Message #84887

[Bianca]

Her more radical positions included acceptance of interracial marriage. Despite her opposition to giving African-American men the right to vote without enfranchising all women and the derogatory language she had resorted to in expressing this opposition, Stanton had no objection to interracial marriage and wrote a congratulatory letter to Frederick Douglass upon his marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman, in 1884.

Anthony, fearing public condemnation of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and want-
ing to keep the demand for female suffrage foremost, pleaded with Stanton not to make her letter to Douglass or support for his marriage publicly known.

Stanton went on to write many of the more important books, documents, and speeches of the women's rights movement.

In 1881, Harper & Brothers Publishers issued the first volume of The History of Woman Suffrage, a seminal, six-volume work containing the full history, documents, and letters of the woman's suffrage movement.  While Stanton, along with Anthony and Gage, wrote the first three volumes, the work was eventually completed in 1922 by Ida Harper.  Stanton's other major writings included The Women's Bible, first published in 1895; Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences 1815-1897, her autobiography, published in 1898; and The Solitude of Self, or "Self-Sovereignty," which she first delivered as a speech at the 1892 convention of the National American Women's Suffrage Association in Washington, D. C..

In 1868 Stanton—together with Susan B. Anthony and Parker Pillsbury, a leading male feminist of his day—began publishing a weekly periodical, Revolution, with editorials by Stanton that focussed on a wide array of women's issues.

In a view different from many modern feminists, Stanton, who supported birth control and likely used it herself,  believed that abortion was infanticide, a position she discussed in Revolution.

At this time, Stanton also joined the New York Lyceum Bureau, embarking on a twelve-year career on the Lyceum Circuit. Traveling and lecturing for eight months every year provided her both with the funds to put her two youngest sons through college and, given her popularity as a lecturer, with a way to spread her ideas among the general population, gain broad public recognition, and further establish her reputation as a pre-eminent leader in the women's rights movement.

Among her most popular speeches were "Our Girls", "Our Boys", "Co-education", "Marriage and Divorce", "Prison Life", and "The Bible and Woman's Rights".

Her lecture travels so occupied her that Stanton, although president, presided at only four of fifteen conventions of the National Women's Suffrage Association during this period.