University of Virginia Library

A REFORMER FROM GIRLHOOD.

The inspiration of Mrs. Stanton's life can be expressed in one word — liberty. She came into the world only twenty-eight years after the Constitution had been adopted which established the independent government of the United States, and when the true significance of liberty was but imperfectly understood. The people had thrown off the tyranny of a king, but they had not yet learned tolerance toward their fellow men. Freedom of religious observance was grudgingly conceded; but freedom of religious thought outside the recognized orthodox forms, was practically denied. Liberty of personal action was exceedingly circumscribed, and any deviation from conventional forms was visited with severe criticism if made by a man, and with fatal consequences if made by a woman. The individuality of the child was sternly suppressed, and the word continually dinned into its ears was "Don't." Mrs. Stanton tells in her "Reminiscences" that, when she was in deep thought one day, and the nurse asked if she were planning some new mischief, she answered passionately, "No, but I am wondering why everything we like to do is a sin, and everything we dislike is commanded by God or some one on earth. I am so tired of that everlasting no! no! no! At school, at home, everywhere, it is no! Even at church all the commandments begin 'Thou shalt not.' I suppose God will say 'no' to all we want in the next world."

She was born a rebel and a reformer. At school she rebelled against the narrow limits of the education permitted to a girl, and determined to fight for her admission to the colleges. Before she was eighteen she was in the throes of a rebellion against the gloom and despair of Calvinism, which had taken such a hold upon her vivid imagination as almost to shatter her reason. By the time she had reached her early twenties, however, all other wrongs began to recede into the background as she realized the terrible injustice of the laws and customs regarding woman. Fortunately, she married a man in full sympathy with her ideas, — the well-known Abolitionist, Henry B. Stanton, — who fanned the smouldering flames in her heart of another rebellion, that against negro slavery. They went on their wedding tour, in 1840, to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Her first meeting here with that gentle but resolute Quaker, Lucretia Mott, and the outrageous treatment accorded the women delegates, sent her home with a renewed determination to do something to raise the status of her sex.