Balancing Acts

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony questioned the traditional assumption that only men had rights and only women had responsibilities by calling for a better balance between the two.

In her autobiography, Eighty 'Years and More, Stanton conceded that there was truth to the observation that she had forged the thunderbolts, while Susan Anthony had fired them.⁶³ Whatever their division of labor, their collaboration proved heroic. True, it avoided serious consideration of the persistent racial, ethnic, and class inequalities that divided women.⁶⁴ Still, Stanton and Anthony made enduring contributions that reached well beyond the liberal discourse of individual rights. They argued that political reform could change human behavior.

The notion that women had been—to modernize Mill's claim— brainwashed to put others' interests before their own suggested not only that that process could be reversed, but that it could be imposed on men. In modern parlance, women could take assertiveness training, while men could practice sensitivity. Then, as now, the big unanswered question was just how far and fast such regendering could go, and at what balance of assertiveness and sensitivity it should come to rest.