Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Woman's Rights Activist
Influences, Ideals and Activism of a Great American Feminist Leader
Aug 9, 2008
Elizabeth Cady Stanton is often overshadowed by her partner in the women’s rights movement, Susan B. Anthony; however, if it were not for the collaboration of the two, women’s suffrage and rights may not have been achieved as quickly in the United States.
Elizabeth Cady was born on November 12, 1815 in Johnstown, New York. From her early childhood, she was prepared for a life in the advocacy of women’s rights. Her family’s household was run very strictly and the devout Presbyterian beliefs which pervaded it caused little Elizabeth to be quite a neurotic child with horrible nightmares about death and hell.
In addition to a home which demanded order and submission, it was a home in which there were several daughters, all of whom were second to the Stanton sons. When a baby girl was born, the family typically bewailed the fact and when their last son passed away in an untimely manner, Elizabeth’s father lamented the fact that she was not a boy.
Determined to live up to her father’s expectations of what a good (male) child could be she studied, among other things, Greek and Latin and learned to ride a horse very well.
Elizabeth was exposed early on to injustices of women in her father’s law offices where she found that the laws were simply not written for the protection or in favor of women. Even abused women, she found, had no rights to their property in the event of a divorce. Her father, half joking, always told her to work to change the laws.
Abolitionist Ideals and Experiences Which Shaped Her Activism
In 1839, Elizabeth met Henry Brewster Stanton, a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. They were engaged a month later and honeymooned in London in 1840, attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention. It was here that she met Lucretia Mott and the women decided, after being refused seats at the convention, that a women’s rights convention ought to be held.
Such an idea did not come to fruition until 1848 when the Seneca Falls Convention was held. In the meantime, Elizabeth and her family moved to Boston, where she met and mingled with the likes of Emerson and Hawthorne; became well acquainted with transcendentalist ideals and attended anti-slavery and temperance conventions.
Cady Stanton’s Family Life
In all of her lectures and travels for the progression of women’s rights, Elizabeth preferred to speak around her home in Seneca Falls, or near her parents’ home in Johnstown, NY.
Her dedication to her family caused a rift between her and Susan B. Anthony. Anthony was often frustrated at the limitations Cady Stanton allowed herself to succumb to by being a mother and wife.
Political Activism and Ideas
The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was the first of its kind and ran for two days. Elizabeth, along with Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright (Mott’s sister), Jane Hunt (another Quaker woman) and Mary Ann McClintock, organized the convention into a great success of lectures and activism.
While she intended to write a volume on women’s rights in the fashion of Mary Wollstonecraft, she never completed it. She did however publish an autobiography: Eighty Years and More; with Anthony wrote three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage; and in the 1890s published The Woman’s Bible.
Her other ideas and actions included a campaign against the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution as they did not support women’s rights. She also favored Ulysses S. Grant for president and believed, unlike other temperance activists, that alcohol was not the problem, but a symptom of man’s rule over women. Additionally, with Anthony she founded the Loyal League which provided relief to the families of Union soldiers.
Elizabeth died on October 27, 1902 at nearly eighty-seven years old. At her death, she was the honorary President of the National Women’s Suffrage Association.
Banner, Lois W. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman’s Rights. 1980.
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