Talk:Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Complicated edit and removal of sentence about infanticide

I will shortly edit the sentence in the "Later years" section that reads "In a view different from many modern feminists, Stanton, who supported birth control and likely used it herself,[83] believed that both the killing of infants and abortion could be considered infanticide,[84][85] a position she discussed in Revolution.[86]". Fixing that sentence requires a lot of explanation because it contains four references.

I will move a modified form of the phrase "who supported birth control and likely used it herself" to the "Marriage and family" section while keeping the original citation. I will delete the remainder of the sentence because all three of its citations are invalid and because no recognized authority on Stanton's life and work says that she equated abortion and infanticide.

Footnote 84, which is about the Hester Vaughn trial, contains nothing at all that supports the idea that Stanton equated abortion and infanticide, as can be seen by following the "blue" link in that footnote. Footnote 85 refers to a non-existent source, as explained in Talk:Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute#Removing citation by Michael Novak. Even if the source existed, Michael Novak could not be cited in support of such a controversial statement because he is not an authority on Stanton.

Footnote 86 refers to an article by Stanton on page 1 of the Feb 5, 1868 issue of The Revolution, presumably the one called "Infanticide and Prostitution", which begins with excerpts of reports from the New York Sun and the New York Tribune about houses of prostitution in New York City and also what amounted to "houses of infanticide", which operated under the guise of boarding houses for unwanted infants. In her article, Stanton said the solution for such problems was the education and enfranchisement of women. The excerpt from the Tribune contained the phrase "the murder of children, either before or after birth", a phrase that has been inaccurately attributed to Stanton both here and in other places to support the claim that she equated abortion and infanticide. The author of the Tribune article is the one who equated abortion and infanticide, not Stanton. Contrary to the sentence being removed, she did not discuss this idea, and she did nothing to indicate that she endorsed it. Here is a link to a scan of that issue of The Revolution: http://digitalcollections.lclark.edu/items/show/9627 The article is in the upper left corner of the first page. Bilpen (talk) 14:34, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

Modern days agendas try to present or twist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony words on abortion for their own purpose. The question is that neither of those who claim she wasn't opposed to abortion can provide a direct quote that shows that any of them supported legal abortion, like modern day pro-choice feminists. In fact the source you provided above [1] tries to distort the fact that Susan B. Anthony includes abortion among a list of "evils". I think we should stick to the NPOV as much as possible while dealing with controversial facts.Mistico Dois (talk) 19:28, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Neither Elizabeth Cady Stanton nor Susan B. Anthony ever stated their views on the legalization of abortion. In a somewhat related issue, Julia Ward Howe charged Stanton with publicly condoning infanticide because she repeatedly called for greater understanding toward women who felt that circumstances left them no choice but to kill their newborn children, but Stanton denied that charge.

It is not true that Anthony listed abortion as an "evil". What actually happened is that in a speech she listed abortion and divorce among the many problems created by the "evil" of alcohol abuse. Later in the speech she vigorously supported legalized divorce, but she didn't make further mention of abortion. Ann Dexter Gordon, the leading expert on Anthony, has clearly stated that Anthony never took a position on abortion.

NPOV means sticking to the facts, and the facts do not support the claim that Stanton and Anthony ever went on record as opposing abortion. The edit on Sept 10, 2019, carefully followed NPOV guidelines. Bilpen (talk) 00:57, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Mistico Dois, Bilpen is correct.

I want to point out that your assertion that people today "twist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony words on abortion for their own purpose" is true. In 1988 everybody who knew about American women's rights history was certain that Anthony and Stanton were dedicated women's rights advocates, especially suffragists, with Stanton engaging more radical positions on other topics. Anthony stuck closely to women's right to vote for the last 50 years of her life, after first campaigning for the abolition of slavery and against alcohol abuse. Neither woman ever said anything in favor of laws against abortion, nor did they say anything in favor of criminalizing abortion. Instead, they were both sympathetic to poverty-stricken women who used abortifacients or killed their newborn infants. Both Anthony and Stanton believed that a woman should be the sole sovereign of her body, that men's laws should not force a woman to bear a child, that a woman should have the right to choose whether to have children or how many children. Stanton was a vocal proponent of contraception, and she probably used contraception herself.

This idea of Stanton and Anthony as radical suffragists began to change in 1989 when Feminists for Life and the Susan B. Anthony List started issuing false interpretations of Stanton and Anthony quotes, as you say, "for their own purpose." Their purpose was to oppose abortion, and if they misrepresented Anthony and Stanton over and over in the media, then people would start to believe them. Binksternet (talk) 02:12, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

This is not a forum. There are many things that can be said about your claims that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others supported the right to abortion, but this is not the right place to do it. I never read anything that she said about abortion being morally acceptable or that it should be done by physicians, in proper conditions, like modern pro-choice feminists say. I really think that what you claim can point clearly to the fact that she believed that the real right to choose done by women, excluded the need to abortions, but this is my POV. I repeat that this is not a forum. There is a clear bias on both sides trying to twist Elizabeth Cady Stanton words for their modern agendas.Mistico Dois (talk) 02:34, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

The twisting of the words was started in 1989 by anti-abortion activists. The only thing that historians and scholars are trying to do now is correct the damage and restore as much of pre-1989 as possible. There was twisting and bias from one side, the pro-lifers, then there was a scramble by the other side to correct history and undo the damage. So both sides are not equally guilty! The pro-lifers started the falsehoods and they are still defending them. If someone says the two sides are both biased then that is a false equivalence, a logical fallacy. Binksternet (talk) 02:55, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Mistico Dois, you seem to have the mistaken idea that people are claiming that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her allies supported legalized abortion. No article in Wikipedia makes that claim, and I have never come across it anywhere else either. As Binksternet points out, the attempts at distorting the historical record comes from the other direction, from some anti-abortion activists who use misattributed and distorted "quotes" to support their inaccurate claim that Stanton and her allies opposed abortion. The fact is that Stanton, Anthony, etc, never went on record as either supporting or opposing legalized abortion. The Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute article does a good job of documenting those distortions and the efforts of historians to set the record straight. Bilpen (talk) 22:55, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Incorrect Link in "Marriage and family" Section

In the "Marriage and family" section of this Wikipedia article on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Weld Stanton is linked to Theodore Dwight Weld, which is incorrect as they are two completely different people. I don't know how to fix this problem but if someone else could, that would be great. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.125.160.220 (talk) 20:53, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

I fixed that link. Thanks for bring it to people's attention.Bilpen (talk) 00:42, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Planned overhaul of article

The current article is not really adequate. The text is sometimes tangled and repetitive, with bits and pieces of some topics (the Woman's Bible, for example) scattered about in different places. The sequence of events is not always right: the material about Stanton's work on the "Woman's Property Bill" is in the "Later Years" section although Stanton was actually quite young at the time. Some significant topics are missing from the article entirely, while there is too much detail about things that aren't significant: does this article really need to include the fact that Stanton's grandfather helped capture Major John Andre during the Revolutionary War?

The major difficulty with improving this article will be fixing the problematic way it deals with the split in the women's movement. This article's current presentation can be outlined like this: 1) Stanton had ideological differences with the women's rights movement and broke from it. 2) Her actions split the movement. 3) The movement eventually reunited despite Stanton's opposition to reunification, and it elected her as president despite the fact that her views didn't change at all.

That's a puzzling sequence of steps. The presentation by mainstream historians, which this article should reflect, goes something like this: 1) Differences within the movement led to the formation of two rival organizations, one led by Lucy Stone and the other by Stanton and Anthony. 2) Stanton and Anthony emerged as the most prominent voices of the movement. 3) The two organizations eventually merged, with Stanton as president.

I have posted an almost-final draft of a proposed rewrite of this article in my workspace at User:Bilpen/sandbox. I will leave it up for a few days for comments before making the edit.

I handled the issue about the split in the movement by dissolving the existing "Ideological divergence with abolitionists and the women's rights movement" section and the "Later years" section into several rewritten and expanded sections. In addition, I am proposing the following specific changes, listed by section name:

Childhood and family background: The material on her father's influence is now covered in the "Education and intellectual development" section. – Dropped the sentence on Major John Andre.

Education and intellectual development: Dropped a sentence about Stanton supposedly speaking at the renaming of the Willard school. What actually happened was that she spoke at the dedication of a new building at the school, which is not a significant event. See Eighty Years and More, pp. 440–441.

Views on religion: Dropped this section after moving the rewritten content of its first paragraph, which is about her childhood experiences with religion, to the preceding "Education and intellectual development" section. The other paragraph in this section is no longer needed because 1) it is repetitive, 2) scholarly research has cast a shadow over the Finney episode, 3) it describes her adult views on religion, which are now covered in the new "Woman's Bible and religious views" section toward the bottom of the rewritten article.

Marriage and family: Removed low priority information. – Made it clear that Harriot was her most prominent child. - Rewrote and moved the Susan B. Anthony material to a new section on Anthony. – Corrected some errors (Henry had a temporary illness, not fragile health; it's a bit of a stretch to describe their marriage as successful; Louisa May Alcott was a child while Stanton lived in Boston and therefore not part of the intellectual circles there).

Early activism in the women's rights movement: Shortened the section name to "Early activism". – Fixed the misattribution of the "thunderbolts" quote, which originated with Stanton, not Anthony. – Shortened the overly-long "general discontent" blockquote and placed it inside a paragraph in the new Seneca Falls section. – Moved some material to newly created sections. – Dropped the paragraph on the Cary sisters because it is unimportant to this article.

Stanton's speech regarding the destructive male: This section consists of a very long quote from one of her speeches. I eliminated this section and used a smaller part of this quote in the new AERA section.

Ideological divergence with abolitionists and the women's rights movement: Dropped the sentence about "triple bondage" of black women because it isn't clear what Stanton was referring to. The dropped sentence contains someone's unsourced guess ("slavery, gender and race"). The quote's context, however, implies that one of those three bondages was that of a tyrannical husband. – Dropped the sentence that says that Sojourner Truth "affiliated herself with Stanton and Anthony's organization". Truth took their side on some issues in 1867 but afterward attended both NWSA and AWSA meetings. – Dropped the sentence speculating that Stanton was partly responsible for laws mandating literacy requirements for voting. Neither of the cited sources (Baker 122-125; Kern 111-112) say this. – Moved text about the "prejudice against color" from a quote box here to inside a paragraph in the new "Married Women's Property Act" section. – Moved material about "The Slave's Appeal" pamphlet to the new "Abolitionist activity" section.

Later years: Dropped the paragraph about Stanton's support for the Spanish-American War because it is not mentioned in either the Griffith, Ginzberg or Baker biographies, an indication that is it not significant. – Removed unsourced material (it apparently derives from "Eighty Years & More", pp. 283–306) about her travels for suffrage in western states. This actually refers to her travels on the lecture circuit, which are now covered in the new "Lecture circuit" section. – Corrected the statement that Woodhull originated the "New Departure" strategy. Actually it was the Miners, and that material is now in the new NWSA section. – Rewrote the material on "The Solitude of Self", using a shorter quote from it that is easier to absorb than the much longer quote that was originally used.

Death, burial, and remembrance: Moved material about her children's college education to the new "Family events" section. I did not remove any of the many entries in this section although I would not object if someone else removed some of the less significant ones.

Writings by Elizabeth Cady Stanton: I dropped this section because it overlaps in practice with the "External links" section and the "Bibliography" section. All her significant writings are available as external links, so I moved much of this section to the "External links" section and provided links as needed. I dropped the list of some of periodicals for which she had written articles and also the list of some of her pamphlets and speeches. The best of those are now either covered in the main body of the article or are in the "External links" section, or both.

Writings about Elizabeth Cady Stanton: I dropped this section because it is sparsely populated and it duplicates the Bibliography section.

Bibliography: Alphabetized as necessary – Dropped unneeded books by Mason, Alpheus Thomas; Renehan, Edward J.; and James, Edward T.

External Links: Renamed the "Collected works of Stanton" section to "Collections of Stanton's works", which more accurately describes its contents. – Updated several links – Dropped the link to the ECS and SBA Papers Project, which has disbanded.

Other online sources: Dropped "Stanton's Family Memorabilia" and "Manhattan Women's Historical Sites", which have broken links and don't appear to be significant anyway.

Categories: Dropped "Christian abolitionists" and "Proponents of Christian feminism", which are not appropriate categories for someone who criticized Christianity and religion in general as persistently and harshly as she did. Bilpen (talk) 20:08, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

I just now posted the overhaul. Bilpen (talk) 13:35, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Your revert

@User:Bilpen, I am OK with your revert. Of course women don't need to be granted the "right" to vote. They already had it, or ought to, based on fairness and equality. My change was a grammar geek's attempt to avoid the use of "women's" with an apostrophe before the s. But a couple of style guides support "women's" so I'm OK with it. Cordially, BuzzWeiser196 (talk) 22:49, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

@User:BuzzWeiser196, Thanks for the follow-up, and for all the good work you do on Wikipedia. Bilpen (talk) 00:55, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Needs reference or should be removed

The following needs a reliable source reference or should be removed

“Her demand for women's right to vote generated a controversy at the convention but quickly became a central tenet of the women's movement. “ 2600:1700:D591:5F10:2083:597A:DFC1:30D6 (talk) 15:21, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

I added a citation for it. Bilpen (talk) 16:39, 15 March 2022 (UTC)