STANTON, ELIZABETH CADY

The opening salvo in the battle for women's rights was fired in 1848 by the grande dame of U.S. feminism, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When Stanton and colleague Lucretia Mott organized the nation's first women's rights convention in 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, they sought nothing less than a revolution. They pressed for equal education, better employment opportunities, and the vote for women—radical notions in the mid–nineteenth-century United States. For fifty years, Stanton was a key strategist and standard-bearer for the feminist movement. Along

with fellow suffragist susan b. anthony and other activists, she helped elevate the legal, social, and political status of U.S. women.

"The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the wayofwomen's emancipation."
—Elizabeth Cadystanton

Stanton was born November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York. She was the middle daughter of Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady, a prominent couple in Johnstown. Elizabeth was one of eleven children, but all five of her brothers and one sister died during childhood. In some ways, Stanton was raised by her parents as a substitute for those deceased brothers. Unlike most girls of her generation, Stanton participated in athletic activities and excelled in courses typically reserved for males, such as

Latin, Greek, logic, philosophy, and economics. Stanton's father, a lawyer and a New York Supreme Court judge, even encouraged her to study law with him, although later he regretted his actions: as an adult, Stanton used her legal knowledge to craft well-reasoned arguments for women's rights, a cause he disliked.

After she graduated from Johnstown Academy in 1830 at age fifteen, Stanton's ambition was to attend New York's Union College. Her enrollment was impossible, however, because Union, like every other college in the entire nation, did not admit women as students. (Ohio's Oberlin College was the first U.S. college to accept female students, in 1834.) Instead of Union College, Stanton attended Troy Female Seminary, in Troy, New York. She graduated in 1833.

Stanton returned to Johnstown, where she divided her time between the pleasant diversions of upper-class life and the important social causes of the day. Despite her parents' objections, she married an abolitionist, Henry Brewster Stanton, in 1840. From the beginning of their marriage, Stanton insisted on being addressed in public by her full name. Throughout her long life, only her political enemies called her Mrs. Henry Stanton.

While attending an international antislavery conference in London with her new husband in 1840, Stanton met Mott, a Quaker activist involved in the nascent U.S. women's movement. Stanton and Mott became quick friends and allies. Both were outraged over the refusal of the male antislavery leaders to seat female delegates at the London conference. Back in the United States, the two corresponded and sometimes joined forces in abolitionist activities. They also finalized plans for the nation's first women's rights convention.

In 1848, one hundred women and men gathered in Seneca Falls for the historic convention. The agenda included a speech by renowned African American abolitionist frederick douglass, and a proposal to adopt Stanton's manifesto, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. The Seneca Falls declaration was inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence. It boldly proclaimed that all men and women were equal and that women deserved greater protection under the law. The declaration called for the expansion of employment and educational opportunities for women, and the right for women to vote. After lengthy debate, it was adopted in its entirety by the convention.

The seneca falls convention was derided by the press—prompting Stanton to complain that its participants "were neither sour old maids, childless women, nor divorced wives as the newspapers declared them to be." Nevertheless, the convention succeeded in bringing women's issues to the political forefront.

After Seneca Falls, Stanton was an acknowledged leader of the U.S. women's movement. She soon joined forces with Anthony, the country's most prominent suffragist. For the next fifty years, Anthony was Stanton's staunchest feminist ally.

In addition to women's rights and abolition, Stanton was involved in temperance, the movement to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol in the United States. Combining temperance with women's rights made sense to Stanton, both philosophically and practically. Drunken men destroyed the lives of powerless wives and children. Without laws to protect them, women who were married to chronic drinkers often faced physical abuse and financial ruin. The Married Women's Property Act of 1848 addressed this imbalance in legal power. Stanton helped win passage of the law by conducting an exhaustive petition drive throughout the state of New York.

Although Stanton supported temperance wholeheartedly, she was angered that the movement's male leaders were just as misguided as the abolitionists at the London antislavery conference. When Stanton attempted to participate in a Sons of Temperance meeting, she was summarily removed from the building. She and Anthony formed their own group, the Woman's State Temperance Society, in 1852.

The women's movement stalled around the time of the u.s. civil war because many of its supporters focused exclusively on abolition. As president of the National Woman's Loyal League, Stanton helped gather four hundred thousand signatures on petitions in support of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery. After the war, Stanton and Anthony were bitterly disappointed when their abolitionist colleagues refused to support the inclusion of women in either the fourteenth amendment, which granted African American males citizenship, or the fifteenth amendment, which gave those males the right to vote. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869 with the sole purpose of winning the vote for women.

Because Stanton was busy with her family of seven children, she initially worked at her home on voting rights strategy while Anthony traveled the country delivering lectures. Later, this arrangement changed as Stanton became a sought-after speaker during the 1870s in the lyceum movement, a series of cultural and educational programs for adults.

As Stanton grew older, she became even more radical in her thinking. She shocked people with her pro-divorce, pro-labor, and antireligion opinions. In particular, her book Woman's Bible, published partially in 1895 and partially in 1898, drew fire because in it, Stanton lambasted what she viewed as the male bias of the Bible. When Stanton suggested that all organized religion oppressed women and should therefore be abolished, many felt she had gone too far. These unpopular opinions explain why some feminists disassociated themselves from Stanton and looked exclusively to Anthony for leadership.

Stanton also helped compile three of the six volumes of the less controversial History of Woman Suffrage, published from 1881 to 1886, with coauthor Matilda Joslyn Gage.

On Stanton's eightieth birthday, she was honored at a gala in New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. Looking back at her life, she told a crowd of six thousand people that she had been warned repeatedly against organizing the Seneca Falls convention. People told her it was a huge mistake because God had set the bounds of a woman's world and she should be satisfied with it. Stanton remarked that it was exactly this type of repressive attitude that led to her embrace of the women's movement.

Stanton died October 26, 1902, in New York City, at the age of eighty-six. Although she did not witness the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which gave nearly 25 million U.S. women the right to vote in 1920, she left her imprint on it.

further readings

Griffith, Elisabeth. 1984. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 1898. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897. Reprint, 2002. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books.

Wellman, Judith. 2004. The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

cross-references

Temperance Movement.

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

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The writer and reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was perhaps the most gifted and versatile feminist leader in American history.

Elizabeth Cady was born in Johnstown, N.Y., on Nov. 12, 1815. The daughter of a judge, she became a feminist while still a child after hearing her father inform abused women that they had no legal alternative but to endure mistreatment by their husbands and fathers. She had the best education then available to women. While completing her studies at the Troy Female Seminary, she experienced a nervous collapse on hearing the great revivalist James Finney preach; henceforth she had an intense hostility toward organized religion.

In 1840 Elizabeth Cady married the abolitionist leader Henry B. Stanton. Although he sympathized with her ambitions, he was not wealthy, and she remained home with her five children for many years. All the same, she was able to do some writing and speaking for the feminist cause. In 1848 she organized America's first woman's-rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., where the Stantons resided. She also composed a declaration of principles, which described the history of mankind as one of "repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her." Despite opposition, she persuaded the convention to approve a resolution calling for women's suffrage.

During the Civil War, Stanton and her friend and ally Susan B. Anthony created the National Woman's Loyal League to build support for what became the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Once the slaves were free, the two worked to ensure that women would be enfranchised along with the freedmen. However, their work was seen as a threat to the black franchise. If the struggle to enfranchise black males was associated with votes for women, it was thought, neither black men nor women of any color would get the vote. But this opposition only made the Stantonites more stubborn. Their campaign finally divided the women's suffrage movement into two camps: their own New York-based band of uncompromising radicals, the National Woman Suffrage Association, and a more conservative group, the American Woman Suffrage Association, which was centered in Boston and accepted the primacy of black suffrage. There were several ideological differences between the two organizations, and a good deal of personal animosity developed. By 1890, however, these were overcome, and the two organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with Stanton as president.

Although Stanton remained active into old age, she was less concerned with suffrage and more interested in divorce reform and other matters during her last years. A fluent and witty writer, she collaborated with Anthony and Matilda Gage on the first three volumes of the massive History of Woman Suffrage and edited The Woman's Bible. Mrs. Stanton also wrote articles on a variety of subjects for the best contemporary magazines. She died on Oct. 26, 1902, in New York City.

Further Reading

Mrs. Stanton's autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898), is engaging; it should be supplemented by Harriet Stanton Blatch and Theodore Stanton, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (2 vols., 1922). Volumes 1-3 of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1888), which she edited with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, contain important material, as does volume 4 (1903), edited by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper. A good biography is Alma Lutz, Created Equal: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902 (1940). □

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902),began her long career for woman's rights at the convention dedicated to this subject in her hometown of Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848. Soon thereafter she became the lifelong collaborator with Susan B. Anthony in working for woman suffrage, as well as for temperance laws and the abolition of slavery. While the plain Miss Anthony was a talented organizer, the warm, attractive Mrs. Stanton was more effective as a public speaker and a vigorous journalist. The differences in abilities and temperaments often caused disagreements, but they worked together in many ways to promote the women's cause, publishing the journal Revolution (1868–69) and compiling and editing the three volumes of the monumental History of Woman Suffrage (1881–86). Mrs. Stanton alone created The Woman's Bible (2 vols., 1895, 1898), interpreting from her point of view all references to women in the Bible. She was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869–90) and a successor organization for two years and a promulgator of the International Council of Women, the latter in part an outgrowth of frequent long visits late in life to be with her daughter Harriet Stanton Blatch, married to an Englishman. Her last major work was her autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898).

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902) US social reformer. Born Elizabeth Cady, she was a lifelong worker for women's rights. She organized the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), the first public assembly in the USA for female suffrage, and was later president of the Woman Suffrage Association.