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 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When
Elizabeth Cady married abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, she'd
already observed enough about the legal relationships between men and
women to insist that the word obey be dropped from
the ceremony.
An active abolitionist herself, Stanton was outraged when
the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, also in 1840, denied
official standing to women delegates, including Lucretia Mott. In
1848, she and Mott called for a women's rights convention
to be held in Seneca Falls, New York. That convention,
and the Declaration of Sentiments written by Stanton which was
approved there, is credited with initiating the long struggle towards
women's rights and woman suffrage.
After 1851, Stanton worked in
close partnership with Susan B. Anthony. Stanton often served
as the writer and Anthony as the strategist in this
effective working relationship. After the Civil War, Stanton and Anthony
were among those who were determined to focus on female
suffrage when only voting rights of freed males were addressed
in Reconstruction. They founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and
Stanton served as president.
When the NWSA and the rival
American Woman Suffrage Association finally merged in 1890, Stanton served
as the president of the resulting National American Woman Suffrage
Association.
In her later years she added to her speech-
and article-writing a history of the suffrage movement, her autobiography
Eighty Years and More and a controversial critique of women's
treatment by religion, The Woman's Bible.
While Stanton is best known
for her long contribution to the woman suffrage struggle, she
was also active and effective in winning property rights for
married women, equal guardianship of children, and liberalized divorce laws
so that women could leave marriages that were often abusive
of the wife, the children, and the economic health of
the family.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in New York on
October 26, 1902, with nearly 20 years to go before
the United States granted women the right to vote.
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