Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton an American writer, orator and reformer (1815-1902) who was the chief intellectual force behind the early women's rights movement in the United States. She drafted the Declaration of Sentiments for the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and devoted her long life to the cause of women's legal, political and religious equality.

Early Life and Education

Elizabeth Cady was born in 1815 in Johnstown, New York, the daughter of a prominent lawyer and judge and a mother from a politically active family. She received an unusually good education for a girl of her time, first at a local academy and then at the Troy Female Seminary, where she studied mathematics, classics and natural science. The law books in her father's office taught her how statutes placed women under the authority of men.

The death of her only brother when she was eleven, and her father's lament that he wished she had been a boy, is said to have strengthened her determination to make her own way. In the household of her cousin Gerrit Smith she met the leaders of the antislavery and temperance movements, including fugitive slaves and radical abolitionists.

In 1840 she married the reformer Henry Brewster Stanton and attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London on their honeymoon. There she and other women delegates were seated behind a curtain and denied the right to speak, an insult that turned her attention decisively toward the condition of women. The couple settled at Seneca Falls, New York.

The Seneca Falls Convention

In July 1848, with her friend Lucretia Mott and others, Stanton organised a convention on women's rights at Seneca Falls. She wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, modelled on the Declaration of Independence, which declared that all men and women are created equal and listed the injuries endured by women. Its most controversial demand was for the right to vote.

The document catalogued the grievances of women in law, education, employment and marriage, including the loss of property, wages and children to husbands, exclusion from the professions and the universities, and a double standard of morality. It framed these wrongs not as natural arrangements but as the deliberate creation of custom and statute, and it asserted women's claim to full citizenship.

The convention adopted the declaration after debate, and the vote on woman suffrage carried narrowly, chiefly through the eloquence of Frederick Douglass. The meeting is now regarded as the beginning of the organised movement for women's rights in the United States, and its declaration as one of the great documents of American reform.

Collaboration and Family Life

Stanton raised seven children, and the responsibilities of her household limited but never ended her public work. She wrote speeches and articles at her kitchen table, sent them out through the network of reform, and kept up an immense correspondence with activists across the country. Her marriage was itself unusual, for the wedding ceremony omitted the promise to obey her husband.

Her partnership with Susan B. Anthony, beginning in the early 1850s, gave the movement both its ideas and its organisation. Stanton supplied analysis, argument and prose, while Anthony travelled, spoke and built the institutions. Together they founded The Revolution and compiled the History of Woman Suffrage, and together they shaped the agenda of American feminism for half a century.

Her interests ranged widely. She wrote on education, on marriage and divorce, on the legal position of women, on co-education and on dress reform, and she lectured across the country. She was one of the first American women to address a congressional committee, and she testified repeatedly before state legislatures on behalf of married women's property rights.

The Woman's Bible and Religious Criticism

In her later years Stanton turned her critical attention to religion, which she believed was the deepest source of women's subjection. The Woman's Bible, published in two parts in 1895 and 1898, was a commentary in which she and a group of collaborators examined the scriptural passages used to justify the subordination of women and questioned the authority of a text so used.

The book provoked intense opposition, including from within the suffrage movement, which feared that it would alienate the churches and damage the campaign. The organisation she had helped to found declined to endorse it, and Stanton, then in her eighties, was left to defend her position largely alone.

She saw the critique of religion as inseparable from the demand for equality, arguing that women would never be free while they were taught that servitude was divinely ordained. Her willingness to take this unpopular position, at a time when the movement needed respectability, illustrates her intellectual courage and her refusal to trim her arguments for tactical advantage.

Ideas, Influence and Legacy

Stanton's thought combined the natural rights tradition of the Enlightenment with a radical critique of the family, the church and the law. She held that women's capacities are equal to men's and that the differences observed between the sexes are the product of education and custom. From this premise she drew conclusions that went well beyond the vote to questions of marriage, property, divorce and religion.

Her influence on the movement was intellectual rather than organisational, and her writings gave later activists a rich vocabulary of argument. Although she did not live to see the vote won, her Declaration of Sentiments defined the aims of the campaign, and her insistence on women's full humanity shaped the feminism of the following century.

She died in 1902 in New York City. Together with Anthony she is honoured as a founder of the American women's rights movement, and her home at Seneca Falls is preserved as a historic site. Her writings remain a fundamental source for the history of feminism and of nineteenth-century American reform.

See also

• Seneca Falls Convention
• Declaration of Sentiments
• The Woman's Bible
• Susan B. Anthony