Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York, the eighth of ten children of Margaret Livingston and Daniel Cady, a lawyer who became a state supreme court judge. Four of his five sons died in infancy, and the fifth when Elizabeth was eleven. She never forgot climbing onto her grieving father’s knee and hearing him sigh: “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!” She vowed to be all her brother had been. No American college then admitted women, so she studied at the Johnstown Academy and Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, and picked up an informal legal education from the lawyers who gathered in her father’s house to talk.

At a cousin’s home she met the abolitionist lecturer Henry Stanton. They married in 1840 against her family’s wishes, and she refused to promise “to obey.” The couple sailed at once to London for the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention.

In London, Stanton and the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott were furious that women were barred from speaking, and they resolved to hold a convention on women’s rights. In 1848 they did so at Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments listed eighteen grievances — that men had denied women the vote, “taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns,” and closed colleges against her — and demanded equality. That year she also petitioned for New York’s Married Women’s Property Act, which let married women keep their own property and wages.

In 1851 she met Susan B. Anthony, beginning a partnership that dominated the movement for over half a century; while raising seven children, Stanton wrote the speeches and Anthony delivered them. During the Civil War the two campaigned for the Thirteenth Amendment. In 1869 they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which Stanton led as president, writing for its journal The Revolution. Once her children were grown, she lectured nationwide on marriage, divorce, child rearing, and women’s property. With Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage she wrote the first volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1885), and in 1890 she became the first president of the reunited National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Stanton believed women were entitled to full equality in law, marriage, property, education, religion, and politics, and that the vote was essential to all the rest. She insisted on women’s “self-dependence”: girls, she said in her popular lecture “Our Girls,” were raised “to revolve round some man,” never knowing “the freedom and dignity that one secures in self-dependence and self support.” In The Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898) she argued for a secular state and challenged the male-centered theology she believed kept women subordinate.

Stanton and Anthony opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments because they protected the voting rights of Black men but not of women, breaking with former abolitionist allies. Her advocacy centered on the concerns of propertied, upper-middle-class women, and at times she spoke against rights for men outside her class, including “natives and foreigners.” The Woman’s Bible alienated many suffragists, and the National Women’s History Museum describes her as a controversial figure who often contradicted herself over a long life.

Stanton recorded her life in the memoir Eighty Years and More and died in New York City in October 1902, eighteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote. The agenda she set at Seneca Falls — equality in property, wages, education, marriage, and politics — guided the women’s movement well into the twentieth century.