Eighty Years and More (1815 – 1897).
New York: European Publishing Company, 1898, First edition. With eleven plates, including a photo frontispiece of Stanton. Plates include portraits of Margaret Livingston Cady, many of Stanton’s other relatives, and Susan B. Anthony. The second page of ads is for both parts of The Woman’s Bible (1898). Dedicated to Anthony, Stanton’s “steadfast friend for half a century.”. Corners a bit bumped. Ink ownership signature, dated 1898, to front flyleaf. Overall a clean copy despite some toning. A very good, tight copy of Stanton’s suffrage memoir. Publisher’s dark green cloth lettered in gilt on spine. Octavo. ix, 471, [2 ads] pp. Item #17028
In Eighty Years and More, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 – 1902) reflects on her lifelong commitment to the rights of women from her days at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary to her critical approach to churches in the last years of her career. In the ANB, Ann D. Gordon describes the present work as a “companion volume” to The Woman’s Bible, which Stanton published in full in the same year. The present work is particularly valuable for its account of Stanton’s later years, when she began to focus more on her criticism of religion and on “impeaching the Christian theology—as well as all other forms of religion, for their degrading teachings in regard to woman” (p. 383).
Gordon writes, “What set Stanton apart most of all in her last decades was her conviction that the next great struggle would occur not against the state but against churches. In 1885 she tried to shepherd the [National Women’s Suffrage Association] into the fray…At about the same time she solicited contributors to a critical exegesis of the Bible. But when she published part one of The Woman’s Bible in 1895, the [NWSA] repudiated her ideas as damaging to the cause. Opposition from within the movement had no effect on her ambitions. In her mind critics of a struggle with orthodox religion simply echoed those who laughed at a woman’s right to vote in 1848.”.
Price: $950.00