Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (redirected from Elizabeth Cady Stanton)

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1815–1902, American reformer, a leader of the woman-suffrage movement, b. Johnstown, N.Y. She was educated at the Troy Female Seminary (now Emma Willard School) in Troy, N.Y. In 1840 she married Henry Brewster Stanton, a journalist and abolitionist, and attended with him the international slavery convention in London. The woman delegates were excluded from the floor of the convention; the indignation this aroused in Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott was an important factor in their efforts to organize women to win greater equality. With several others they called the first women's rights convention in the United States in 1848 at Seneca Falls, N.Y. Stanton insisted that a suffrage clause be included in the bill of rights for women that was drawn up at the convention. From 1852, despite occasional disagreements, she was intimately associated with Susan B. Anthony in leading the women's movement. She was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869–90) and of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890–92). With Anthony as publisher she and Parker Pillsbury edited (1868–70) the Revolution, a militant feminist magazine. Elizabeth Stanton was a brilliant orator and an able journalist, and as a writer and lecturer she strove for legal, political, and industrial equality of women and for liberal divorce laws. She compiled with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881–86) and wrote Eighty Years and More (1898).

Bibliography

See Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (ed. by T. Stanton and H. S. Blatch, 1922); biographies by W. E. Wise (1960) and E. Griffith (1985).

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Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

 orig. Elizabeth Cady

(born , Nov. 12, 1815, Johnstown, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 26, 1902, New York, N.Y.) U.S. social reformer and women's suffrage leader. She graduated from Troy Female Seminary (1832), and in 1840 she married the abolitionist Henry B. Stanton and began working to secure passage of a New York law giving property rights to married women. She and Lucretia Mott organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. She joined forces in 1850 with Susan B. Anthony in the woman suffrage movement, and later she coedited the women's-rights newspaper The Revolution (1868–70). In 1869 she became the founding president of the National Woman Suffrage Association.

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Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902) women's rights leader, feminist pioneer; born in Johnstown, N.Y. Daughter of a lawyer who made no secret of his preference for another son, she early showed her desire to excel in intellectual and other "male" spheres. She graduated from the Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary (1832) and then was drawn to the abolitionist, temperance, and women's rights movements through visits to the home of her cousin, the reformer Gerrit Smith. In 1840 she married a reformer, Henry Stanton (omitting "obey" from the marriage oath), and they went at once to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where she joined other women in objecting to their exclusion from the assembly. On returning to the U.S.A., Elizabeth and Henry had seven children while he studied and practiced law, and eventually they settled in Seneca Falls, N.Y. With Lucretia Mott and several other women, she called the famous Seneca Falls Convention in July 1848, drew up its "Declaration of Sentiments," and took the lead in proposing that women be granted the right to vote. She continued to write and lecture on women's rights and other reforms of the day (and for awhile adopted the new female clothing promoted by Amelia Bloomer), and after meeting Susan B. Anthony in 1851, she was one of the principals in promoting women's rights in general (such as divorce) and the right to vote in particular. During the Civil War she concentrated her efforts on abolishing slavery, but afterward she became even more outspoken in promoting women suffrage. She became publisher of the Revolution (1868–69), a militant weekly paper, and in 1869, with Susan B. Anthony, she formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, of which she was the first president (1869–90). Between 1868 and 1880 she also traveled widely as a popular lecturer on the lyceum circuit. She became one of the chief proponents of a woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She and Susan B. Anthony collaborated on the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–86). When the two leading woman suffrage organizataions united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she served as its first president (1890–92). Meanwhile, she had long been critical of the role that the Bible and organized religion played in denying women their full rights, and with her daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, she published a critique, The Woman's Bible (2 vols. 1895, 1898). This brought considerable protest not only from expected religious quarters but from many in the woman suffrage movement. More so than many other women in that movement, she was able and willing to speak out on a wide spectrum of issues—from the primacy of legislatures over the courts and constitution to women's right to ride bicycles—and she deserves to be recognized as one of the more remarkable individuals in American history.