Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-1902, American reformer, a leader of the woman-suffrage movement, b. Johnstown, N.Y. She was educated at the Troy Female Seminary (now Emma Willard School) in Troy, N.Y. In 1840 she married Henry Brewster Stanton, a journalist and abolitionist, and attended with him the international slavery convention in London. The woman delegates were excluded from the floor of the convention; the indignation this aroused in Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott was an important factor in their efforts to organize women to win greater equality. With several others they called the first women's rights convention in the United States in 1848 at Seneca Falls, N.Y. Stanton insisted that a suffrage clause be included in the bill of rights for women that was drawn up at the convention. From 1852, despite occasional disagreements, she was intimately associated with Susan B. Anthony in leading the women's movement. She was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869-90) and of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890-92). With Anthony as publisher she and Parker Pillsbury edited (1868-70) the Revolution, a militant feminist magazine. Elizabeth Stanton was a brilliant orator and an able journalist, and as a writer and lecturer she strove for legal, political, and industrial equality of women and for liberal divorce laws. She compiled with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881-86) and wrote Eighty Years and More (1898).

Bibliography: See Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (ed. by T. Stanton and H. S. Blatch, 1922); biographies by W. E. Wise (1960) and E. Griffith (1985).

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.