Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(1815-1902)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton became one of the best known and most
radical women’s rights advocates of the nineteenth century. If Susan B. Anthony
became the movement’s most effective organizer, Stanton became its leading
philosopher.
No one would have
predicted Stanton’s public role from the circumstances of her birth. She was
born in Johnstown, New York, on November 12, 1815. Her father, Daniel
Cady, was a judge, “a conservative of the conservatives,” as Stanton later
recalled. Her mother, Margaret, came from the landed Livingston family of
eastern New York and remained, according to her daughter, “blue-blooded,
socially as well as physically.”
As a young girl, she
was reminded often that sons would have been more welcome in her family than
daughters. Of eleven children born to her parents, six died young, including
all five of the Cady sons. When her eldest brother, Eleazer, died in 1826,
Stanton tried desperately to comfort her father. All he would say was, “Oh, my
daughter, I wish you were a boy!” Stanton learned early that such gender
stereotyping was not personal but structural. In her father’s law office, where
she acted as assistant, she discovered that everywhere, men had legal,
political, and economic dominance.
In the 1830s, Stanton
saw a far different vision of the world when she visited her cousins, Gerrit
and Ann Smith. The Smiths were committed anti-slavery activists, and there
Stanton met her future husband, Henry Brewster Stanton, a tireless and
enthusiastic abolitionist lecturer. Henry and Elizabeth were married, despite
strong parental misgivings, in May, 1840.
The Stantons spent
their honeymoon in England, where they attended the World Anti-Slavery
Convention. Among the delegates to the meeting, Lucretia Mott most
attracted Stanton’s attention. Quaker minister from Philadelphia, founder of
the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and mother of six, Mott
epitomized for Stanton the freedom and independence for women that Stanton had
dreamed about but had never before seen.
The World Anti-Slavery
Convention decided on the first day of its meeting not to seat women delegates.
Angered by such discrimination, Stanton and Mott resolved to organize a
convention, as soon as they returned home, solely to discuss women’s rights.
For eight years,
however, they postponed action. The Stantons were immersed in starting a new
career and a new family, first in Johnstown and then in Boston, where Henry
began work as a lawyer and politician. Not until the Stantons moved to Seneca
Falls would Elizabeth and Lucretia carry out their plan. There in Seneca Falls,
the Stantons would raise four more children, to make seven in all. There, too,
Elizabeth would begin her active career as a women’s rights reformer.
Perhaps three hundred
people attended the Seneca Falls convention. One hundred of them (sixty-eight
women and thirty-two men) signed the Declaration of Sentiments, asserting that
“all men and women are created equal.” While Stanton discussed her own reasons
for organizing this meeting, she said very little about why so many other
people, on such short notice, would attend such a radical gathering.
Local people were in
fact inspired to support women’s rights by their participation in three other
reform movements. The first was the effort to pass a Married Women’s Property
Act. For twelve years, the right of married women to own property had been
seriously discussed throughout New York State. Wealthy men supported it so that
they could give land to their daughters. Yet such an act had unsettling
implications. Public debate over the Married Women’s Property Act was also a
debate over the equality of women and men and, in fact, over the meaning of the
Declaration of Independence itself. As republicans, Americans linked
citizenship rights (including the right to vote) with economic independence. If
married women could be economically self-sufficient, what would prevent them
from demanding political independence, as well? This debate over women’s rights
occurred simultaneously with efforts to give black males equal voting rights
with white men in New York State. Both issues forced New Yorkers to consider
the essential meaning of citizenship in their democratic republic.
Against this general
background, two more reform efforts hit Seneca Falls and the neighboring
village of Waterloo with particular intensity. In Waterloo, a large Quaker
meeting split apart over issues relating to equality. One group formed the new Congregational Friends. Active in both abolitionism and women’s rights, almost
every family in this group would attend the Seneca Falls convention. In Seneca
Falls at the same time, traditional political parties exploded under the impact
of the new Free Soil party, whose goal was to eliminate slavery in the western
territories. Free Soilers in Seneca Falls would also support the women’s rights
convention.
Because the Seneca
Falls convention used the language of the Declaration of Independence, people
reacted to its demands for women’s equality more positively than Stanton
remembered. Many Americans agreed with Horace Greeley, editor of the nation’s
most influential newspaper, the New York Tribune, when he admitted that
“when a sincere republican is asked to say in sober earnest, what adequate
reason he can give for refusing the demand of women to an equal participation
with men in political rights, he must answer, None at all. . . . it
is but the assertion of a natural right, and as such must be conceded.”
The Seneca Falls
convention raised issues that Americans would debate through the mid-twentieth
century. It touched off a series of local and national conventions that led to
the formation of national women’s rights organizations, to women’s active presence
in public life, and finally, seventy-two years later, to the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920, giving women the right to vote.
Americans remain ambivalent, however, about whether or not “all men and women
are created equal.”
Stanton herself never
deviated from her uncompromising commitment to women’s rights, which she called
“the greatest revolution the world has ever known.” In her last public act
before her death in 1902, she wrote one letter to President Theodore Roosevelt
and another, the day before she died, to his wife, Edith K. Roosevelt, asking
them to support a constitutional amendment for women’s right to vote.
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