biography
| name: |
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady
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née Cady
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1815–1902)
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| biography:
| Women's rights leader and feminist pioneer, born in Johnstown, New York, USA. The daughter of a lawyer who made no secret of his preference for another son, she early showed her desire to excel in intellectual and other ‘male’ spheres. She graduated from the Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary (1832) and then was drawn to the abolitionist, temperance, and women's rights movements through visits to the home of her cousin, the reformer Gerrit Smith. In 1840 she married a reformer Henry Stanton (omitting ‘obey’ from the marriage oath), and they went at once to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where she joined other women in objecting to their exclusion from the assembly. On returning to the USA, Elizabeth and Henry had seven children while he studied and practised law, and eventually they settled in Seneca Falls, NY. With Lucretia Mott and several other women, she called the famous Seneca Falls Convention (Jul 1848), drew up its ‘Declaration of Sentiments’, and took the lead in proposing that women be granted the right to vote. She continued to write and lecture on women's rights and other reforms of the day (and for a while adopted the new female clothing promoted by Amelia Bloomer), and after meeting Susan B Anthony in 1851, she was one of the principals in promoting women's rights in general (such as divorce) and the right to vote in particular. During the Civil War she concentrated her efforts on abolishing slavery, but afterwards she became even more outspoken in promoting women suffrage. She became publisher of the Revolution (1868–9), a militant weekly paper, and with Susan B Anthony she formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869), of which she was the first president (1869–90). During 1868–80 she also travelled widely as a popular lecturer on the lyceum circuit. She became one of the chief proponents of a woman suffrage amendment to the US Constitution, and she and Anthony collaborated on the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–6). When the two leading woman suffrage organizations united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she served as its first president (1890–2). Meanwhile, she had long been critical of the role that the Bible and organized religion played in denying women their full rights, and with her daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, she published a critique, The Woman's Bible (2 vols, 1895, 1898). This brought considerable protest not only from expected religious quarters but from many in the woman suffrage movement. More so than many other women in that movement, she was able and willing to speak out on a wide spectrum of issues - from the primacy of legislatures over the courts and constitution, to women's right to ride bicycles - and she deserves to be recognized as one of the more remarkable individuals in American history. |
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