Elizabeth Cady Stanton SPEECHES & WRITINGS FILE Speech: "The Pleasures of Age" An address delivered on her 70th Birthday, Nov. 12, 1885 THE PLEASURES OF AGE By ELIZABETH CADY STANTON Born November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, N. Y. Died October 26, 1902, in New York City Elizabeth Cady Stanton, her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch and her granddaughter Nora Blatch 44a The Pleasures of Age AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BY ELIZABETH CADY STANTON ON HER Seventieth Birthday Nov. 12, 1885. "The only way to learn to use a gun or a ballot is to possess one."--Elizabeth Cady Stanton The Pleasures of Age A friend asked me one day to write an article on "The Pleasures of Age," for her journal, to which request I readily responded. Being on the threshold of seventy, I felt myself peculiarly fitted to write an essay on that theme. Before giving my views, however, I though I would ask those of my friends whom I chanced to meet, who had passed three score and ten, what they had to say on the question. Accordingly, seated at the breakfast table one morning with several friends revolving round the seventies and eighties, I launched my question for their serious consideration. The octogenarian at the head of the feast, after a few moments' thought, replied sadly: "There is no pleasure in old age. Whatever poet, orator, or sage May say of it, old age is still old age, It is the waning, not the crescent, moon, The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon." As my friend's life had been one of great usefulness, good health and all the ordinary comforts of wealth and position, I was rather surprised at the reply. Another said: "Perhaps one may find some pleasure in being deaf, as then you do not hear the nonsense of ordinary talk." Another said: "Blindness, too, may have its advantages as then your eyes are shut to many things you fain would never see." Another said: "There is comfort even in being crippled, as then, like the old woman in the song, who was always tired, one need do nothing but rest forever and ever." Most discouraging negations from a group of educated people, from which to extract an essay on the pleasures of old age! And many more I have asked in the ordinary walks of life, without one triumphant response as to the joys of this grand period of our mortal life. Even the poets and philosophers speak with no certain sound. 1 44b I turned to a calendar prepared by a woman on the shady side of sixty. I hoped to find something encouraging there. I read the following from Harriet Martineau: "Under the eternal laws of the universe I came into being, and under them I have lived a life so full that its fullness is equivalent to length. There has been much in my life that I am glad to have enjoyed, and much that generates a mood of contentment at the close. I never dream of wishing that anything were otherwise than it is; I am frankly satisfied to have done with this life. I have had a noble share of it and I desire no more. I neither wish to live longer here, nor find life again elsewhere." As Miss Martineau lived to be over seventy, and had labored assiduously with her pen for all the reforms of her day, her willingness to rest through eternity is not surprising. To my young disciples, looking forward with apprehension to the time when the joys of youth have passed, to that period so deplored by all, I bring a message of hope, of triumph, of victory. By making the best possible use of the passing days, you have the opportunity to make your old age all that you desire. If we analyze the pleasures of youth, middle life and old age, we find all alike depend on the capacity of the individual for enjoyment, in other words, on organization, education, development. One child will amuse herself all day without toys, or scenes of diversion, seemingly thinking of the nature of everything about her, using her little brain, in its feeble beginnings, peering into the soul of the universe, watching the motions of the trees outside, or the play of the sunbeams on the nursery walls, always healthy and happy, as a well-organized child should be. Another child is restless, peevish, in spite of all the attention that love and affection can give, with all the books and toys that Yankee invention has taxed itself to produce. The former, grown to a girl of sweet seventeen, is like a beam of sunshine wherever she goes, reflecting, like the prism, the glorious colors of the light. Her reports of balls, parties, the skating-rink, the school, the teacher, home, parents, are all gilded with her own glad outlook on life. She is linked with everything that is good and true and beautiful in nature, in harmony with herself and her surroundings. Never on the lookout for personal attention, she is never neglected; not on the watch for the meed of praise, she is rarely disappointed. Her thoughts are not centered in herself, hence she has no envy, hatred or malice. She is still seemingly thinking of the mysteries of life and her relations to the outside world. The peevish, restless child is the discontented girl, more and more unhappy as the years roll round. She is in the same world with our sunbeam, but reflects in her atmosphere only the pale, 2 white light. She has all the outward appliances of happiness, wealth, position, beauty, talent, but there is no music in her soul; to her unskillful touch discords only answer back. Middle age, too, repeats alike the follies and the virtues of our youth. Our girls are now wives of senators in Washington. One, in a simple comfortable establishment, outside the whirl of fashion, performs the social duties incumbent on her position with becoming etiquette, giving her best hours and faculties to a higher world of thought. She reads Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, John Stuart Mill, poets, novelists, American jurisprudence, Constitutional law, and keeps pace with all the debates on the great questions of government. She is interested in the reforms of the day. Good men visit her to have their moral purposes strengthened to new endeavor, to be encouraged in patriotic sentiments and labors for the real good of the nation. Her ambition for her husband and children is that they may lead pure, grand lives, and leave the world better than they found it, and make themselves links in the chain of influences by which humanity may be fitted to a higher plane of action. With Mazzini, the great Italian apostle of liberty, she labors first, for justice and equality for all; second, for love of country; third, for the best interest of the family; fourth, for her own highest good and development. With her the universe is not built on the Ego, but the Ego is the outgrowth of the universe. It is easy to predict what the old age of such a royal soul must be. She knows no vacant, restless solitude. Her liberty is full of old acquaintances, whose noble deeds and words are as familiar as those of living friends. When tired of reading she can recite by the hour inspiring sentiments in prose and verse, and, if she has culitvated a taste for music, and can play on some instrument, then, in deviner language than any words can reach, she will touch the deepest, tenderest chords in the human soul; and thus, with boundless resources to entertain herself, she will always be a charming companion to old and young. And now fares our other matron in her gilded palace home, so spacious, so richly furnished, adorned with pictures and statuary, brilliant with the gala-day receptions of the leading belles and statesmen, lords and ladies from foreign lands, amid scenes surpassing far the luxury and elegance of the Caesars in the palmiest days of Rome? As a wife of a Senator, she has attained the highest position in our Republic. Rich in diamonds, velvets and laces, she is the observed of all observers; in beauty and grace she is the one peculiar star envied by all her class; but, alas, the peevish child, the restless girl is but reproduced in the fashionable worldly-minded woman. Her notes are 3 44C still, as ever, notes of discord in the great psalm of life. With her the true order of human duties is reversed from that of our ideal woman; it is, first, herself; second, her family; third, her country; fourth, God and eternal principles of justice and truth. Beauty, wealth, position gone, evanescent possessions at the best, what has this matron left in poverty and solitude to gild the sunset of her life, or to make her company attractive? Old age to such as these must be as varied as their experiences in bygone years. The life of those obedient to law, linked with the birds, the flowers, the majestic trees and mountains, the eternal stars revolving with one common purpose around the great central source of light and truth, knows no old age; it is continued progress, step by step, in harmonious development. The great Humboldt, resting from his prolonged researches into the facts of science, sitting on the mountain-side, in converse with his friends on Nature's mysteries, was wont to say: "I find all things governed by law." The same message the lovers of science bring back to us from the jeweled arches in the caves of the earth, from the eternal snows on mountain peaks, from ocean depths and realms above the clouds. They tell us, too, "all things are governed by law." And this law is as immutable in the moral as in the material world, in its control over man, as over all inferior forms of animal life. "The first point in education," says Herbert Spencer, "is to learn the laws that govern our own organization and our relations to the outside world." and make our lives harmonious with them. We shall find that the keynote in our human relations is love, and the great chorus is equality. The pleasures of age depend on what constitutes the warp and woof of our lives and how the threads are woven together. All that has been put into our lives will step by step reveal itself in a purer, higher development. Those who have obeyed the physical laws will have sound bodies and they will not be racked with pain and disease; they will work, eat, sleep, and rise again to fulfill the round of human duties until the machinery runs down to work no more. If they have obeyed the moral laws, a blessed peace and joy pervade their lives, unbroken as the years roll on. The forces, wasted by so many erring ones in vain regrets, by them are garnered up and used in noble deeds. If they have obeyed the laws of mind and enriched their lives with broad culture, with a knowledge of art, science and literature, and wisely used it all in philanthropic endeavors, they will have boundless resources in themselves for their own happiness, and for making life pleasant and profitable for others. They will be a pillar of light in 4 this wilderness of life to the ignorant and unfortunate and a star of hope to the miserable and despairing. With good health, moral purpose and mental vigor, the pleasures of age are many and varied. If they differ from those we enjoyed in younger days, they are not less real and satisfying. In the place of active, we enjoy passive exercise. Rolling in an easy phaeton is more to our taste than a gallop in the saddle. If our dancing days are over, we still enjoy the harmony in music and motion, and the graceful posing of youth and beauty. While at ease in a comfortable rocking-chair we can imagine that the waltzing, the quadrille, the Virginia reel, are all, as for the kings of old, gotten up for our especial entertainment. Instead of going through the fatigue of skating, well wrapped in furs we can drive about in a sleigh and see the fun without the danger. If we can no longer run and hunt the fox, we can take a pleasant stroll, at the twilight hour, over the autumn leaves and enjoy the rustle and cracking as much as ever, with all the added memories of early days, that like a picture gallery, we can review at our leisure. The young have no memories with which to gild their lives, none of the pleasure of retrospection. Neither has youth a monopoly of the illusions of hope, for that is eternal; to the end we have something still to hope. And here age has the advantage of basing its hopes on something rational and attainable. Instead of building castles in the air, we clear off the mortages from our earthly habitations. Instead of waiting for the winds of good fortune to waft us to elysian fields and heights sublime, we plant and gather our own harvests, and climb step by step on ladders of our own making. After many experiences on life's tempestuous seas, we learn to use the chart and compass, to take soundings, to measure distances, to shun the dangerous coasts, to prepare for winds and weather, to reef our sails, and to know when it is wise to stay in the safe harbor. From experience we understand the situation, we have a knowledge of human nature, we learn how to control ourselves, to treat children with tenderness, servants with consideration, and our equals with proper respect. Years bring wisdom and charity; pity, rather than criticism; sympathy, rather than condemnation. I often hear women say, after their children are grown up and established in life, that they have nothing to live for. I would point them to the broad fields of philanthropic work, to the wants and needs of humanity, calling for faithful service on every hand. It is unworthy any woman to say, "My work is done," so long as she has energy and talent to fill the vacant places in this struggling, suffering sphere 5 of action. I point such women to their own undeveloped faculties, to their duty to improve every talent they possess, to the study of the useful sciences, to fine arts, to practical work in the trades and professions; for brave souls, true women, are needed everywhere. "Yes," they say, "I might have done something years ago, but I am too old to begin now." Not so. Fifty, not Fifteen, is the heyday of woman's life. Then the forces hither finding an outlet in flirtations, courtship, conjugal and maternal love, are garnered in the brain to find expression in intellectual achievements, in spiritual friendships and beautiful thoughts, in music, poetry and art. It is never too late to try what we may do. In the words of Longfellow: "Ah! Nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate, Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years, And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his Characters of Men. Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales; Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. These are indeed exceptions; but they show How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow Into the Artic regions of our lives, When little else than life itself survives!" The hurry and bustle of life over, if prosperity is ours, surely each of us may take up some absorbing, congenial work to dignify the sunset or our lives, and if poverty is our lot, labor should be a necessity rather than an idle life of dependence. Professor Swing, of Chicago, thought people ought to read novels enough to keep up the colorings and warmth of youth through middle and old age. Certainly let us read novels, mingle with the young, and enter into whatever we really enjoy. It was a custom with my father, who was the oldest judge that ever sat on the bench in this country, to take a novel in his valise when on one of his circuits, to read when waiting at the depot, or for his breakfast, or on the bench before the clerks and lawyers were ready to open the court, and many are the tears he has shed over the miseries of imaginary characters. His sympathies were warm and tender to the end. 6 The old idea used to be that after fifty our special business was to prepare for death, that our reading should comprise the Bible, the Lives of the Saints, Zimmerman on "Solitude," Bickersteth on "Prayer," Harvey "Among the Tombs," Young's "Night Thoughts," and Baxter's "Saints' Rest," quite forgetting that the best possible preparation for death is active work and generous services to our fellow-men. And what is death that we should contemplate it with sorrow and gloom? Simply to fall asleep when our work is finished, our limited powers exhausted, to awake with renewed energies to more soul-satisfying pleasures in a higher spere of action. Why torment the dying with the medieval theologies of an angry God, a judgment seat, an all-powerful devil, and everlasting torments in hell-ideas that emanated from the diseased brains of dyspeptic celebates? These masculine theologies, all so foreign to the mother-soul, should have no place in our thoughts. They should no longer be permitted to shadow our lives. In the fuller development of the feminine element in humanity, we shall have the impress of woman's thought and sentiment in government and religion, exalting justice, and equally in the one, love and tenderness in the other, anger and vindictive punishment having no place in either. Harriet Martineau said that the happiest day of her life was the day that she gave up the charge of her soul. I can say that the happiest period of my life has been since I emerged from the shadows and superstitions of the old theologies, relieved from all gloomy apprehension of the future, satisfied that as my labors and capacities were limited to this spere of action, I was responsible for nothing beyond my horizon, as I could neither understand nor change the conditions of the unknown world. Giving ourselves, then, no trouble about the future, let us make the most of the present, and fill up our lives with earnest work here. The time has passed for the saints to withdraw from the world, to atone for their sins in fasting and prayer. One good woman laboring at her profession of healing the sick, bearing messages of good cheer to many a bedside, always active on the watchtower of faith and hope, with bright face and busy hands, is of more value to her day and generation than a regiment of saints who spend their day weeping and praying over the sins of the people. There is just the same difference in dignity and importance between women engaged in some earnest life purpose, and those who do nothing, that there is between men who labor in the trades and professions, and those who spend their time in yachts, horse-races and general amusements. To my youthful coadjutors in the woman suffrage work, into whose hands we are now passing the lamp of this great reform, that has lighted us through so many dark days of persecution, I would say, rest 7 assured that your labors in this movement will prove a double blessing-- to yourselves in the higher development it will bring to you, and to the world in the nobler type of womanhood henceforth to share an equal place with man. In the words of Tennyson: "Everywhere Two heads in council, two besides the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two plummets dropped as one to sound the abyss Of science and the secrets of the mind." It is the general opinion that with age must come decrepitude; that its inevitable accompaniments are wigs, spectacles, ear-trumpets, false teeth, weak knees, asthma, neuralgia and rheumatism. This is by no means the case. I know several old gentlemen on the shady side of eighty who read without spectacles, whose hearing is as keen as a rabbit's, who can walk as briskly as most men of forty, and have as keen a zest as ever for all there is in life worth enjoying. I suppose the time will never come when women, or men, either, will delight in crow's feet, wrinkles or gray hairs, but the time will come--aye, and now is--when they will view these blemishes as but a petty price to pay for the joy of added wisdom, for the deeper joy of closer contact with humanity, and for the deepest joy of worthy work well done. But if our senses are not so keen as in our youth, our spiritual eyes may behold the unfolding of many glories we never saw before. We hear the music in the air, the harmonies of Nature unheeded in the early days; the interior life grows brighter as the years roll on; the horizon of thoughts broadens; new vistas open to unknown paths; we see visions and dream dreams of celestial harmony and happiness of the complete fulfillment of our earth-born plans and purposes, begun in youth, in doubt and weakness, but finished at last in faith and victory. "For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars invisible by day." 8 Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.