Elizabeth Cady Stanton began the women’s suffrage movement at the women’s rights convention she helped organize in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. One of the earliest feminists in U. S. history, she had a profound effect on women’s organizing and the shape of the U. S. electorate. Though she never lived to see passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which enfranchised women in every state in 1920, her fifty-four-year struggle for the vote changed the future of U. S. institutions and politics forever. Always a controversial figure, she shocked the people of her day not only with the call for the vote and the politicizing of women, but also for radical changes within the family, for women’s rights to hold property and keep their own wages, and with her critique of Christianity.
Stanton’s political life began through her involvement in the abolitionist movement. In 1840, she and her husband traveled to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London just after they married. When they arrived, women delegates were not seated at the convention because such political activity was not considered proper for women. There she met Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), and the two became convinced women should hold a conference of their own to discuss women’s rights.
That conference occurred eight years later, in 1848. By this time, Stanton was increasingly isolated and constrained by the needs of a growing family (she eventually had seven children) in a small town with a husband who was away much of the time. In some ways Stanton’s role as wife and mother detracted from her political work, keeping her from traveling and speaking early on (though she wrote plenty). However, it probably also galvanized her political commitment to women’s equality, as she understood the extreme responsibilities women of her day felt and directed her gaze at women’s inability to secure resources—such as political influence and property—in their own right.
In addition to spearheading the 1848 conference with Mott and two others, Stanton drafted the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence, it enumerated the wrongs done to women at the hands of a male-dominated society. Its most controversial tenet, which Stanton insisted upon including, was the call for woman suffrage. Without the vote, she believed, men could continue to pass laws oppressive to women. That call was so radical it was opposed by many at the conference, including Mott.
Soon after the conference, Stanton met Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), and the two began a lifelong friendship and political partnership dedicated to the
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated, and Susan B. Anthony, ca. 1890 (Library of Congress)
Cause of women’s suffrage and equality. They formed the New York State Women’s Temperance Society in 1852 and the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866 and founded The Revolution, a radical feminist newspaper, in 1868.Although the AERA was designed to help entwine the movement for women’s rights with the movement for black rights after the Civil War, struggles over whether combining the two groups’ claims for suffrage would jeopardize them both in the debate over the Civil War amendments led to a rift in the women’s suffrage movement. Stanton and Anthony decided they would not let the claims of former male slaves take precedence over the claims of women and even employed some racist arguments to help their cause, though both had been abolitionists. In 1869 they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which was to deal with all forms of women’s oppression, be they social, economic, or political.
Over their fifty-year partnership, Stanton and Anthony struggled to end laws that discriminated
Against married women by prohibiting them from holding property and from keeping their own wages and by denying them guardianship of their children after a divorce. Once her seven children were old enough, Stanton toured the country on behalf of women’s rights and grew bolder and more critical with age. Eventually, Anthony would focus more on suffrage as her primary goal, whereas Stanton would work on a range of topics, taking a more radical view of what it would mean to enact women’s equality. She believed women were oppressed sexually, especially in marriage, and fought for women’s control over their own bodies, meaning the right to refuse the sexual advances of their husbands to prevent pregnancy and also to delegitimize marital rape. She fought for an end to prostitution, for temperance, and for more liberalized divorce laws— the latter two to help women escape the abuse of violent, drunken husbands, in an era in which physical abuse of wives was widely accepted.
Stanton argued for labor unions, job training, and equal wages. She claimed that education and gainful employment were necessary specifically for women so that they could elevate the morality and virtue, not just of women but of the entire citizenry. She argued that women were degraded and became dishonorable when they were forced to marry to guarantee their own subsistence or position in life. Education and profitable labor would make women independent and just; in turn, they would teach their children the same virtues. In a country that scorned aristocratic systems and despotism, Stanton claimed that to deny women property was tyranny and to force them to marry for social position and financial security perpetuated class hierarchy. Education and independent labor for women were necessary for the United States to live up to its democratic ideals.
Stanton always believed suffrage was necessary so that women could organize politically to alter other areas of oppression in their lives. This was often a more progressive stance than others within the emerging women’s reform movement wished to take, as many did not advocate changing the traditional roles of women but rather wished to protect and enhance them. Yet as Stanton aged, she grew even more radical in her claims—advocating free thought and dialogue, even if it might seem to put their suffrage coalitions in jeopardy—and in her attacks on the structure of the Christian church. She believed that Christianity ultimately degraded women by creating double standards about sexuality, but other women reformers believed Christianity elevated the status of women. In 1895 Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, a feminist commentary on the Old Testament. Stanton’s radical critiques, while distancing her from both her fellow women reformers and from conservatives in society, ultimately paved the way for subsequent “mainstream” twentieth-century feminist critiques that called for equal opportunity for women outside the home but also the elimination of the sexual division of labor within it.
Jennifer Schenk
See also Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Equal Pay Act; Glass Ceiling; Pay Equity; Pink Collar; Steinem, Gloria; Women and Work
References and further reading
DuBois, Ellen Carol, ed. 1992. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches. Revised ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Griffith, Elisabeth. 1984. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York: Oxford University Press.
National American Woman Suffrage Association. 1971. Woman Suffrage: Arguments and Results 1910-1911. New York: Kraus Reprint Company.
Oakely, Mary Ann B. 1972. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York: Feminist Press.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 1898. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897. New York: T. Fischer Unwin.
Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. 1999. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, an Illustrated History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Weber, Sandra S. 1985. Special History Study: Women’s Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, New York. Washington, DC: U. S. Department of the Interior/ National Park Service.
World History
