Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Reminiscences |
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Part 8: A Fugitive Mother and Child |
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Whilst all this was going on publicly, we had an equally trying experience progressing day by day behind the scenes. Miss Anthony had been instrumental in helping a fugitive mother with her child, escape from a husband who had immured her in an insane asylum. The wife, belonging to one of the first families of New York, her brother a United States Senator, and the husband a man of position, a large circle of friends and acquaintances were interested in the result. Though she was incarcerated in an insane asylum for eighteen months, yet members of her own family again and again testified that she was not insane. Miss Anthony knowing that she was not, and believing fully that the unhappy mother was the victim of a conspiracy, would not reveal her hiding-place. Knowing the confidence Miss Anthony felt in the wisdom of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Phillips, they were implored to use their influence with her to give up the fugitives. Letters and telegrams, persuasions, arguments, warnings, from Mr. Garrison, Mr. Phillips, the Senator, on the one side, and from Lydia Mott, Mrs. Elizabeth F. Ellet, Abby Hopper Gibbons, on the other, poured in upon her day after day, but Miss Anthony remained immovable, although she knew she was defying authority and violating law, and that she might be arrested any moment on the platform. We had known so many aggravated cases of this kind, that in daily counsel we resolved that this woman should not be recaptured if it was possible to prevent it. To us it looked as imperative a duty to shield a sane mother who had been torn from a family of little children and doomed to the companionship of lunatics, and to aid her in fleeing to a place of safety, as to help a fugitive from slavery to Canada. In both eases an unjust law was violated; in both cases the supposed owners of the victims were defied, hence, in point of law and morals, the act was the same in both cases. The result proved the wisdom of Miss Anthony's decision, as all with whom Mrs. P. came in contact for years afterward, expressed the opinion that she was perfectly sane and always had been. Could the dark secrets of these insane asylums be brought to light, we should be shocked, to know the countless number of rebellious wives, sisters, and daughters that are thus annually sacrificed to false customs and conventionalisms, and barbarous laws made by men for women. Next page > Chapter 9: The Bloomer Costume > Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 from Chapter XIII, "Reminiscences," The History of Woman Suffrage (ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton), Vol. 1 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881). |
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Summary: A section of the original text by Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the early days of the woman suffrage movement, including the meeting of Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, their early struggles for women's rights, opposition to their work and the experiment with fashion innovation called the Bloomer Costume.
