Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the Federal Marriage Amendment: a letter to the president.

• Author: Thomas, Tracy A.

Dear president Bush,

I have read of your call for a Federal Marriage Amendment to preserve the sanctity of the traditional marriage between one man and one woman. (1) The proposed constitutional amendment declares that "marriage in the United States shall consist of only the union of a man and a woman" and that no federal or state constitution can be construed to require otherwise. (2) I was surprised to see such a proposal put forth in light of the failed attempts at such a national marriage amendment in my time during the late nineteenth century. For over sixty years from 1884 to 1947, proposals were made by "pro-family" advocates like you to amend the federal Constitution to give Congress the power to legislate uniform laws of marriage. (3) Until my death in 1902, I was one of the leading opponents and most outspoken critics of the proposed marriage amendment of the prior century. I write to you now to advise you of the substantial grounds that I advanced against a constitutional marriage amendment, for the arguments continue to be relevant and applicable today.

The outcry for a uniform national marriage law rang loud as I approached my ninetieth year. I weighed in on the issue, as I did with all issues of importance to women, speaking at lectures and professing my views in the newspapers of the day. (4) Indeed, I was as "radical on the marriage question at the age of eighty-six as I had been a half century earlier." (5) Throughout my career, I agitated for equality in marriage, challenging the traditional marital patriarchy and advocating for marital property rights for women, elimination of the word "obey" from the marriage ceremony, the retention of a wife's birth name, and no-fault divorce.

With the advent of a national conservative movement against divorce in 1884, I articulated a multi-pronged analytical attack on the constitutional amendment. Marriage reformers then, as now, claimed the need of an amendment to protect against the exportation of liberal state laws of marriage through the Full Faith and Credit Clause. Yet, it seems to me that such claims of threats to federalism are mere pretexts for social targets--first women, and now homosexuals. I opposed the federal marriage amendment of the nineteenth century on grounds that it stunted state democratic action, perpetuated gender discrimination in the family, and denied the true contractual relation of marriage. (6) I recount those arguments here in the hope that perhaps they might be persuasive with regard to the parallel Federal Marriage Amendment championed in this new millennium.

HISTORY AS A GUIDE

Perhaps I should begin by introducing myself properly. You have referred to me in passing as a "courageous hero" when proclaiming presidential support for Women's Equality Days. (7) Others know me as a reformer who agitated for woman's suffrage with my cohort Susan B. Anthony. (8) Still others have remembered me as the leading philosopher and ideologue of the nineteenth-century woman's movement, even calling me "the most brilliant and dynamic feminist theorist" of the day. (9) Indeed, I spent most of my adult life from 1848 to 1902 working for the advancement of women's rights beginning with the first meeting on the woman question at Seneca Falls, New York. (10) This momentous first meeting has been memorialized in recent times in the monument to my work created at the National Women's Rights Park in Seneca Falls. (11) There, etched on the walls flowing with water are the words I wrote in the Declaration of Sentiments declaring equality for women in all aspects of social, political, and civil life.

In the Declaration of Sentiments, you will find my panoptic philosophy for the ultimate equality and empowerment of women. (12) Included in this broad agenda are attacks on the patriarchal marriage relation and calls for divorce reform so that women could escape unharmonious marriages. (13) As I often repeated, liberal divorce laws for oppressed wives are what Canada was for Southern slaves, (14) especially given the fact that the vast majority of applications for divorce in the late nineteenth century were made by women. (15) During my five decades of agitation, I strongly advocated for the no-fault divorce that I believed was critical to achieving equality and partnership for women within marriages. (16) Others labeled me an advocate of "easy divorce," yet I hate and repudiate that phrase, and the promiscuous relations it seems to indicate. What I have always insisted on is that the laws of marriage and divorce, whatever they are, shall bear equally on man and woman. (17) As I recounted in my memoirs, Eighty Years and More:

So bitter was the opposition to divorce, for any cause, that but few dared to take part in the discussion. I was the only woman, for many years, who wrote and spoke on the question.... I was always courageous in saying what I saw to be true, for the simple reason that I never dreamed of opposition. What seemed to me to be right I thought must be equally plain to all other rational beings. (18) Of course, it must be said that I never sought the avenue of divorce for myself, having remained married to the lawyer and reformer Henry B. Stanton for over fifty years. (19) During this time, I could not have been more "pro-family" as I single-handedly raised seven children.

I summarized the tensions surrounding the proposed national marriage amendment in my testimony before the United States Senate Special Select Committee on Woman Suffrage in 1890:

There is much anxiety just now being expressed by distinguished statesmen, judges, bishops, lest the foundations of our homes are about to be swept away by liberal divorce laws. So strong is this feeling that a demand has been made on Congress for a national law, that will make the code regulating marriage and divorce homogeneous throughout the states. Congress has already made an appropriation to gather statistics on this question. Carroll D. Wright who was employed to make the report, states that there are 10,000 divorces every year, and other statisticians (20) say the majority are asked for by women. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, conservative marriage reformers sought to preserve the family and protect against state idiosyncrasies that purported to impose easy divorce upon all the states. Divorce colonies in South Dakota, Indiana, and Iowa raised the ire of church and state leaders nationwide by their alleged promotion of divorce through laws providing short residency requirements and liberal fault grounds for divorce. (21) I had heard such a hue and cry about Indiana's divorce laws that I was quite surprised when visiting there in 1870 on a lecture tour to find the mass of men and women living in the same harmonious, faithful relations as in my native state, where divorces are unhonored and unknown. (22) Nonetheless, Theodore Woolsey, attorney and retired president of Yale University, formed the New England Divorce Reform League which soon grew to national prominence as the National League for the Protection of the Family under the direction of Congregational minister Samuel Dike. (23) Comprised of Protestant and Catholic clergy, lawyers, and later social scientists, the group championed the cause of a uniform national divorce code. (24) The League convinced Congress to fund national statistical studies of marriage and divorce, resulting in the Wright Report of 1887, our first U.S. Census. (25) The results of this report demonstrated an increase in the divorce rate which spurred agitation for a national restriction on divorce. (26)

However, to my mind, the divorce rate per se was not a cause of concern, but perhaps even one for celebration. As two-thirds of the divorces were granted to women on grounds of cruelty and non-support, (27) the laws permitted women's legal escape from destructive marriages that had so long been denied. The instances of domestic violence and brutal, battering husbands fueled my support of divorce as a necessity for women. (28) There had been several aggravated cases of cruelty to wives among the Dutch aristocracy in my home state of New York. (29) My feelings had been stirred to their depths very early in life by the sufferings of a dear friend of mine, at whose wedding I was one of the bridesmaids. In listening to the facts in her case, my mind was fully made up as to the wisdom of a liberal divorce law. (30) She was married ostensibly to a gentleman, but in reality to a brute. At their marriage a place in New Jersey was given to him worth $60,O00--the next day his creditors had it. He stole her jewels, clothes--everything she had. She told me about it. I told her to leave him. Her parents wouldn't take her back. A year later she appeared, thinly clad, with a baby in her arms, at my door. I took care of her. (31) We read Milton's essays on divorce together and were thoroughly convinced as to the right and duty not only of separation, but of absolute divorce. (32)

Despite my arguments, the national outcry against divorce continued, and, in 1884, congressional leaders responded by proposing a constitutional amendment on marriage. (33) Concerns over curbing the divorce rate and prohibiting Mormon polygamy sparked the national effort of a uniform marriage standard. (34) Amendments were continuously proposed over the span of sixty years intended to give Congress the power to enact national marriage and divorce legislation. (35) It was believed at the time that without such an amendment, Congress lacked the power to legislate on such local matters of marriage and divorce. (36) Perhaps that assumption no longer holds true as Congress seems to have in fact legislated marriage in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. (37) Nonetheless, the focus of the nineteenth-century movement was on institutionalizing the marriage standard in a federal constitutional amendment. The call for federal action on marriage continued after my death, when President...