Who was Elizabeth Cady Stanton?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up in Johnstown, New York, and married the abolitionist Henry Stanton. On their 1840 trip to London, women delegates were refused seats at a world anti-slavery meeting. That day she and Lucretia Mott agreed to organize a women's rights meeting. It took place at Seneca Falls in July 1848, and Stanton wrote most of its Declaration of Sentiments. After 1851 she teamed up with Susan B. Anthony: Stanton wrote, Anthony organized. She was an editor of the paper The Revolution, headed the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1869 and helped write a history of the cause. She died in 1902.
Political views
- She wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which put the denial of the vote at the head of women's complaints.Source: nps.gov
- She treated marriage as a civil contract and pushed for looser divorce laws, including divorce for a husband's drunkenness.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- She also pressed for property rights for wives, equal pay, wider job options, dress reform and changes in religion.Source: nps.gov
- In 1863 she helped found the Women's Loyal National League, which gathered petitions for the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- She turned against the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, since they gave Black men the vote but left out women.Source: womenshistory.org
- She wanted a state separate from religion, and in The Woman's Bible she attacked orthodox teaching for holding women down.Source: womenshistory.org
Legacy
Admirers call Stanton the leading thinker of the women's movement in her century. Her Declaration of Sentiments set its goals, and her writing on marriage, divorce and religion pointed ahead to later feminism. Her decades of speeches and essays fed the campaign that finally won votes for women in 1920, long after she died. Critics and historians also point to serious faults. In the fight over the Fifteenth Amendment she used elitist and racially insulting language, which Frederick Douglass condemned and which split the movement. She mostly spoke for educated, property-owning women and argued against votes for immigrant men. Even other suffragists disliked The Woman's Bible.
In their own words
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”