Elizabeth Cady Stanton On Solitude
Martha Nussbaum sees a big glaring contradiction in Stanton's thoughts on solitude. I don't. To be alone is, at first, hard and painful. But once you're enough of a person to be comfortable with it, solitude becomes comfortable; even necessary. Of course, some people -- women, especially -- never get to that point, because they convince themselves that having a man is a shortcut to having a "you." Here's an excerpt from Nussbaum's review of Vivian Gornick's new book on Stanton -- in which she comes to pretty much the same conclusion I do:

In "The Solitude of Self," Stanton gave two very different accounts of what the "solitude of self" is and, correspondingly--though without in any way signaling the difference--two very different accounts of why equal education and citizenship for women are important. The speech, in fact, is a mess; to get anything out of it one must forage around in it and reconstruct it.

On one account, which Stanton repeatedly emphasizes, the "solitude of self" is simply the fact that "we come into the world alone...[and] we leave it alone." Each woman, like each man, "must make the voyage of life alone." As a variant on this theme, Stanton often observes that, however much we may like to depend on others, we never can: Any person can be abandoned at any time. "Rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman; it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself." Here, solitude is something bad and usually painful, a "march" and a "battle." It is, however, inevitable. Because solitude is the inevitable condition of our existence, each person must be schooled to deal with it, taking responsibility for his or her own life: "As in our extremity we must depend on ourselves, the dictates of wisdom point to complete individual development." Women have never been given this development, and this is unfair, since they need it as much as any. Even if they think they can depend on men, they can't. It is unjust not to prepare them for self-sufficiency.

There is, however, another very different account of solitude in the speech, one that tugs against the first. Every human life, Stanton suggests, contains a precious inner world, one that no other person can enter, an inner space that is rightly called "conscience" and "our self." Included in "conscience" is the power of autonomous choice, and this power is seen as something deeply precious, hidden away inside us, "more hidden than the caves of the gnome." Here, solitude is not a painful absence of connection but a joyous realization of one's inner depths.

This second conception of solitude, which Stanton explicitly connects to an American Protestant heritage, yields a different explanation of why women should be given education and political rights: because this inner world is precious and sublime, and demands respect. Respecting it means developing it. Here Stanton speaks of a woman's "right of individual conscience and judgment," her "birthright to self-sovereignty." In other words, even if women could depend utterly on men and would never lack external support, it would still be an egregious offense to fail to give them the freedom of choice and self-development. It is their right, because of the depth and preciousness of the self.

The tension between the two accounts is not just a prissy philosopher's problem: It impedes any attempt to read the speech and to be moved by a coherent set of emotions. The speech's rhetoric jolts oddly back and forth between horror at solitude and love of the rich inner life that is revealed in solitude. Is solitude something ugly or something precious? A grim fate or a sublime opportunity? It is difficult to follow the speech emotionally, so jarring are these attitudinal shifts.

How might one make a coherent whole out of Stanton's ideas? Gornick, unfortunately, does not try. Her account of the speech, piecemeal and truncated, has all the problems of the speech itself, and more, for she adds to Stanton's already problematic text the idea that it is a sense of shame that has caused women to close off their inner world from others. According to Gornick, Stanton "realized that to the greatest degree the solitude is self-created, the result of being locked from birth into a psychology of shame." This sentiment, for which I find no evidence in the speech itself, and which seems to me quite foreign to Stanton's unabashed personality, as Gornick herself depicts it, strengthens the idea that solitude is something unfortunate and nonadmirable, and even casts doubt on Stanton's own insistence that it is inevitable. (For surely, women might learn not to be ashamed of themselves, and let's hope that there is a lot less shame around now, in connection with being female, than there was in the nineteenth century.) Moreover, Gornick also connects the "solitude of self" to Stanton's unpleasant experiences with rivalry and animosity within the feminist movement, thus further bolstering the idea that solitude is all bad. That reading, however, just won't do as a reading of the whole text and its most powerful arguments.

I think we might put Stanton's two theses together as follows. We see that we must ultimately live and die alone. At first this condition seems horrible to us. But as we investigate it, we find that there is something precious in the solitude of the inner self, a world within each person "more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea." These romantic images of the beauty of solitude, of which Stanton was fond, suggest a further romantic thought: This inner life is actually something awe-inspiring, something sublime, to which we can rightly give the names "conscience" and "birthright to self-sovereignty." Once we start thinking this way and learn to love, even revere, the sublime beauty of each person's inner life, we see that we have not just one but two reasons for educating women and giving them the vote: not just because they may need these practical abilities in some time of abandonment but because conscience deserves respect, and to respect conscience is to give it space to unfold.

via aldaily