On this day in 1815, Elizabeth Cady is born into a prominent family in Johnstown, New York. She would go on to become a well-known advocate for women’s rights.
“[Elizabeth] was arguably the most important female activist-intellectual of [her] era,” biographer Lori Ginzberg writes, “and one of her generation’s most charismatic leaders.”
Elizabeth’s discontent with the status quo began early: Her gender put artificial limits on her education, which she found upsetting. She yearned for more opportunity and would have leapt at the chance to go to college.
She had to instead content herself with attending a female seminary.
When Elizabeth was 24 years old, she married abolitionist orator Henry Stanton. The new Elizabeth Cady Stanton embarked with her husband on a honeymoon to London, where the couple expected to attend an international anti-slavery convention.
You can imagine Stanton’s shock when she learned that she would not be allowed inside the convention because of her gender. Nor was she the only one: Lucretia Mott, a Quaker abolitionist, had also been turned away.
The two quickly became friends.
Stanton later said that Mott opened her up to a “new world of thought.” By 1848, they were working together to host a Woman’s Rights convention in Seneca Falls. Not too long afterwards, Stanton met Susan B. Anthony. By then, Stanton had several young children. It could be difficult for her to travel, but Anthony was less restricted. The two worked together: Anthony would travel and deliver speeches, but Stanton wrote them.
“It has been said that I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them,” Stanton explained.
Fellow suffragette Anna Shaw agreed, noting that “the two women worked marvelously together, for Mrs. Stanton was a master of words and could write and speak to perfection of the things Susan B. Anthony saw and felt but could not herself express.”
The Civil War changed Stanton’s focus to abolitionist causes, at least for a little bit. At one point, she helped gather 400,000 signatures on a petition supporting the 13th amendment (ending slavery). But suffragettes such as Stanton and Anthony later found that they could not support the 14th and 15th Amendments. Those amendments protected black men but failed to include women in their provisions.
This opposition didn’t sit well with other suffragettes. The movement became divided for a while.
Nevertheless, Stanton was busy. Her children were older, and she had more freedom to travel. She gave speeches. She testified before Congress. She encouraged states to let women vote, even if the federal government wouldn’t. She advocated for higher education for women and for legal equality in other ways. She was President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. At one point, she even ran for office.
She wasn’t allowed to vote for herself, but she did receive 24 votes.
In the 1880s, she collaborated on a three-volume History of Woman Suffrage, but a subsequent undertaking proved much more controversial. Stanton had long felt that religion undermined women’s rights. In the late 1890s, she published a two-volume critique of traditional religion, The Woman’s Bible.
Needless to say, many other suffragettes felt that she’d gone a bridge too far.
Stanton passed away in 1902, a few years before Anthony. Both women had worked tirelessly for women’s suffrage, but neither would see the fruits of their labor.
The 19th Amendment was finally ratified in 1920. It provides that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
Both women surely would have been delighted.
Primary Sources:
Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer (1915)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 – 1902) (National Women’s History Museum; Debra Michals ed.; 2017)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Women’s Rights National Historical Park New York; NPS website)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers (Library of Congress website)
Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (2010)
Today in History: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Library of Congress website)
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