Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Like so many social reformer of the age, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s interests covered the full spectrum of issues and agendas, but she is best remembered as the founding voice of the early women’s rights movement in the United States.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born into a wealthy New York legal and political family, and unlike many women of the age, she was well educated. She attended first the Johnstown Academy, continuing thereafter to higher education in the Troy Female Seminary in New York, founded and run by women’s rights activist Emma Willard. In 1848, with the help of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth organized the world’s first women’s rights convention, but unlike Mott, who did not consider it a priority, she insisted that female suffrage be included in the resolutions of the conference.
In 1851, she met and befriended Susan B Anthony, and from that moment on one of the most powerful and influential partnerships in the cause of female emancipation was born. In 1854, Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered an address to the New York legislature on an omnibus women’s rights bill, speaking passionately for the cause. In 1860, the bill was passed, and most of the legal reforms in regards to women’s rights she sought, with the significant exception of enfranchisement, were achieved.
Upon the advent of the Civil War, she and Susan B Anthony plunged into the abolition debate, forming the National Women’s Loyal League, lobbying passionately for the constitutional abolition of slavery. After the war, however, the two women created enormous controversy among fellow reformers by trying to link female suffrage to black suffrage, and when this failed, by criticizing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for ignoring woman suffrage.
They then turned to constitutional reform, and in 1869 founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, forerunner of the organization that would eventually secure the Nineteenth Amendment.
Always highly militant and controversial, Elizabeth Cady Stanton raised her voice frequently in matters such as divorce law liberalization, and urging women to leave unhappy and abusive marriages. She advocated birth control, and what she referred to as the ‘right to self-sovereignty’ of women. However, thanks to her support for liberalized divorce laws, reproductive self-determination and greater sexual freedom for women, she became increasingly estranged from the mainstream of women’s rights reformers.
She also diverged from the likes of Lucretia Mott in her open distaste for organized religion, and fell foul of numerous religious and temperance organizations for her outspoken views and radical opinions. She was, in fact, far ahead of her time, and while embittered somewhat by these rejections, she continued her independent course on behalf of women’s emancipation until her death in 1902.