"To Educate Women into Rebellion": Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists

Abstract

IN THE 1880s AND EARLY 1890s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton made three extended visits from the United States to Britain and Europe. During this decade, she spent in all some five years living in England, where her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, had married. In this time, she renewed and extended friendships first made during a wedding tour in 1840, and she and her daughter became central figures in a transatlantic friendship network. This was a network that in Britain drew substantially on a kinship circle of women connected with the Brights, a radical reforming Quaker family among whom was the statesman, John Bright. Women of the Bright circle had helped in the formation of every major society and campaign on which the organized women's movement in Britain had been built in the late 1860s.1 The Bright circle also provided an important locus of radical suffragism in Britain. At the time of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's return to Britain in the 1880s, however, a moderate current of suffrage opinion dominated the movement there, one whose viewpoint until recently has also informed prevailing understandings of British suffragism during the nineteenth century.2 Because the more moderate