Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Speech for the Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Stanton had been involved in the cause of abolition since before her marriage; friends she made working for abolition included William Lloyd Garrison, who invited her to address the opening session of the annual American Anti-Slavery Society meeting in New York on May 8, 1860. Delivered to an audience of fifteen hundred, her speech is an attack on slavery and an acknowledgment of the work of abolitionists as well as a statement about the chattel-like status of women.

Stanton discusses how black men have been deprived of their rights, using the graphic example of a black man kidnapped from his home in Africa and noting the consequences of slavery for America: “It has corrupted our churches, our politics,… it has gagged our statesmen.” Stanton then celebrates the actions of Garrison, who had worked against slavery for thirty years, with others battling “a whole nation, Church and State, law and public sentiment, without the shadow of ever wavering, turning or faltering.” Using a biblical reference characteristic of her speeches, Stanton remarks that women are also represented in the fight for abolition as the “Marys and Marthas” who “have gathered round the prophets of our day.”

Stanton continues by stating that Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society is the only one “where the humanity of woman is recognized, and these are the only men who have ever echoed back her cries for justice and equality.” She recalls how in 1840, at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, the British had denied the elected American women delegates a voice since they were not fit, because of their sex, to be delegates. Garrison was to have spoken to the group but refused because the women delegates were not allowed to speak or vote. Stanton's outrage fueled her sense of injustice, which then shifted from the plight of the black slave to that of women. She declares here that the “mission of this Radical Anti-Slavery Movement is not to the African slave alone, but to the slaves of custom, creed and sex, as well.” In discussing how men had denounced slavery, she remarks that those (white) men could take only “an objective view,” since they had not suffered the torments of slaves; while men as a “privileged class can never conceive the feelings of those who are born to contempt, to inferiority, to degradation,” women could. She thus compares the “subjective link” between women and slaves, both being oppressed and victimized.

Stanton shares a conversation she once had with a “reverend gentleman” who did not understand why women felt victimized. In her response to him, she had compared American woman to slaves, “trained up in ignorance of all laws.” Speaking of women as living like slaves, her graphic images of women sold “body and soul, to the highest bidder” confused those who could not tell whether she was speaking of black women or white. Her remarks were valid for both and spoke to women's loss of rights in marriage. Stanton's anger at the complacency of the “reverend gentleman” was reflective of her disgust with organized religion, which condoned the lesser role of women in society. She told them that “the condition of woman in republican, Christian America” is no blessing and, recasting Jesus' words in Matthew 25:40, she states that “whatever is done unto one of the least of these my sisters is done also unto me.”

Stanton supported the antislavery movement and felt that woman's rights would be granted at the end of the Civil War. However, the abolitionists with whom she worked, including Garrison, turned their backs on woman's rights. Although slaves were freed in 1865 and got the vote in 1870, women were not allowed to vote until 1920.