Author Background

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) got her start in Seneca Falls, New York at the Seneca Falls Convention, where she surprised herself with her own eloquence at a gathering at the Richard P. Hunt home in nearby Waterloo. Invited to put her money where her mouth was, she organized the 1848 First Woman’s Rights Convention with Marth Coffin Wright, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Lucretia Mott and Jane Hunt. She co-authored the Declaration of Sentiments issued by the convention that introduced the demand for votes for women into the debate. Her good mind and ready wit, both well-trained by her prominent and wealthy family, opened doors of reform that her father, Daniel Cady, would rather she left shut. She studied at Troy Female Seminary and learned the importance of the law in regulating women through her father’s law books and interactions with him and his young male law students.

The Abolition Movement

As Elizabeth entered her twenties, her reform-minded cousin Gerrit Smith introduced her to her future husband, Henry Brewster Stanton, a guest in his home. Stanton, an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society and an eloquent speaker for the immediate abolition of slavery, turned Elizabeth’s life upside down. In 1840, they married against her parents’ wishes, departing immediately on a honeymoon to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. There, the convention refused to seat American female delegates. One, though short, slight, and gentle in demeanor, was every bit as imposing as Stanton’s mother. Lucretia Mott, a Hicksite Quaker preacher well-known for her activism in anti-slavery, woman’s rights, religious and other reforms, “opened to [Stanton] a new world of thought.”

At the First Woman’s Rights Convention, Mott and her wide circle of fellow Quakers and anti-slavery advocates, including M’Clintocks, Hunts, Posts, deGarmos, and Palmers, opened a new world of action to Stanton as well. Between 1848 and 1862, they worked the Declaration of Sentiments’ call to “employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf.” They worked on conventions in Rochester, Westchester, PA, and Syracuse and organized, sent letters to, or attended national conventions between 1850 and 1862.

Stanton met Susan B. Anthony, wrote articles on divorce, property rights, and temperance, and adopted the Bloomer costume. By 1852, she and Anthony were refining techniques for her to write speeches and Anthony to deliver them. In 1854, she described legal restrictions facing women in a speech to the New York State Woman’s Rights Convention in Albany. Her speech was reported in papers, printed, presented to lawmakers in the New York State legislature, and circulated as a tract. Though an 1854 campaign failed, a comprehensive reform of laws regarding women passed in 1860. By 1862, most of the reforms were repealed. The Stantons moved from Seneca Falls to New York City in 1862, following a federal appointment for Henry Stanton.

Women’s Suffrage

In the early 1860s, national attention focused on the Civil War. Many anti-slavery men served in the Union Army. The women’s rights movement rested its annual conventions, but in 1863, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony created the Women’s Loyal National League, gathering 400,000 signatures on a petition to bring about immediate passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to end slavery in the United States.

The war over, the women’s movement created its first national organization, the American Equal Rights Association, to gain universal suffrage, the federal guarantee of the vote for all citizens. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s signature headed the petition, followed by Anthony, Lucy Stone, and other leaders. However, the political climate undermined their hopes. The 15th Amendment eliminated restriction of the vote due to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” but not gender. Campaigns to include universal suffrage in Kansas and New York state constitutions failed in 1867. Anthony’s newspaper, The Revolution, edited by Stanton and Parker Pillsbury, male newspaperman and woman’s rights supporter, published between January 1868 and May 1870, with articles on all aspects of women’s lives.

Between 1869 and 1890, Stanton and Anthony’s National American Woman Suffrage Association worked at the national level to pursue the right of citizens to be protected by the U.S. Constitution. Despite their efforts, Congress was unresponsive. In 1878, an amendment was introduced and Stanton testified. She was outraged by the rudeness of the Senators, who read newspapers or smoked while women spoke on behalf of the right to vote.

Between 1878 and 1919, a new suffrage bill was introduced in the Senate every year. Meanwhile, the American Woman Suffrage Association turned its attention to the states with little success until 1890, when the territory of Wyoming entered the United States as a suffrage state. By then, Anthony had engineered the union of the two organizations into the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Colorado, Utah, and Idaho gained woman suffrage between 1894 and 1896. There it stayed until well after Stanton and Anthony’s deaths.

Nothing seemed to stop Stanton. In the 1870s, she traveled across the United States giving speeches. In “Our Girls,” her most frequent speech, she urged girls to get an education that would develop them as persons and provide an income if needed; both her daughters completed college. In 1876, she helped organize a protest at the nation’s 100th birthday celebration in Philadelphia. In the 1880s, she, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage produced three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage.

Writing Career and Legacy

Stanton also traveled in Europe, visiting daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch in England and son Theodore Stanton in France. In 1888, leaders of the U.S. women’s movement staged an International Council of Women to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. Stanton sat front and center. In 1890, she agreed to serve as president of the combined National American Woman Suffrage Society.

In 1895, she published The Woman’s Bible, earning the censure of members of the NAWSA. Her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, appeared in 1898. Her final speech before Congress, The Solitude of Self, delivered in 1902, echoed themes in “Our Girls,” claiming that as no other person could face death for another, none could decide for them how to educate themselves.

Along the way, Stanton advocated for Laura Fair, accused of murdering a man with whom she was having an affair. She allied the movement and her resources to Victoria Woodhull, who claimed the right to love as she pleased without regard to marriage laws. She supported Elizabeth Tilton, a supposed victim of the sexual advances of clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. She broke with Frederick Douglass over the vote in the 1860s and congratulated him on his marriage to Helen Pitts of Honeoye, NY in 1884, when others, including family, criticized their interracial marriage.

Stanton was a complicated personality who lived a long life, saw many changes and created some of them. Her writings were prolific. She often contradicted herself as she and the world around her progressed and regressed for the better part of a century.

Declaration of Sentiments from Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention (1848) 

Copyright: Public Domain

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

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; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Bottom of Form:

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men — both natives and foreigners.

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master — the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.

He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women — the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.

After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.

He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.

He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education — all colleges being closed against her.

He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.

He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation, — in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the state and national legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.

Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.

Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eunice Newton Foote, Mary Ann McClintock, Martha C. Wright, Jane C. Hunt, Amy Post, Catharine A. F. Stebbins, Mary H. Hallowell, Charlotte Woodward, Sarah Hallowell.

Richard P Hunt, Samuel D. Tilman, Elisha Foote, Frederick Douglass, Elias J. Doty, James Mott, Thomas McClintock.

This Declaration was unanimously adopted and signed by 32 men and 68 women.

Sources

“Declaration of Sentiments from Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention.” National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbnawsa.n7548/?sp=2,  Public Domain.

“Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”  National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/elizabeth-cady-stanton.htm, Public Domain.