Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York, one of eleven children of Daniel Cady, a prominent lawyer and later a judge, and Margaret Livingston Cady, a daughter of a Revolutionary War officer ^[1]. Only five of the Cady children survived to adulthood, and the deaths of her siblings marked the household. When her only surviving brother, Eleazar, died in 1826, the ten year old Elizabeth tried to console her grieving father, who reportedly wished aloud that she had been a boy. The exchange stayed with her for the rest of her life, and she later described it as an early spur to prove that a daughter could equal any son ^[2].

Her father's law office gave her an unusual education in the legal disabilities of women. Listening to clients, she learned that a married woman in New York could not own property, keep her own wages, or claim guardianship of her children ^[1]. She studied Greek, Latin, and mathematics at the Johnstown Academy, often outperforming the boys in her classes, and won a prize in Greek. Because no college then admitted women, she enrolled at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, graduating in 1832 with one of the most rigorous educations available to an American woman of her generation ^[3].

The religious revivals sweeping upstate New York also touched her youth. A period of anxiety following the preaching of the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney left her wary of orthodox religion, and she moved steadily toward a rationalist outlook that would later inform her most controversial writing ^[2].

Through her cousin Gerrit Smith, a wealthy reformer in Peterboro, New York, the young Elizabeth Cady entered abolitionist circles. There she met Henry Brewster Stanton, an antislavery lecturer ten years her senior. They married in 1840, and at her insistence the word obey was dropped from the ceremony ^[1]. She kept her birth name alongside her husband's, signing herself Elizabeth Cady Stanton rather than Mrs. Henry Stanton, a small act that signaled larger convictions.

The couple spent their honeymoon at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in June 1840, where the organizers refused to seat women delegates from the United States. Forced to watch from a curtained gallery, Stanton met the Quaker minister Lucretia Mott, and the two women resolved to hold a convention on women's rights when they returned home ^[4]. Family duties delayed the plan for eight years.

After periods in Johnstown and Boston, the Stantons settled in 1847 in Seneca Falls, New York, where Henry practiced law and Elizabeth managed a growing household. Isolated from the intellectual life she had enjoyed in Boston, she later wrote that the drudgery of small town domesticity sharpened her sense of what women were denied ^[2]. In July 1848, at a tea in nearby Waterloo with Mott and three other women, she poured out that discontent, and the group decided to act at last.

On July 19 and 20, 1848, roughly three hundred people gathered at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls for the first convention devoted to the rights of women in the United States ^[4]. Stanton drafted the meeting's central document, the Declaration of Sentiments, modeling it deliberately on the Declaration of Independence. It asserted that all men and women are created equal and listed eighteen grievances against the legal and social order that subordinated women ^[1].

The most radical of the eleven resolutions attached to the declaration demanded the elective franchise for women. Even Mott thought the suffrage resolution went too far, and it was the only one that did not pass unanimously. Support from the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who spoke in its favor, helped carry it ^[4]. One hundred people, sixty eight women and thirty two men, signed the declaration. Newspapers across the country ridiculed the convention, but the mockery spread its ideas, and Stanton welcomed the publicity.

Seneca Falls made Stanton a public figure and fixed the vote at the center of the movement's agenda for the next seven decades. Historians studying who was Elizabeth Cady Stanton generally begin with this convention, since it announced both her method, applying the nation's founding language to women, and her willingness to demand more than her allies thought prudent ^[5].

In 1851 Stanton met Susan B. Anthony on a street corner in Seneca Falls, beginning one of the most productive partnerships in American reform. Anthony, unmarried and free to travel, organized and lectured; Stanton, tied to home by seven children, wrote many of the speeches and arguments Anthony delivered. Stanton described the arrangement plainly: she forged the thunderbolts and Anthony fired them ^[2].

Among the achievements of Elizabeth Cady Stanton beyond Seneca Falls, her legislative campaigns in New York rank high. Her petitioning and her 1854 address to the New York legislature contributed to the expansion of the state's Married Women's Property Act in 1860, which gave married women rights to their earnings and to joint guardianship of their children ^[1]. During the Civil War she and Anthony founded the Women's Loyal National League in 1863, which gathered close to 400,000 signatures urging the constitutional abolition of slavery, the largest petition drive in the nation's history to that point ^[6].

After the war, Stanton broke with former abolitionist allies over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which extended citizenship and voting protections to Black men while omitting women. In 1869 she and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, and Stanton served as its president for two decades. During this fight she sometimes used elitist and racially charged arguments about educated white women deserving the vote before uneducated men, rhetoric that later historians have weighed critically against her achievements ^[5]. In 1878 she persuaded Senator Aaron Sargent of California to introduce a federal woman suffrage amendment; its text, unchanged, became the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 ^[6]. With Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage she also compiled the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, published between 1881 and 1886, preserving the movement's record in thousands of pages of documents ^[3].

Stanton's marriage to Henry lasted forty seven years, until his death in 1887, though the two often lived apart as his legal and political work and her lecturing kept them on separate schedules. They had seven children, born between 1842 and 1859: Daniel, Henry, Gerrit, Theodore, Margaret, Harriot, and Robert ^[1]. Stanton took open pride in motherhood and in her unconventional theories of child rearing, which favored fresh air, loose clothing, and less medical intervention than was then customary.

Her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch followed her into the suffrage movement and helped revive the New York campaign in the early twentieth century, while her son Theodore wrote on women's rights from Europe. Family finances required Stanton to earn money in middle age, and from 1869 to about 1880 she spent months each year on the lyceum lecture circuit, speaking across the Midwest and West on marriage, divorce, education, and child care ^[2].

Stout, white haired, and quick with a joke, Stanton cultivated a grandmotherly public image that softened the radicalism of what she actually said. She argued for liberalized divorce laws, for women's control over their own bodies within marriage, and for coeducation, positions that unsettled even some suffragists ^[5].

In 1890 the rival suffrage organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Stanton, then seventy four, served as its first president until 1892. Her farewell address to Congress that year, The Solitude of Self, argued that because every human being ultimately faces life alone, every woman needs the full rights of an individual. Many consider it her finest piece of writing, and it was reprinted and distributed by admirers for years ^[6].

Her last decade was dominated by a project that cost her much of her following. In 1895 and 1898 she published the two parts of The Woman's Bible, a commentary arguing that organized religion and selective scripture reading had been used to keep women subordinate. The National American Woman Suffrage Association formally disavowed the book in 1896 over Anthony's objection, and younger, more cautious suffragists pushed its author to the movement's margins ^[3]. Stanton also published her memoir, Eighty Years and More, in 1898.

Nearly blind but still writing daily, she died of heart failure at her apartment in New York City on October 26, 1902, seventeen days before her eighty seventh birthday ^[1]. On her desk was an unfinished letter urging President Theodore Roosevelt to support woman suffrage.

Stanton did not live to cast a legal ballot, but the amendment she helped draft in 1878 became law in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment barred the states and the federal government from denying the vote on account of sex ^[6]. For decades afterward, popular memory of the movement centered on Anthony, partly because Stanton's religious skepticism and her postwar rhetoric made her a less comfortable symbol. Scholarship since the 1970s has restored her place as the movement's chief theorist ^[5].

Her Seneca Falls home is preserved within Women's Rights National Historical Park, established by Congress in 1980, and the Wesleyan Chapel where she read the Declaration of Sentiments still stands nearby ^[4]. In 1973 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. A monument including her likeness alongside Anthony and Sojourner Truth was unveiled in New York's Central Park in August 2020, the park's first statue honoring historical women ^[6].

Any fair account of Elizabeth Cady Stanton facts must hold two things together: the breadth of her claims for women, covering property, custody, education, divorce, religion, and the vote, and the blind spots of her later rhetoric on race. An Elizabeth Cady Stanton biography is therefore also a history of American democracy arguing with itself, which is one reason her writing is still read and debated more than a century after her death ^[3].