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The Origins of Feminist Equality: Celebrating the 200 Anniversary of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Birth November 12, 2015 Sponsore

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The Origins of Feminist Equality: Celebrating the 200 Anniversary of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Birth November 12, 2015 Sponsore The Origins of Feminist Equality: Celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Birth November 12, 2015 sponsored by THE CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON SCHOOL OF LAW Table of Contents Program Schedule 3 Speaker Biographies 4 Letter, Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony, Mar. 1, 1852 6 Tracy A. Thomas, Introduction: The Life and Work of Elizabeth Cady 8 Stanton, Powerpoint Bibliography, works by and of Elizabeth Cady Stanton 11 Excerpt, Chapter 1, “The Radical Conscience” of Nineteenth-Century 17 Feminism, in Tracy A. Thomas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law This course has been approved by the Supreme Court of Ohio Commission on Continuing Legal Education for 3.25 total CLE hours instruction. 2 The Origins of Feminist Equality: Celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Birth Thursday, November 12 1:00pm to 4:30pm (Room Law-151) THE CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON SCHOOL OF LAW This program explores the historic constitutional notions of gender equality in the groundbreaking work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton was the leader of the nineteenth- century woman’s rights movement, providing both the philosophy and the advocacy for radical reform of the state, church, and family. This colloquium of leading Stanton experts discusses new research on Stanton and her contributions to the broader cause of women’s equality. Schedule 1:00 Introduction Tracy Thomas, Introducing Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a Feminist and Legal Thinker 1:30 Understanding the Radical Origins of Stanton’s Equality Theory Felice Batlan, Domestic Disorders: Suffrage, Federalism, and New York’s Constitutional Convention of 1867 Lisa Tetrault, Investing the Vote with Meaning; or An Intellectual Odyssey with Stanton Discussion 2:45 Coffee Break 3:00 Placing Stanton’s Legal Thought in Social Context Lisa Hogan, Marriage, Divorce, and Sexual Domination in the Rhetoric of Elizabeth Cady Stanton Kathi Kern, Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Religious Liberty Discussion 3 Speaker Biographies Felice Batlan, J.D., Ph.D, Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Faculty, Director of the Institute for Compliance, and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and the Humanities, Chicago-Kent School of Law After graduating summa cum laude in history from Smith College, Professor Batlan received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as executive editor for the Harvard Women's Law Journal. She clerked for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then worked as a law firm associate specializing in securities law and financial markets. She then joined Greenwich NatWest as associate general counsel and head of global compliance. Eventually she returned to the academic world, completing a Ph.D. in U.S. history from New York University. She has been a law professor at IIT Chicago-Kent from Tulane Law School since in 2006. Batlan is the author of the new book, Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863– 1945 (Cambridge University Press 2015). Lisa S. Hogan, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer of Communication Arts and Sciences and Women's Studies, Penn State University, Graduate School Hogan received her Ph.D. in Communications and Women’s Studies from Indiana University. She has been a lecturer on the faculty of Penn State’s Communication Arts graduate program for sixteen years. Hogan is the author of multiple works on Stanton, including: The Politics of Feminist Autobiography: Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Eighty Years or More as Ideological Manifesto, 38 Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 (2009); A Time for Silence: William Lloyd Garrison and the 'Woman Question' at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, 25 Gender Issues 63 (June 2008); Wisdom, Goodness, and Power: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the History of Woman Suffrage, 23 Gender Issues 3 (Spring 2006); Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Our Girls” (1880), 1Voices of Democracy 104 (2006). Kathi Kern, Ph.D., Associate Professor History; Director, Center for the Enhancement of Learning & Teaching; Chellgren Professor; University of Kentucky Professor Kern earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Pennsylvania where she was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and a winner of the Dean's Award for distinguished teaching. Since 1989 she has been a member of the History Department at the University of Kentucky as well as an affiliated member of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. At UK, she has won the Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Teaching (1995) and the Alumni Great Teacher Award (2003), and the College of Education’s “Teachers Who Make a Difference” Award (2001, 2004). Professor Kern's research concerns gender, religion and the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America. She is the author of Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (2001). 4 Lisa Tetrault, Ph.D., Associate Professor, History, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Tetrault specializes in the history of U.S. women and gender. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of History. Her first book, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) won the Organization of American Historians' inaugural Mary Jurich Nickliss women's history book prize. Professor Tetrault has received long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Newberry Library, and the Smithsonian Institution. Tracy Thomas, J.D., Associate Dean for Institutional Excellence and Seiberling Chair of Constitutional Law, the University of Akron School of Law; Director of the Center for Constitutional Law. Professor Thomas received her B.A. degree, cum laude, from Miami University, M.P.A. degree from California State University and J.D. degree from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, where she was a member of the Order of the Coif and production editor of the Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Journal. Prior to joining the Akron Law faculty in 1998, she clerked for Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney for Covington & Burling and Neighborhood Legal Services in Washington D.C. Professor Thomas is the co-editor of Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law (NYU Press 2011). She is the author of a book Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law, forthcoming from NYU Press. Professor Thomas is the author of numerous articles on equitable remedies and her work has appeared in the Hastings Law Journal, the U.C. Davis Law Review, and the Washington University Law Review. She is a co-editor on West's casebook, Remedies: Public and Private. 5 Seneca Falls, March 1 [1852] Miss Susan B. Anthony Dear friend, I do not know that the world is quite willing or ready to discuss the question of marriage. I feel in my innermost that the thoughts I sent your convention are true. It is in vain to look for the elevation of woman, so long as she is degraded in marriage. I say it is a sin, an outrage on our holiest feelings to pretend that anything but deep, fervent love & sympathy constitutes marriage. The right idea of marriage is at the foundation of all reforms. How strange it is, man will apply all the improvements in the arts & sciences to everything about him animate & inanimate, but himself. A child conceived in the midst of hate, sin, & discord, nurtured in abuse & injustice cannot do much to l the world or himself. If we properly understand the science of life—it would be far easier to give to the world, harmonious beautiful, noble, virtuous children, than it is to bring grown up discord into harmony with the great divine soul of all. I ask for no laws on marriage . remove law and false public sentiment & woman will no more live as wife with a cruel, beastly, drunkard, than a servant, in this free country will stay with a pettish, unjust mistress. If law makers insist upon exercising their prerogative in some way on this question, let them forbid any woman to marry until she is twenty one. Let them fine a woman fifty dollars for every child she conceives by a Drunkard. Women have no right to saddle the state with idiots to be supported by the public. Only look at the statistics of the idiot asylums, nearly all the offspring of Drunkards. Woman must be made to feel that the transmitting of immortal life is a most solemn responsible act & never should be allowed, except when the parents are in the highest condition of mind & body. 6 Man in his lust has regulated this whole question of sexual intercourse long enough; let the mother of mankind whose prerogative it is to set bounds to his indulgence, rouse up & give this whole question a thorough, fearless examination. [I]f by martyrdom I can advance my race one step I am ready for it. I feel this whole question of woman’s rights turns on the pivot of the marriage relation, & sooner or later it will be the question for discussion. I would not hurry it on neither would I avoid it…. ~ E.C. Stanton 7 8 9 10 BIBLIOGRAPHY For further reading on Elizabeth Cady Stanton see the following Bibliography from Tracy A. Thomas, The Feminist Foundations of Family Law (forthcoming August 2016 NYU Press) Stanton Papers The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Microfilm Collection, reels 1-45 (Ann D. Gordon, ed.), 1991.
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