“This Pageantry of Woe”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Politics of Death

In her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that the deaths of her brother, Eleazar Cady, and her pastor, Rev. Simon Hosack, profoundly shaped her understanding of women’s equality. The same text describes the property disadvantages that married and widowed women faced and which Stanton first learned about in her father’s law office; that lesson about love and loss motivated her to fight for a woman’s right to property. Her essay, Solitude of Self, affirmed dying as the great equalizer, as the final solitude that required a life lived to its fullest potential. Stanton’s focus on childhood grief, widowhood, and dying demonstrates that she, like many Americans in the post-bellum period, understood death as a vital source of private and public power. Stanton defined death in relation to power due to her own personal loss of family members and friends and due to the concern with death that gripped the nation in the post-Civil War era.