While raising seven children, Elizabeth Cady Stanton became a leader of the Suffrage Movement, serving as the theorist of women’s rights in the late 19th century. She described herself as a “caged lioness”, but refused to believe that women had to choose between motherhood and public activism.
Stanton had a good start in life, born to a well-to-do family, enjoying the privilege of access to formal education in the days when girls were largely excluded from the lecture halls. She married abolitionist Henry Stanton, ten years her senior, and traveled with him to London for the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. When women were not allowed to take seats, she was inspired to work for women’s rights. There she also met Lucretia Mott; later they fought together for women’s rights.
Eight years later, in 1848, she co-hosted the first Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton wrote and presented there the Declaration of Sentiments, which was an inclusive take on the Declaration of Independence. After meeting Susan B. Anthony, the two became close friends and partners in the movement: Anthony was the strategist, and Cady Stanton was the thinker and writer. She co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and edited its journal ‘The Revolution’, addressing a wide range of women’s issues in her lectures and articles, including divorce law and married women’s property rights.
Her later years were focused on writing – publishing History of Woman Suffrage and the controversial Woman’s Bible, which questioned the place of women within religion. Stanton died 18 years before women gained the right to vote in the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the American Constitution in 1920. Her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch did practice her right to vote and continued her mother’s legacy as a feminist activist.
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