SOME QUESTIONS ON VIVIAN GORNICK, THE SOLITUDE OF SELF

1. Vivian Gornick, a modern feminist, begins her essay on Elizabeth Cady Stanton with a discussion of Stanton’s speech on “The Solitude of Self.”  What in this speech might be relevant to a feminist today? Whether or not you consider yourself a feminist, what do you think of it?

2. What prospects or opportunities were there for a young woman of her social class, education and intelligence in the early nineteenth century?

3. What happened to Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the London anti-slavery convention in 1840? Why does Gornick consider her experience to be so crucial to her later development?

4. Was her marriage to Henry B. Stanton a good one? What standards should we apply in evaluating it? Was her feminism an indication and/or a result of marital conflicts?

5. What was the relationship between her involvement in the anti-slavery movement and her commitment to women's rights?  Were the two movements mutually supportive or did they become rivals of each other?

6. What were the main concerns of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848?  Why was the demand for the right to vote so controversial?

7. Cady Stanton had seven children and had to juggle child-rearing with her activism.   Do you think she was successful in balancing these roles?

8. Although Cady Stanton devoted much of her life to winning the right to vote for women, she frequently raised issues concerning divorce, sexuality, domestic violence, etc. in her position as a nationally-recognized leader of the women's movement.  Was this wise or did it interfere with gaining women's suffrage?

9. Cady Stanton and other early advocates of women's rights had been active abolitionists.  Yet Gornick points to some racist-sounding comments she made.   Do you think she was a racist?

10. Should Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony have supported passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution (which was intended to give the right to vote to African-American men)?

11. What were the issues that divided the movement for women's suffrage in the years after the Civil War?

12. What was her critique of religion and the Bible? What effect did it have?

13. Gornick says that Stanton recognized a sense of “humiliated loneliness” that people may feel but did not realize that this loneliness could be “put to great and good use” (pp.131-132) in movements of liberation for women and others.  What does she mean?  Do you agree?

History 350
Spring 2015