In a Lonely Place

by MARTHA NUSSBAUM

[from the February 27, 2006 issue]

In 1840 the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London with her new husband, abolitionist politician Henry Stanton. At least she tried to attend it. On her arrival at the convention site, the people in charge refused to seat her because she was a woman. All the women were required to withdraw to the periphery, where, Vivian Gornick writes in her new book on Stanton, The Solitude of Self, "they could see but not be seen, hear but not be heard." Most of the men, including her husband, went along with this arrangement, unwilling to complicate discussion of the all-important antislavery issue. Only a few, notably William Lloyd Garrison, refused to participate on terms that excluded women. Stanton recalled later that it was on this day that she realized for the first time that "in the eyes of the world I was not as I was in my own eyes, I was only a woman."

So began the career of one of America's greatest radicals. Perhaps, however, it really began much earlier. When Stanton, around age 12, heard of a local woman who had suffered outrageous but legally sanctioned injustice at the hands of her dead husband's son, she grabbed a knife and cut the offending passage out of the law book on her father's desk. Her father told her that she could work to change the law but that, in Gornick's words, defacing the book was "not only forbidden...it was also useless." She reflects that at this point it was "already too late: an educated, upright, law-and-order household had spawned a daughter who was going to cut the laws out of the books with a knife."