Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American suffragist, social activist and abolitionist. Stanton was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1892 until 1900.
Background
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the eighth of eleven children, was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York, to Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady. Daniel Cady, Stanton's father, was a prominent Federalist attorney who served one term in the United States Congress and then became both a circuit court judge and, in 1847, a New York Supreme Court justice. Stanton's mother, Margaret Livingston Cady, a descendant of early Dutch settlers, was the daughter of Colonel James Livingston, an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.
Education
Elizabeth Cady received a superior education at home, at the Johnstown Academy, and at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, from which she graduated in 1832. Also she studied law in the office of her father.
In 1841 Elizabeth attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, and she was outraged at the denial of official recognition to several women delegates because of their sex. In 1848 she organized America's first woman's-rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, where the Stantons resided. Despite opposition, she persuaded the convention to approve a resolution calling for women's suffrage.
The convention was a hit and in 1850, she got invited at the National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts to speak on the women’s rights.
From 1851 Elizabeth worked closely with Susan B. Anthony; together they remained active for 50 years after the first convention, planning campaigns, speaking before legislative bodies, and addressing gatherings in conventions, in lyceums, and in the streets. Stanton, the better orator and writer, was perfectly complemented by Anthony, the organizer and tactician. She wrote not only her own and many of Anthony’s addresses but also countless letters and pamphlets, as well as articles and essays for numerous periodicals, including Amelia Bloomer’s Lily, Paulina Wright Davis’s Una, and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.
In 1854 Stanton received an unprecedented invitation to address the New York legislature; her speech resulted in new legislation in 1860 granting married women the rights to their wages and to equal guardianship of their children. During her presidency in 1852-1853 of the short-lived Woman’s State Temperance Society, which she and Anthony had founded, she scandalized many of her most ardent supporters by suggesting that drunkenness be made sufficient cause for divorce. Liberalized divorce laws continued to be one of her principal issues.
During the Civil War, Stanton again worked for abolitionism. In 1863 she and Anthony organized the Women’s National Loyal League, which gathered more than 300, 000 signatures on petitions calling for immediate emancipation. The movement to extend the franchise to African American men after the war, however, caused her bitterness and outrage, reemphasized the disenfranchisement of women, and led her and her colleagues to redouble their efforts for woman suffrage.
Stanton and Anthony made several exhausting speaking and organizing tours on behalf of woman suffrage. In 1868 Stanton became coeditor (with Parker Pillsbury) of the newly established weekly The Revolution, a newspaper devoted to women’s rights. She continued to write fiery editorials until the paper’s demise in 1870. She helped organize the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and was named its president, a post she retained until 1890, when the organization merged with the rival American Woman Suffrage Association. She was then elected president of the new National American Woman Suffrage Association and held that position until 1892.
Stanton continued to write and lecture tirelessly. She was the principal author of the Declaration of Rights for Women presented at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. In 1878 she drafted a federal suffrage amendment that was introduced in every Congress thereafter until women were granted the right to vote in 1920. With Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage she compiled the first three volumes of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton died due to a heart attack on October 26, 1902, in the New York City at her daughter’s home.
Elizabeth was a leading figure of the early women's rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls Convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women's rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States.
Elizabeth religious skepticism began early in her life. As a young girl she chafed against the Presbyterianism of her family, but the critical turning point came in 1831, when she was a student at Troy Female Seminary.
Views
Quotations:
"Nothing strengthens the judgement and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility."
"Besides the obstinancy of the nurse, I had the ignorance of the physicians to contend with."
"We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman."
Connections
As a young woman, Elizabeth Cady met Henry Brewster Stanton through her early involvement in the temperance and the abolition movements. Stanton was a journalist, an antislavery orator. The couple was married in 1840, with Elizabeth Cady requesting of the minister that the phrase "promise to obey" be removed from the wedding vows. The couple had 7 children.
