of revolutionary moment, in some ways it was, and a revolutionary moment that included everybody, included women.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

So let me just let me if I could just pause so that we understand. The great uh challenge you're referring to was the challenge of slavery and overcoming slavery through emancipation for enslaved peoples.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

Well, also the uh civil war, the division of war.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

And the civil war, yeah.

unknown 10:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Yeah, maybe we can identify talk about identification. Uh yes, the civil war, the the uh uh uh uh almost avert uh uh uh the danger of the collapse of the country, and certainly uh had the South one of its becoming something very different than the founders had hoped. Um so what happened was that um for reasons both uh moral and political, the leading party, the radical party, left radical party, progressive party, the Republicans, very different from our Republican Party, uh led in the um in the passage and ratification of three constitutional amendments, which changed Americ the American Constitution for the better. Uh up to that time there had been very little change in the Constitution. There had been the Bill of Rights, which was at the time of the passage of the Constitution, and two other sort of uh uh technical changes. But these were changes that really affected the nature of American democracy. And it's very interesting that Elizabeth and Susan were so committed to all this that when the country was facing, and the Republican Party was facing the first of these, the 13th Amendment, which constitutionally forbade slavery, it was they who turned this into the first public campaign for a constitutional amendment, and a public campaign that was focused on the signatures of women sent to Congress. Uh thus, when the next amendments came, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, which uh expanded the franchise, they expected, hoped, believed that uh the expansion of the right to vote would include all adult citizens. And uh when it was limited to black men, black men, uh, and didn't include women, black or white, um uh and other and had other limitations, but let's just focus on that one. They were, I think it's fair to say, heartbroken together. Uh Elizabeth has um, who is a great uh great wordsmith, talks about how the degree of her wrath, her anger, she says, and the way she says it is she says, I regret all the mittens I knitted, I regret all the knees that I fixed. Uh she had of her seven children, five were sons. Um and uh she loved them all. But anyhow, uh she was, they were both really enraged. Now, if we move further ahead in their lives together, um they uh in the last 25 years of their lives together, they both die in the early 20th century. Um, as the suffrage movement was growing and on the verge of becoming the mass movement that it was to become in the 20th century, they had very different attitudes towards it. Susan's goal was to make the biggest tent possible. She just wanted votes for women. Elizabeth really cared about how women would use their votes and had originally, uh, when she had begun her campaign for suffrage, assumed, believed that uh uh the votes of women would add to Americans democracy and commitment to rights for all. And in the late 19th century, uh those two ambitions diverged. And that the suffra the woman's suffrage movement grew, uh, but it grew in a more conservative direction. And Susan and Elizabeth, um their their uh political attitudes and commitments diverged.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

But they remained so who in who in that partnership was the conservative one? And maybe more generally, um, how would you how would you assess the division of labor between them in advancing the cause? Who did what well?

SPEAKER_02 15:17

Uh well, in in the terms that I'm using, Susan was the more conservative one. Um and let me add a detail here that I'll come back to. One of the ways that the suffrage movement was becoming more conservative, was that it had begun to embrace uh a broadswath of religious Christian women who came into the suffrage movement through the Women's Christian Temperance Union. And these women, led by a tremendously creative and charismatic woman political leader, um uh became important forces in pressing the United States to constitutionalize Christianity. And it came closer to happening then than it ever had, although it's coming back to us. And this terrified Elizabeth. And Susan thought it was a secondary matter to the fact that women would be able to vote.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Um okay. Uh I want to maybe just pause here at that point um and talk about um uh Elizabeth's attitude toward rel toward organized religion, uh, which was a troubled one. Um and yet um she one of the important literary works um that she labored on was a woman's bible. Um so if you could tell us a little bit about uh how she worked through her own deep ambivalence about Christianity and its role in retarding and and preventing um uh women's equality.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

Democracy.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

And democracy.

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

But uh women's subordination in particular, if I understand correctly.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Yes, women's subordination. Uh let me uh uh underline something that you did. You started by talking about her attitude towards religion, and then you switched to talking about her attitude toward Christianity. And I go even further. She grew up uh in the 19th century, the United States was still an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. And it was Protestantism, especially Orthodox Protestantism, which she had grown up in, that she which was very powerful and which she most feared. Um when she uh there are throughout her life there is an occasional uh Jewish character of some great foresight and and uh and uh liberalism that was very important to her. And when she was exposed in France to Catholicism, she was very taken with the Mariolatry and the uh role of women, uh the nuns, the the fact that there were sisterhoods of women with importance. Um okay, the woman's Bible. She'd had the beginnings of this idea for a long time. I mean, in fact, I would say that her um suspicion uh and rejection of uh of religious orthodoxy was the longest-running uh uh theme of her life. Uh in the uh 80s, uh, when uh, as I said, the suffrage movement was beginning to move forward, and more importantly, uh she was spending a lot of her time in England with her daughter and was exposed to ideas that she wouldn't have been exposed to in the United States. She began to conceptualize the idea of writing a, I'm gonna call this a concordance about the Bible. Actually, Jefferson had done the same thing. A concordance means that she was interested in commentary about the Bible. So people thought, oh my God, this is a Bible by women or about women. It wasn't a Bible, it was a set of uh commentaries. And uh, but it was controversial enough that it got her excommunicated, I think it's a good word to use, from the movement that she had formed. And to go back to your uh earlier question, uh even though uh Susan uh had nowhere near this thought that Liz Elizabeth's campaign about religious orthodoxy was a mistake, she defended her uh to the utmost, trying to keep the movement from rejecting her. In this, she failed. Uh, and as a result, um those of us that when we think about the women's suffrage movement, most of us think solely about Susan P. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton has uh faded from public memory, which to go to your first question is why I wanted to write this book.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Okay. Um so we've covered uh a good bit of her relationship with uh with Susan B. Anthony, her partner in the quest for women's suffrage. Um the other major relationship that uh captures the reader's attention is that with Frederick Douglass, uh who was a presence at uh meetings, um, conventions on behalf of women's suffrage from an early stage and um had uh his own quite complicated relationship with uh Elizabeth Stanton. So could you unpack that for us?

SPEAKER_02 20:47

Well, before I do that, I just want to say uh when I was uh uh promoting the book, I went to Rochester and I went to the cemetery there. And both Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass are buried there. There are uh uh there's a bit of a trick that people make, sort of uh it's very moving. Okay. Um you could say that Frederick Douglass was uh uh involved in uh uh uh a supporter of, a believer in uh women's equal political rights from the beginning of the movement. He was there at the uh original convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, and is usually credited with his support of the Elizabeth's call for women's votes with turning the campaign, turning the convention in favor of uh woman suffrage. And then all the way up to his death uh in 1893, he was still active, uh, I would say, most consistently of all the male uh abolitionists of the period. Now, to go to her relationship. With him. On the one hand, she credited him always and repeatedly with the support that had launched the suffrage movement. And he, for his turn, credited her. He said he met her when he was just out of slavery. And he what the way he described uh the way they met is that she um she took him, this is not the right quite the right word, but she took him seriously and importantly enough that she began to teach him about women's equality. And uh he credits her with uh the way that she um politically and intellectually respected him. Um I would add to that, and this goes to the final thing I want to say. I think she recognized she's she saw herself as uh as a superior person. That's the only way to put it.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

Um by virtue of her race?

SPEAKER_02 23:04

No, by virtue of her intelligence, her capacity. Now, uh I I'll come back to the race part, but she recognized in Douglas a person who had the same distinction, the same extraordinary character. And this shows up in uh an episode that I was happy to give attention to. In the 80s, uh 1880s, Douglas, his first wife, a black woman, having died, he marries again, and he marries a white woman. And black and white uh commentators both were repulsed by this. This is sort of the high point of a belief in the uh uh uh impact of miscegenation on uh uh the terrible impact on on the race, the human race, and on uh the the progeny. And um she wrote a letter defending his right to marry whom he who who he individually thought was best for him. She was unable to, despite her her uh distinction and her uh prominence, she was unable to get the letter uh published. And so she sent it to him, and he said, he thanked her for it, and he said, I knew this is what you thought, I knew this is what you would say. The um just to pick this other point up, uh in the in the cover letter that she wrote, she says something like, the idea of men so below you in intelligence and capacity, have the gall to tell you what you can do with your life and who you can marry, is appalling. And she says, I have had that experience all my life. And so, despite the fact that they were born, she was born from a wealthy and distinguished family, despite that, and he was born into slavery, there was a great identification between the two of them.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

And I think they differed over the 15th Amendment, uh, if I'm not mistaken. Well, they differed over the strategy of whether one must proceed first full throttle with suffrage for black men, um, and then take up the battle for women's suffrage, or whether they should be lumped together as Katie, as Elizabeth Katie Stanton insisted. That was a difference between them, no?

SPEAKER_02 25:40

Yes. Um uh it was not uh it was uh he insisted on that given what was happening to former slaves in the uh late 1860s, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, uh riots, race riots, etc. And she says at one point, he says at one point, uh when women are hung from lampposts, they will have the same uh claim on the vote as black people. And then somebody says, I don't know if it's Elizabeth or Susan, someone says, is it not the case that there are women who, you know, that these are women as well as men? And then he returns and says, yeah, but because they're black, not because they're women. But I want to say that uh Susan and Elizabeth uh wanted to have, it's not just they wanted to have women, white and black women lump with black men, but that they wanted to have a fundamental change in the enfranchisement. They wanted the enfranchisement to be linked to citizenship, not to race and not to gender. Uh and they wanted it to be under the control of the federal government, unlike uh my God, we're certainly uh experiencing this now under the control of the states. And they lost uh both of those uh wishes. Uh so I think it's important to say that uh although there was uh racial animus that rose up in this time, there was also a question of a capacious understanding of constitutional change.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

So you've just described certain um sort of tactical, strategic, political differences. We've just talked about that. Um but there was also a kind of temperamental uh change that um Elizabeth Cady Stanton undergoes, um, underwent, um, that became the source of controversy and then some measure, considerable measure of contempt for her. Um, you mentioned her cancellation. And I'm referring to um language that she began to use at a certain point in her uh in her life that was quite demeaning towards particularly black men. Um and I wonder if you can explain how that, how and when that comes about.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Well, I'm I'm glad you brought me back to this point. Yeah. You are talking about the uh the underside, as it were, of this moment that I've been describing. And uh in this period, uh in a combination of her rage and her calculation of political forces at work, uh, for um several years, not a long time, she began to use language like she talked about Sambo, which was already a slur for black men. And she repeatedly said something like, Why should uh the uh um this is interesting because she was contrasting black women and white women, she says, why should the daughters of boot blacks and and and and uh barbers or and farm workers be the equivalent of the daughters of the founding fathers? Uh and she thought of herself that way. She was actually the granddaughter of a revolutionary uh leader. Um and uh Douglas says uh he particularly calls out that kind of language. Um and he says the daughters of book blacks are equal to the daughters of the founding fathers. Um I just want to add that that uh when uh when the rights to vote of black men are undone as they are starting in the mid-1870s, um she and and that and that brings black men back to the same position of disfranchisement as women, um she drops that language, but she picks it up and that attitude, um, but she picks it up again in the very last years of her life when the uh beginning of the incoming of mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe uh just begins to disturb her terror terribly. And she lives in uh New York and she talks about seeing the masses of steerage people come off uh and and off the boats. And it was the case, I don't know if you noticed, uh one of the city councilwomen in uh in LA began to talk about non-citizens voting in municipal elections. Well, that had happened a lot. Uh uh non-citizens voted at various places in the country in the 19th century. So um it was already the case that these immigrant uh men were voting even uh before they without being naturalized. But she very much uses so instead of Sambo, she talks about uh uh Hans and in other words, German and Pedro.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

And uh she uses how do you, as her biographer, who sat with her for so long, um understand, assess, and contextualize those racist and nativist sentiments and uh quite explicit uh expressions um in sort of taking stock of the the woman as a whole.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

I have to say, of all the challenges I put before myself, the ability to really understand where those attitudes came from, I've never been quite satisfied with my answer. A friend of mine who works in the same period talks about the racism of American society was so substantial that she taught, he, this friend of mine talks about her marinating. That's the word he used, marinating in these attitudes. I would also say what we do know is she was more forthright in publicly in expressing this than she was in holding these attitudes. Um we have every reason to think that there were other uh uh uh inheritors of the abolitionist movement who uh harbored similar feelings, but had no reason or ability to bring them to the public. Uh I don't know if you think, I think some people think that I have uh excused her for that. Oh, I guess I would add one other thing, which is um she was from a very distinguished uh background, both from her mother's side, she was a Livingston, which was one of the first families of New York, and her father was a very distinguished uh lawyer, judge, member of Congress. And so she had come from a situation of she was uh from one of the first families in her hometown of Johnstown, New York. So this sense of superiority uh probably had a lot to do with her family. And the reason that it hits us is because it's so much at odds with her other political beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

Yeah. I mean, to me, it seems like so much of that animist as it's or whatever one describes that uh that uh derogatory language really issued from um actually her class status that you've just described. I mean that uh that lofty station from which she came, that she was she clung to. I mean, when she talked about her superiority, it wasn't just her intelligence. It it seemed to come from a sense that uh she was of a lofty status by by birth. Um, and in some sense, she never lost that sense. And of course, it met up with sort of that undercurrent of uh racialist and racist sensibility in in U.S. history in the 19th century. But uh at least that's how I understood it uh through the lens that you very um skillfully put before us. Um you conclude the book uh very interestingly with a comment from your fellow Baltimorean, uh Tanahasi Coates, um, who says the following um I think of Stanton and Anthony misstepping, but always pushing, always agitating, always expanding. And I feel a strong kinship. I don't feel my personal pantheon to be clean, but I need it to be filled with with warriors. As always, I invite the professionals to fill in the gaps, both in terms of actual facts and context. So maybe you can reflect a bit on that, and then we'll turn our attention to how we understand the legacy uh of Anthony um and and Staten moving forward.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

Well, these were his opinions probably in the 90s or early 21st century. He was uh he was writing a review of uh Chris Stanzel's book on feminism. And uh 2019. That's from 2019. 2019, that review, yeah. Oh, well, good. Um because I don't know, you know, he's undergone a lot of changes, and uh I don't know if he would still sign on to those ideas. I I did write to him and I said I wanted to quote this, and I had enough of a connection with him that I think he got my letter, and he didn't reject, he allowed me to quote, he didn't he didn't forbid me from quoting it. So uh uh I have so much respect for him. Maybe he's my Douglas. Uh um I read both of his autobiographies, very interesting. Um, okay, so uh you wanted to talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Well, I mean what he speaks to is the flaws. Um, but the flaws is not being altogether disabling and uh his ability to appreciate. And it seems like that's what you're attempting to do. So maybe now you can sort of in the in in the wake of of Coates' own assessment, um, offer your kind of summation of where you think she belongs in um in the path towards uh women's suffrage and the quest for equal rights in the United States. How do you assess her significance?

SPEAKER_02 36:40

Um well, as an as an as a founder, um her signific her significance was crucial. She was the one to introduce the issue of rights, uh political rights for women, uh, and to uh, along with uh others, create an active political movement on behalf of women's rights uh that had at its center and increasingly at its center the right to vote. Uh she could not have known when uh she began this quest that because of the Civil War, uh the issue of enfranchisement would re rise to this to this height of American politics. When she began, uh, the right to vote was a matter for states to deal with. And in the Reconstruction years, uh it became a federal matter. Of course, the 15th Amendment and then the 19th Amendment are the only parts of the Constitution that address the expansion of voting. Actually, the Constitution has very little to say about voting. Um the other thing I would say about her is I would like to have helped her um be recovered because her contribution is so broad and so diverse. And her idea about the relationship of women's political rights is connected on the one hand to uh a full human rights of women, especially uh she emphasized their rights to bodily autonomy, and on the other hand, to the flourishing and expansion of American democracy. Uh, both of those issues are hardly in the past. Um I'll just give you one sort of episode. Uh in uh in the uh anniversary of the 19th Amendment, uh President Trump, searching for some way to connect himself to this movement, um learned or was told that Susan B. Anthony had been arrested for trying to vote in uh uh 1872. And he uh announced that he was going to pardon her. Uh she was actually found guilty of a federal crime.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

And uh I was like, Stanton did not join her in that, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 39:11

No, she did not. Stanton didn't she wasn't somebody who liked to uh help, she was uh unqualified in her words, but she she was a judge's daughter. She didn't like to act against the law openly. Later, uh, in the when they were living together in the 80s, she did vote, but it wasn't a public issue like that. And uh I was gonna say uh Susan B. People said Susan B. Anthony is turning over in her grave for being pardoned. Being arrested for voting was one of the high points of her life.

unknown 39:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 39:49

So let's in fact turn our attention to uh the present um and um focus in particular on um, well, you mentioned two areas of concern for uh for Stanton, reproductive rights and and and um uh and women's equality. Um It seemed once upon a time that the arc of women's rights was bending inexorably towards equality, uh, but that's no longer the case. And I wonder how you, as uh an astute observer of uh the recent past would would uh chart uh the sort of uh um directionality of that arc. Um when did things begin to move significantly away from the trajectory that Stanton and Anthony had set in motion? Um when do you think we really began to uh uh revert to um uh principles that were at odds with their vision?

SPEAKER_02 40:50

Um okay, that's a complicated question. Um I would say that the movement for women's rights has had its, has moved forward and has stalled and has moved backwards over and over again in the um almost 200, more than 200 years that uh we can trace it in American history. Um the other hand, we have never had a uh we've had presidents who were not supporters of women's rights. It would be interesting to realize that one of these was Woodrow Wilson, um, who was a good old Southerner and didn't think women uh should be politically active. Uh, but we've never before had a president uh and um and a movement behind him uh so committed to um uh to restraining women to how shall I say this? Because it's not just about women's rights, it's about their personhood in the world that we live in. Um and um I never, I never thought Roe would be overturned. Uh so I was dismayed to say the least. Um But I do not believe that these setbacks, I remain convinced that these setbacks will be reversed. I think of feminism as a movement that not only never ends, but I think of it, I often use the metaphor of a horizon, that women's equality or women's full humanity is the horizon to which we approach. And every time we think we've gotten to the horizon, it recedes. So, for instance, in the exact period in which women's right to vote is being secured, um the birth control movement rises, which takes the issue of women's rights in a new direction, in a more personal and embodied direction. And is possible because women have now made gains politically. Also, you know, women are in terms of economics and education, there's no turning back. And there's really, look, I could be as surprised as I was about Roe, but I I'm gonna dig a hole and go into it if somehow they figure out a way to undo uh uh women's right to vote. But it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen because women's votes benefit both parties.

SPEAKER_00 43:32

Yeah, I mean, just thinking of the the sort of the lay of the land over the last um spell, um, it's important to recall that these developments, including the reversal of Roe, um, are not solely the function of the election of Donald Trump. There's a very powerful um particularly religious Christian movement um that has been active um in various guises for decades, for a half a century. I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Which is one of the capitals of a Catholic-inspired pro-life movement that has been enormously uh powerful and effective. Uh, there's obviously a very large Christian evangelical uh political movement that has um been uh a major uh driver of opposition to Roe. Uh and also now, very tellingly, uh, of a movement to um institutionalize something called household voting, um, where, based on a certain reading of uh biblical patriarchal principles, only the head of household should be allowed to vote. Um, and women should accept their subordination to the head of the household. Uh, this is something that has been developing in certain Christian circles of late, which would seem to violate everything that Elizabeth Cady Stanton said.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

Yeah, I want to say a couple things about that. Uh, first of all, I'm really glad you brought that in. To me, her attitudes towards uh the uh intersection between uh conservative, reactionary um Christianity and American politics is in the end as important to us as anything she did. When she put these issues forward uh at the end of the 19th century, uh they sort of landed with a dud. Um the younger generation, the generation of her daughters, was no longer so interested in religion. And it seemed like it had passed. But now we realize that she was not too late, she was too early because these still surface. Just want to add one other thing. They can do all they want to try to institute household voting, but you know what is it? I'm gonna make up a number. A third, a half of American families are led by women. So they're gonna have to be a little more explicit.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

Uh I think this movement is going to be as explicit as possible. Yeah, I think this movement is as explicit as as you could imagine, and making clear by household, by head of household, they mean um unmistakably men. Um but um and it it's a movement that's that's gaining traction. Um, but your view is that ultimately um women's vote votes matter to all involved in the political process, and that will be determinative. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Yes, yes. And you know, uh it's interesting to watch Trump's um uh um uh decisions and actions with respect to women in his administration. On the one hand, there are fair number, there have been a fair number of them as long as they have blonde hair and enough uh plastic surgery to uh meet his standards. Um on the other hand, as he's been uh getting rid of uh disloyal people, uh women uh show up as disloyal a lot faster than men do. And uh so far, all of the, I think it's true, maybe I've missed somebody. All of the uh uh cabinet officers dismissed have been women.

SPEAKER_00 47:08

Okay, just a final thought uh to sort of wrap uh wrap uh up this this podcast and bring us full circle. Um what do you think Elizabeth Katie Stanton uh teaches us today?

SPEAKER_02 47:21

Well, I would say that um she remains uh an inspiration to me for the fact that the spirit and and uh life of uh the movement for women's equality, I'll call it feminism, continues to be alive and will continue to be alive. I think having been unleashed on humanity, there's no putting it back in the lipstick case.

SPEAKER_00 47:49

Ellen Du Bois, author of the new biography, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, A Revolutionary Life. Thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

David, you're a wonderful interviewer. Thank you.

Narrator 48:01

Thank you, thank you for listening to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, luskincenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Rosalind Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichmann. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.