Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American writer and reformer who led the women's rights movement in the United States for half a century. She was the driving force behind the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the main author of its Declaration of Sentiments, which first put the demand for women's suffrage at the centre of the movement. With Susan B. Anthony she built the organisations that campaigned for the vote, though she died 18 years before American women won it, and her record includes racially disparaging language that historians have criticised.

Elizabeth Cady was born on 12 November 1815 in Johnstown, New York, into one of the town's leading families. Her father, Daniel Cady, was a wealthy lawyer, one-term congressman and later a state judge. All her brothers died young, and when the last of them died her grieving father told her he wished she were a boy. She studied at Johnstown Academy and, since no college then admitted women, at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary.

At the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist, she met Henry Brewster Stanton, an anti-slavery campaigner. They married in 1840, leaving the word obey out of the vows, and had seven children.

On their honeymoon the couple went to London for the World Anti-Slavery Convention, where women delegates were barred from taking part and seated behind a curtain. There Stanton befriended the Quaker minister Lucretia Mott, and she later traced her commitment to women's rights to that experience. After some years in Boston, the Stantons moved in 1847 to Seneca Falls in upstate New York.

In the summer of 1848 a meeting with Mott and other Quaker women led to a hastily organised convention in Seneca Falls. Stanton drafted its Declaration of Sentiments, modelled on the Declaration of Independence, and included a call for women's right to vote. The resolution passed only after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke in its favour. The Seneca Falls Convention, attended by an estimated 300 people, is remembered as the first gathering called solely to discuss women's rights.

In 1851 Stanton was introduced to Susan B. Anthony, beginning a working partnership of some fifty years. Stanton, tied to the house by her children, wrote the speeches and arguments; the unmarried Anthony organised and travelled. Stanton also campaigned for married women's property rights and divorce reform.

During the American Civil War the two women founded the Women's Loyal National League in 1863, whose petition of nearly 400,000 signatures supported the amendment abolishing slavery. In 1866 Stanton became the first woman to run for Congress, winning 24 votes.

After the war Stanton and Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred racial discrimination in voting but did nothing for women, insisting that all women and African Americans be enfranchised together. In this dispute Stanton wrote in elitist and racially condescending terms about Black and immigrant men, drawing rebukes from Douglass. The movement split in 1869. Stanton became president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, while Lucy Stone and others formed a rival body. In 1878 she and Anthony persuaded a senator to introduce the suffrage amendment that would eventually be ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment.

Through the 1870s Stanton toured the country as a lecturer. With Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage she produced the History of Woman Suffrage, whose first three volumes form a vast record slanted toward their own wing. When the two suffrage groups merged in 1890 she became the first president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1895 she published The Woman's Bible, which treated much of scripture as reflecting prejudice against women. It caused uproar, and in 1896 the suffrage association voted to disown it, leaving her increasingly isolated. She died of heart failure in New York City on 26 October 1902. Her reputation was revived by feminist historians from the 1960s onward.

Stanton lived her whole life in the United States, mainly in New York State and New York City. Our 1880 and 1900 maps show the country during her decades of campaigning.