Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902), women's rights leader and theorist.A favorite child of a prominent and wealthy New York lawyer, Elizabeth Cady attended Emma Willard's girls' school in Troy, New York, graduating in 1832. In 1840 she married a prominent abolitionist, Henry Stanton. She was inspired to focus on women's rights by her own difficulties as a wife and mother (eventually with seven children), by the serious discriminations against women in U.S. society, and by the reform community around her. In 1848, with Lucretia Mott and others, she organized America's first woman's rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York, where she lived with her family. She drafted the convention's Declaration of Sentiments, an assertion of women's rights modeled on the Declaration of Independence. In 1851, along with Amelia Bloomer, editor of the temperance newspaper the Lily, she designed and wore the simplified Bloomer dress. (The opposition was so vehement, however, that they gave it up after several years.) That same year she met her life‐long coworker in the women's rights cause, Susan B. Anthony.

In 1863, after moving to New York City, she and Anthony founded the Women's Loyal National League. The organization secured over 300,000 signatures to a petition demanding the abolition of slavery. In 1866 she ran (unsuccessfully) for the House of Representatives, when she discovered that the state's prohibition against women voting did not extend to their holding office. She was the first woman to do so. In 1868 she and Anthony founded a cross‐class Workingwoman's Association to improve working conditions for women. That same year they also launched a weekly newspaper, the Revolution, which lasted a year and a half. In 1869 they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, of which Stanton served as president for the next twenty‐one years. That same year she began a twelve‐year stint as a national lecturer for the New York Lyceum Bureau, becoming one of its most popular speakers.

Stanton was known for her searching intellect, wide‐ranging views, and radical positions. Although suffrage and property rights remained central to her women's rights platform, she also favored birth control and liberalized divorce laws—inflammatory issues in her era. She was attracted to communalism, practiced homeopathy and diet reform, critiqued unfair labor practices, and excoriated men for their treatment of women. Far in advance of her times, she saw the abuse of women's bodies in slavery, rape, and confining fashions as central to men's control of women, under a system she occasionally called “patriarchy.” Although Stanton strongly supported woman suffrage—and coedited with Anthony a three‐volume History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1886)—she rejected Anthony's exclusive focus on this issue. In her final decades, she crusaded against religion's oppression of women, writing a Woman's Bible (2 vols., 1895–1898) in which she reworked Bible stories according to women's rights principles. In 1888, along with Anthony, she participated in the founding of the International Council of Women. Her memoirs Eighty Years and More appeared in 1898. A long‐planned systemic treatise on women's rights remained uncompleted, but her output of speeches and articles were sufficient to make her the preeminent women's‐rights theorist of nineteenth‐century America.
See also Antebellum Era; Antislavery; Birth Control and Family Planning; Clothing and Fashion; Feminism; Marriage and Divorce; National American Woman Suffrage Association; Seneca Falls Convention; Stone, Lucy; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women in the Labor Force; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Lois W. Banner , Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Women's Rights, 1979.
Elizabeth Griffith , In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1984.

Lois W. Banner