Elizabeth Cady Stanton was 26 years old when her first child, a son, was born.  “I was entirely afloat, launched on the seas of doubt without chart or compass,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897.”  Stanton was one of 11 children, five of whom died as infants and small children. As she watched her mother grieve the cycle of childbirth and loss, Stanton was determined to spare herself and her son the same fate.   “Having gone through the ordeal of bearing a child, I was determined, if possible, to keep him,” she wrote. “So I read everything I could find on the subject.”  Skeptical of male experts and the books they wrote, Stanton rejected common practices like tight swaddling, which liberated her infant’s tiny limbs. A parenting style rooted in independence began to take shape.   “Though uncertain at every step of my own knowledge, I learned another lesson in self-reliance,” she reflected.   Living in Boston, she home-schooled her children while reading, writing and hosting reformers. But after moving to Seneca Falls, with her husband often away and three young boys to raise, domestic labor became stifling. Stanton felt — as so many mothers do — wedged between deep devotion to her children and a growing resentment of the constraints of motherhood. In the trenches of that tension, seeds of revolution were sown.  On July 9, 1848, Stanton visited Jane Hunt in Waterloo for tea with fellow reformers Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright and Mary Ann M’Clintock.  Hunt was two weeks postpartum, likely with linen cloths tucked under her skirts to protect the upholstery in her sitting room. Wright was six months pregnant with her seventh child, sweltering and exhausted under layers of corsets and skirts.  Mott, just returned from an extended stay with the Onöndowa’ga at Cattaraugus, had seen women live differently: wearing loose clothing, speaking freely, choosing their leaders, owning property and their own bodies.  In Boston, Stanton’s exposure to lectures, churches, and other intellectuals was constant. Here in New York, these gatherings were more intimate, allowing these women to share their frustrations earnestly.   She later wrote, “I poured out… the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything.”  Within days, Stanton wrote and delivered the Declaration of Sentiments, forever linking the theoretical idea of suffrage to the visceral reality of motherhood.  Their movement took root and grew, branched out and sometimes splintered. The lessons of Hunt’s tea party echo through contemporary struggles over reproductive rights, parental leave and education. History repeats — and remembers Stanton’s great intervention was that motherhood should not be a retreat from public life, but a source of power, motivation and hope.   Veronica Volk is an audio journalist and podcast enthusiast at WXXI. On instagram @soundslikeveronica. The post How a local suffragist led the mother of all movements appeared first on CITY Magazine. Arts. Music. Culture.. ...read more read less