November 12, 1815 - October 26, 1902
Birth Place : United States
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) was a social activist and a leading figure of the early women's rights movement in the United States. Along with her husband, Henry Stanton and cousin, Gerrit Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an active abolitionist before she settled on women's issues as her primary focus. Until their disagreement over ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, Stanton enjoyed a strong friendship with abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass along with many other prominent leaders of the abolitionist movement.
Stanton was an outspoken supporter and speech writer of the 19th century temperance movement. She and Susan B. Anthony were instrumental in founding the short-lived Woman's State Temperance Society (1852-53). During her presidency of the organization, she scandalized many supporters by suggesting that drunkenness be made sufficient cause for divorce. She was a strong critic of religion in general and Christianity in particular, which distanced her from the religiously oriented Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In addition to suffrage, she addressed many issues pertaining to women including custody of children, abortion, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce laws, and the economic health of the family.
Elizabeth Cady, the eighth of eleven children, was born in Johnstown, New York to Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady. Five of her siblings died in early childhood or infancy. A sixth, her brother Eleazar, died at age 20 just prior to his graduation from Union College in Schenectady, New York. Only Elizabeth Cady and four sisters lived well into adulthood and old age. Growing up, Elizabeth was closest to her younger sister Margaret, two years Elizabeth's junior. Close friends as well as sisters, they spent much of their time playing together in Johnstown. Later in life, Elizabeth named one of her own daughters for her sister. (Griffith; Stanton, Eighty Years & More)
Stanton's mother, Margaret Livingston Cady, a descendant of early Dutch settlers, was the daughter of Colonel James Livingston, an officer in the American Revolutionary War who assisted in the capture of Benedict Arnold at West Point, New York. Margaret Livingston was a commanding woman whom Stanton routinely described as "queenly." She stood nearly six feet tall and was both appreciably taller and younger than her husband. (Griffith, pp.10-11) While Stanton's daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, remembers her grandmother as being fun, affectionate, and lively, Stanton herself did not share such memories. (Blatch, pp. 18-20) Emotionally devastated by the loss of so many children, Margaret Livingston Cady fell into a depression, which kept her from being fully involved in the lives of her remaining children. Since Judge Cady coped with this loss by immersing himself in his work, many of the childrearing responsibilities fell to Elizabeth's elder sister, Tryphena, eleven years her senior. (Griffith, p.7)
Daniel Cady, Stanton's father, was a prominent attorney who served one term in the Congress of the United States (Federalist; 1814-1817) and later became a judge. Judge Cady introduced his daughter to the law and, together with her brother-in-law, Edward Bayard, planted the earliest seeds which grew into her legal and social activism. Even as a young girl, she enjoyed perusing her father's law library and debating legal issues with his law clerks. It was this early exposure to law that, in part, caused Stanton to realize how severely the law favored men over women, particularly over married women. She was horrified to learn that married women had virtually no property rights, income or employment rights, or even custody rights over their own children, and determined that she would one day work to change these inequities. (Stanton, Eighty Years & More, pp 31-32, 48) Like many men of his day, Judge Cady was a slave holder in Johnstown. In fact, Peter Teabout, a slave in the Cady household and later a freeman in Johnstown, who took care of Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, is remembered with particular fondness by Stanton in her memoir, Eighty Years & More. It was, it appears, not the fact that her family owned at least one slave, but her exposure to the abolition movement as a young woman visiting her cousin, Gerrit Smith, in Peterboro, New York that led to her abolitionist sentiments.
Unlike many women of her era, Stanton was formally educated. She attended Johnstown Academy, where she studied Latin, Greek and mathematics, until the age of 16. At the Academy, she enjoyed being in co-ed classes where she could compete intellectually and academically with the boys her age and older. She did this very successfully, winning several academic awards and honors while a student in Johnstown.
In her memoir, Stanton credits the Cadys' neighbor, Rev. Simon Hosack, with strongly encouraging her intellectual development and academic abilities at a time when she felt these were undervalued by her father. Writing of her brother's death when she was eleven years old, Stanton remembers trying to comfort her father in his grief, saying that she would try to be all her brother had been. At the time, her father's response devastated Stanton: "Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!" Understanding from this that her father valued boys above girls, Stanton tearfully took her disappointment to Hosack, whose firm belief in her abilities counteracted her father's disparagement. Hosack went on to teach Stanton Greek, encouraged her to read widely, and ultimately bequeathed her his own Greek lexicon along with other books. (Stanton, Eighty Years & More, pp21-24)
Upon graduation from Johnstown Academy, Stanton received one of her first tastes of sexual discrimination. Stanton watched with dismay as the young men graduating with her, many of whom she had surpassed academically, went on to Union College, as her older brother, Eleazar, had done a number of years earlier. In 1830, with Union College taking only men, Stanton enrolled in the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, NY, which was founded and run by Emma Willard. She was later joined at the school by her sister Margaret. (The school was renamed the Emma Willard School in honor of its founder in 1895.)
Early during her student days in Troy, Stanton remembers being strongly influenced by Charles Grandison Finney, an evangelical preacher and revivalist. It seems his influence, combined with the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of her childhood, caused her great stress. After hearing Finney speak, Stanton became terrified of her own possible damnation: "Fear of judgment seized my soul. Visions of the lost haunted my dreams. Mental anguish prostrated my health. Dethronement of my reason was apprehended by my friends." (Stanton, Eighty Years & More, p.43) Stanton credits her father and brother-in-law, Edward Bayard, with removing her from the situation and, after taking her on a rejuvenating trip to Niagra Falls, finally restoring her reason and sense of balance. (Stanton, Eighty Years & More, p.43) She was never again to abandon her commitment to the human intellect, rational thought, and logical analysis.
As a young woman, Elizabeth Cady met Henry Brewster Stanton through her early involvement in the temperance and the abolition movements. Henry Stanton was an acquaintance of Elizabeth Cady's cousin, Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist and member of the "Secret Six" that supported John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, WV. Stanton was a journalist, an antislavery orator, and, after his marriage to Elizabeth Cady, an attorney. Despite Daniel Cady's reservations, the couple were married in 1840 and had six children, carefully planned (Baker, p. 107-108) between 1842 and 1856.
Soon after returning to the United States from their European honeymoon, the Stantons moved into the Cady household in Johnstown, NY. Henry Stanton studied law under his father-in-law until 1843, when the Stantons moved to Boston where Henry joined a law firm. While living in Boston, Elizabeth thoroughly enjoyed the social, political, and intellectual stimulation that came with a constant round of abolitionist gatherings and meetings. Here she enjoyed the company of such people as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Lowell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. (Stanton, Eighty Years & More, p 127)
In 1847, concerned about the effect of New England winters on Henry Stanton's fragile health, the Stantons moved from Boston to Seneca Falls, NY, into a house that had been purchased for them by Elizabeth's father. After a difficult period of adjustment to the life of a rural housewife, Stanton became increasingly involved in the community of Seneca Falls and, by 1848, was firmly committed to the nascent women's rights movement. It was in Seneca Falls that the couple's last four children, two daughters and two sons, were born. Stanton asserted that her children were conceived under a program she called voluntary motherhood. However, the Stanton's seventh and last child, Robert, born in 1859, was an unplanned menopausal child born when she was forty-four. Stanton loved motherhood and assumed primary responsibility for rearing the children. She was remembered by her daughter Margaret as cheerful, sunny and indulgent.
The Stanton marriage was not entirely without tension and disagreement. Because of employment, travel and financial considerations, husband and wife lived more often apart than together. Friends of the couple found them very similar in temperament and ambition, but quite dissimilar in their views on certain issues such as women's rights. In 1842, abolitionist reformer Sarah Grimke counseled Elizabeth in a letter: "Henry greatly needs a humble, holy companion and thou needest the same." However, both Stantons appeared to consider their marriage an overall success and the marriage lasted for forty-seven years, ending with Henry's death in 1887. (Baker, pp. 99-113).
Throughout her marriage and eventual widowhood, Stanton took her husband's surname as part of her own, signing herself Elizabeth Cady Stanton or E. Cady Stanton, but refused to be addressed as Mrs. Henry B. Stanton. Asserting that women were individual persons, she stated that, "(t)he custom of calling women Mrs. John This and Mrs. Tom That and colored men Sambo and Zip Coon, is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all."
Stanton was a great admirer, and subsequently a friend, of the Quaker feminist Lucretia Mott, whom she heard speak at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London, England in the spring of 1840 while on her honeymoon. Stanton became angry when she couldn't see Mott speak, as women in the audience were required to sit in a roped-off section hidden from the view of the men in attendance. Later, Stanton and Mott were the primary organizers of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. For this convention, Stanton drafted the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on The Declaration of Independence, Stanton's Declaration proclaimed that men and women are created equal. At the Seneca Falls Convention she proposed, among other things, a then-controversial resolution demanding voting rights for women. The final resolution, including feminine voting rights, was passed, in no small measure, because of the support of Frederick Douglass, who attended and informally spoke at the convention.
In 1851, soon after the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, Stanton met Susan B. Anthony. They were introduced on a street in Seneca Fall by mutual acquaintance Amelia Bloomer, a feminist who had declined to sign the Declaration of Sentiments despite her attendance at the convention. Stanton and Anthony were to remain close friends and colleagues for the rest of Stanton's life. Both women recognized that their skills and talents complemented one another. Stanton was the better orator and writer, and produced many of Anthony's speeches. Anthony was the movement's organizer and tactician. Unlike Anthony's relatively narrow focus on suffrage, Stanton wanted to push for a broader platform of women's rights. The opposing viewpoints led to some discussion and conflict, but never affected their friendship and working relationship.
Despite their disagreements, both Stanton and Anthony, upset that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution made voting rights dependent on citizenship, which in turn was defined as applying only to men, broke with their abolitionist backgrounds and lobbied strongly against ratification of these amendments. (Griffith, p. 122; Kern p. 111) They believed that so largely expanding the male franchise in the country would only strengthen the opposition to women gaining the right to vote. Stanton was angry that the abolitionists, her former partners in working for both women's and Negro rights, refused to demand that the language of the amendments be changed to include women.
It was at this time that Stanton declared, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman." Eventually, Stanton's rhetoric took on a potentially racist tone. Arguing on behalf of female suffrage, Stanton posited that women voters of "wealth, education, and refinement" were needed to offset the effect of former slaves and immigrants whose "pauperism, ignorance, and degradation" might negatively effect the American political system. (Griffith, p. 124) Another time she declared it to be "a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom [of civil rights] first." (Kern, p. 111) While her frustration was understandable, it has been argued that Stanton's position, and most especially the arguably racist tone of some of her statements, helped do two things: (1) fragment the civil rights movement by pitting African American men against women, and (2) establish a basis for the literacy requirements that followed the Black male franchise. (Kern, pp 111-112) Initially, Stanton's position caused a significant rift between herself and many civil rights leaders, particularly Frederick Douglass, who believed that their horrifying treatment as slaves justified giving now free African American men the right to vote even if women continued to be denied the franchise. In a letter written to Josephine Sophia White Griffing in 1868, Douglass, refusing an invitation to speak in Washington, DC, on behalf of women's suffrage, wrote as follows:
"As you very well know, woman has a thousand ways to attach herself to the governing power of the land and already exerts an honorable influence on the course of legislation. She is the victim of abuses, to be sure, but it cannot be pretended I think that her cause is as urgent as ours. I never suspected you of sympathizing with Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton in this course. Their principal is: that no Negro shall be enfranchised while woman is not. Now, considering that white men have been enfranchised always, and colored men have not, the conduct of these white women, whose husbands, fathers, and brothers are voters, does not seem generous." (Foner, p. 600)
Ultimately, Stanton's position led to a schism in the women's rights movement itself. There were leaders of the women's rights movement, including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, who argued against Stanton's "all or nothing" position. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868. By 1869, disagreement over ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment gave birth to two separate women's suffrage organizations. The National Woman's Suffrage Association (NWSA) founded in May, 1869 by Stanton and Anthony, opposed passage of the fifteenth amendment without it being changed to include female suffrage. The American Woman's Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded the following November and led by Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, supported the amendment as written.
Believing that men should not be given the right to vote without women also being granted the franchise, Sojourner Truth, a former slave and feminist, affiliated herself with Stanton and Anthony's organization. (James, pp 345-47 & 389; Palmer, pp xxvii; Sklar pp 72-75) They were joined by Matilda Joslyn Gage, who later worked on The Women's Bible with Stanton. Despite Stanton's position and efforts to expand the Fifteenth Amendment to include voting rights for women, the amendment passed, as originally written, in 1870.
After passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and its support by the Equal Rights Association and prominent suffragists such as Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, the gap between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other leaders of the women's movement widened as Stanton took issue with the fundamental religious leanings of several movement leaders. Unlike many of her colleagues, Stanton believed organized Christianity relegated women to an unacceptable position in society.
She explored this view in The Woman's Bible, which elucidated a feminist understanding of biblical scripture and sought to correct the fundamental sexism Stanton saw as being inherent to organized Christianity. (Stanton, The Woman's Bible, p.7) Likewise, Stanton supported divorce rights, employment rights, and property rights for women, issues which the more conservative suffragists preferred not to become substantially involved in. (James, p.389) Clearly not limited by her perspective on religion, however, Stanton went on to write many of the more important documents and speeches of the women's rights movement.
In a view different from many modern feminists, Stanton believed that abortion was infanticide (The Revolution, I, No. 5 (February 5, 1868), 1). She addressed the issue in an 1873 letter to Julia Ward Howe, recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University Library, and in editions of the newsletter The Revolution, Stanton wrote, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." She suggested that solutions to abortion would be found, at least in part, in the elevation and enfranchisement of women.
As she aged, Stanton was also active internationally, spending a great deal of time in Europe, where her daughter and fellow feminist, Harriot Stanton Blatch, lived, and in 1888 she helped prepare for the founding of the International Council of Women. In 1890, Stanton opposed the merger of the National Woman's Suffrage Association with the more conservative and religiously based American Woman Suffrage Association. Over her objections, the organizations merged, creating the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Despite her opposition to the merger, Stanton became its first president, largely because of Susan B. Anthony's support. In good measure because of the Women's Bible, she was, however, never popular among the more religiously conservative members of the 'National American'.
On January 17, 1892, Stanton, Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Isabella Beecher Hooker addressed the issue of suffrage before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. In contrast to the response common earlier in the century, the suffragists were cordially received and members of the House listened carefully to their prepared statements. Stanton made a strong point when speaking of the value of the individual, noting that value was not based on gender. As with the Declaration of Sentiments she had penned years earlier, Stanton's statement eloquently expressed not only the need for women's voting rights in particular, but the need for a revamped understanding of women's position in society and even of women in general:
The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear--is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. . . .'
"History of Woman Suffrage", Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., eds., vol. 4, 1902.
Sadly, Stanton died in 1902 some twenty years before women were finally granted the right to vote in the United States. She was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.
In 1868, Stanton and Anthony founded the women's rights newsletter The Revolution. Stanton served as co-editor with Parker Pillsbury and frequently contributed to the paper. Stanton also wrote countless letters and pamphlets, as well as articles and essays for numerous periodicals, including Amelia Bloomer's "Lily", Paulina Wright Davis's "Una", and Horace Greeley's "New York Tribune".
Starting in 1881, Stanton, Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage published the first of three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, an anthology of writings about the movement in which they were so prominent. This anthology reached six volumes by various writers in 1922.
Stanton's individual writings include:
* Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897 ISBN 1-59102-009-3
* The Woman's Bible ISBN 1-57392-696-5
* Solitude of Self ISBN 1-930464-01-0
Declaration of Sentiments; Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY accessed through the National Park Service or through the Women's Rights National Historical Park website (occassionally not able to be accessed directly).
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