Read In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton for Free Online Page A

ally since Seneca Falls, now claimed that black male suffrage was more urgent than female suffrage because women were less vulnerable than blacks. “The government of this country loves women, but the Negro is loathed,” exclaimed Douglass. Black male suffrage was a matter of life and death; only the vote protected “unoffending” blacks from the Ku Klux Klan and the Regulators. Woman suffrage, Douglass concluded, “meets nothing but ridicule.” 42
    Stanton refused to accept these claims or to acknowledge that her position had no support. Blind to political reality, insensitive to the abolitionist position, Stanton and Anthony argued for the defeat of the Fifteenth Amendment altogether. Why should she support voting rights for black men, demanded Stanton, when she could not trust them to ensure hers? The vehemence and racial invective of Stanton’s arguments stunned the AERA audience. Although Stanton and Douglass were reelected vice-presidents and Anthony was returned to the executive committee of the AERA, Stanton recognized that she had very little influence within the Equal Rights Association.
    In the summer of 1868 Stanton and Anthony decided upon a three-part suffrage strategy. They needed to identify supporters of women’s rights and suffrage, to draft a sixteenth amendment that would enfranchise women, and to organize women who shared their separate platform. Again Stanton moved from persuasion to political action and back again, keeping up constant pressure for suffrage. With limited resources, she used every means available to her.
    To identify political allies, the women turned to the national party conventions meeting that summer. A written appeal from Stanton and Anthony to the Republican party was ignored. The same appeal to the Democratswas met with an invitation to attend their convention. Stanton dispatched Anthony at once. The Democrats applauded Miss Anthony and seated her on the dais but jeered her proposal and relegated suffrage to a subcommittee. With a jibe at her spinster state, Greeley reported the incident. “Miss Susan B. Anthony has our sincere pity. She has been an ardent suitor of democracy, and they rejected her overtures . . . with screams of laughter.” The inaction of both national parties confirmed Stanton’s independent leanings. She had no lingering loyalties to the Republicans, the party of Henry’s enemies and hers. She called for a new party standing for “universal suffrage and anti-monopoly.” 43 Stanton and Anthony did identify a core of congressional supporters. They worked with these men to introduce a woman suffrage amendment.
    In October 1868 Stanton laid plans for a Washington meeting of the Woman Suffrage Association of America. She formed the new group to counter the American Equal Rights Association. Stanton had discussed her plans at a luncheon in New York City attended by Anthony, Stone, Mott, and Mott’s daughter. “Lizzie [Stanton] was like herself—full of spirits and so pleasant,” Mrs. Mott reported to her family, but the discussion was so intense that it made Mrs. Mott “ache all over.” 44
    With the exception of Stone, the group appointed itself a central committee of correspondence and issued a call for a January 1869 meeting. Increasingly annoyed at Stanton’s behavior, Stone returned to Boston. With Julia Ward Howe and Isabella Beecher Hooker, she formed the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association. Stone invited Mott to join but did not include Stanton or Anthony. Mrs. Mott refused their offer, finding it “too partisan.” Stanton accidentally received an invitation. “As I was invited to the convention by a mistake of yours,” she replied, “I might have made a mistake in going, but for your frankness in telling me that the committee did not desire my presence.” 45
    Stanton ignored the New England group and concentrated on the newborn Woman Suffrage Association of America. Women representing twenty state suffrage groups attended its