Elizabeth Cady Stanton
American social reformer, orator, writer and diplomat
1815 CE to 1902 CE
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) is an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement.
Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women's rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States.
Before Stanton narrows her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, she is an active abolitionist together with her husband, Henry Brewster Stanton and cousin, Gerrit Smith.
Unlike many of those involved in the women's rights movement, Stanton addresses various issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights.
Her concerns include women's parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce, the economic health of the family, and birth control.
She is also an outspoken supporter of the 19th-century temperance movement.
After the American Civil War, Stanton's commitment to female suffrage causes a schism in the women's rights movement when she, together with Susan B. Anthony, decline to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
She opposes giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while women, black and white, are denied these same rights.
Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women's issues beyond voting rights, leads to the formation of two separate women's rights organizations that are finally rejoined, with Stanton as president of the joint organization, approximately twenty years after her break from the original women's suffrage movement.
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The first women's rights convention advertises itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman".
Held in Seneca Falls, New York, it spans two days over July 19–20, 1848.
Attracting widespread attention, it will soon be followed by other women's rights conventions, including the Rochester Women's Rights Convention in Rochester, New York, two weeks later.
In 1850 the first in a series of annual National Women's Rights Conventions will meet in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Female Quakers local to the area have organized the meeting along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is not a Quaker.
They had planned the event during a visit to the area by Philadelphia-based Lucretia Mott.
Mott, a Quaker, is famous for her oratorical ability, which is rare for non-Quaker women during an era in which women are often not allowed to speak in public.
The meeting comprisea six sessions including a lecture on law, a humorous presentation, and multiple discussions about the role of women in society.
Stanton and the Quaker women present two prepared documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and an accompanying list of resolutions, to be debated and modified before being put forward for signatures.
A heated debate springs up regarding women's right to vote, with many—including Mott—urging the removal of this concept, but Frederick Douglass, who is the convention's sole African American attendee, argues eloquently for its inclusion, and the suffrage resolution is retained.
Exactly one hundred of approximately three hundred attendees sign the document, mostly women.
The convention is seen by some of its contemporaries, including featured speaker Mott, as one important step among many others in the continuing effort by women to gain for themselves a greater proportion of social, civil and moral rights, while it is viewed by others as a revolutionary beginning to the struggle by women for complete equality with men.
Stanton considers the Seneca Falls Convention to be the beginning of the women's rights movement, an opinion that will be echoed in the History of Woman Suffrage, which Stanton co-writes.
The convention's Declaration of Sentiments becomes "the single most important factor in spreading news of the women's rights movement around the country in 1848 and into the future", according to Judith Wellman, a historian of the convention.
By the time of the National Women's Rights Convention of 1851, the issue of women's right to vote will have become a central tenet of the United States women's rights movement.
These conventions will become annual events until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had broken with their abolitionist backgrounds after the American Civil War and will lobby strongly against ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, meant to grant African American men the right to vote.
Believing that African American men, by virtue of the Thirteenth Amendment, already have the legal protections, except for suffrage, offered to white male citizens, and that so largely expanding the male franchise in the country will only increase the number of voters prepared to deny women the right to vote, both Stanton and Anthony are angry that the abolitionists, their former partners in working for both African American and women's rights, refuse to demand that the language of the amendments be changed to include women.
Eventually, Stanton's oppositional rhetoric takes on racial overtones.
Arguing on behalf of female suffrage, Stanton posits that women voters of "wealth, education, and refinement" are needed to offset the effect of former slaves and immigrants whose "pauperism, ignorance, and degradation" might negatively affect the American political system.
She declares it to be "a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom [of civil rights] first." (Kern, Kathi. Mrs. Stanton's Bible. Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY, 2001, p. 111 (directly quoting Stanton))
Stanton's position causes a significant rift between herself and many civil rights leaders, particularly Frederick Douglass, who believes that white women, already empowered by their connection to fathers, husbands, and brothers, at least vicariously have the vote.
According to Douglass, their treatment as slaves entitles the now liberated African-American men, who lack women's indirect empowerment, to voting rights before women are granted the franchise.
African-American women, he believes, would have the same degree of empowerment as white women once African-American men had the vote; hence, general female suffrage is, according to Douglass, of less concern than black male suffrage. (Foner, Philip S., editor. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Lawrence Hill Books (The Library of Black America); Chicago, IL, 1999., p.600)
Disagreeing with Douglass, and despite the racist language she sometimes resorts to, Stanton firmly believes in a universal franchise that empowers blacks and whites, men and women.
Speaking on behalf of black women, she states that not allowing them to vote condemns African American freedwomen "to a triple bondage that man never knows," that of slavery, gender, and race. (Dubois, Ellen Carol. Feminism & Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869. Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY, 1999 p.69).
She is joined in this belief by Anthony, Olympia Brown, and most especially Frances Gage, who was the first suffragist to champion voting rights for freedwomen.
Thaddeus Stevens, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and ardent abolitionist, agrees that voting rights should be universal.
In 1866, Stanton, Anthony, and several other suffragists draft a universal suffrage petition demanding that the right to vote be given without consideration of sex or race.
The petition is introduced in the United States Congress by Stevens.
Despite these efforts, the Fourteenth Amendment will be passed, without adjustment, in 1868.
Stanton's position has led to a major schism in the women's rights movement itself by the time the Fifteenth Amendment is making its way through Congress.
Many leaders in the women's rights movement, including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, strongly argue against Stanton's "all or nothing" position.
By 1869, disagreement over ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment has given birth to two separate women's suffrage organizations.
The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) had been founded in May 1869 by Anthony and Stanton, who will serve as its president for twenty-one years.
The NWSA opposes passage of the Fifteenth Amendment without changes to include female suffrage and, under Stanton's influence in particular, champions a number of women's issues that are deemed too radical by more conservative members of the suffrage movement.
The better-funded, larger, and more representative woman suffragist vehicle American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded the following November and led by Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, supports the Fifteenth Amendment as written.
Following passage of that Amendment, the AWSA prefers to focus only on female suffrage rather than advocate for the broader women's rights espoused by Stanton: gender-neutral divorce laws, a woman's right to refuse her husband sexually, increased economic opportunities for women, and the right of women to serve on juries.