Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Women’s Rights Activist:
1815 – 1902
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American social activist, abolitionist,
and leading figure of the early woman's movement.
Elizabeth's father, was a prominent attorney who later became a New York
Supreme Court justice. Judge Cady introduced his daughter to the law and
planted the early seeds that grew into her legal and social activism. Even as a
young girl, she enjoyed perusing her father's law library and debating legal
issues with his law clerks. It was this early exposure to law that, in part,
caused her to realize how disproportionately the law favored men over women,
particularly over married women.
When Elizabeth 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, Elizabeth Cady 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 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
which was approved there, is credited with initiating the long struggle towards
women's rights and woman suffrage.
In the years following the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. 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, Elizabeth Cady Stanton served as the president of the
resulting National American Woman Suffrage Association.
While Elizabeth Cady 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. These reforms made it possible for women to leave
marriages that were abusive of the wife, the children, and the economic health
of the family.
In addition she made a stand for women in theological circles by
publishing The Woman's Bible in 1895. She attempted to take the misogyny out of
scriptural interpretations and present them in a brave new feminist light.
