Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the best known and most conspicuous advocate of women's rights in the nineteenth century. For almost fifty years she led the first women's movement in America. She set its agenda, drafted its documents, and articulated its ideology. Her followers grew from a scattered network of local reform groups into a national constituency of politically active women. Her statements and actions were recorded in the national press; her death in 1902 made international headlines. Newspapers called her "America's Grand Old Woman."

On November 12, 1895, six thousand people celebrated Stanton's eightieth birthday. The "Queen Mother" of American suffragists was enthroned on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. As usual, her rotound form was swathed in yards of black silk. White lace set off her carefully coifed thick white curls and bright blue eyes.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's feminism was not limited to suffrage. In an era of outspoken reformers, she was an innovative and radical thinker. She believed that women had been condemned to a subordinate status by entrenched attitudes based on Judeo-Christian tradition, patriarchal institutions, English common law, American statutes, and social customs. She frequently compared the position of women to that of slaves, and she worked to abolish both forms of bondage. In addition to suffrage she advocated coeducation, girls' sports, job training, equal wages, labor unions, birth control, cooperative nurseries and kitchens, property rights for wives, child custody rights for mothers, and reform of divorce laws. Stanton was the first person to enumerate every major advance achieved for women in the last century and many of the reforms still on the agenda in this century.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's talents were aptly suited to the role of agitator. Well educated and widely read, she had keen intelligence, a trained mind, and an ability to argue persuasively in writing and speaking. Her personality was magnetic. In conversation and correspondence she was witty and opinionated; in person she was funny, feisty, engaging. Her most remarkable trait was her self-confidence. It gave her the courage to take controversial stands without hesitation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's life was characterized by controversy. From the unusual academic and athletic achievements of her adolescence to her demand for female suffrage in 1848, to her declaration of a feminist ideology of independence, to her agitation for radical social change, to her attack on the Bible, her actions and attitudes provoked debate and dissension. Her politics, her prejudices, her rhetoric, her associates, her attire, even her child - raising practices alarmed many. Her behavior outraged the socially conservative element of the population, including her father. Eventually it offended her liberal allies as well, including her husband and her successors in the suffrage movement. Although she appeared to be a respectable matron, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was accurately perceived to be a revolutionary - not a suitable role for a nineteenth-century woman.

The substitution of Anthony for Stanton was a conscious strategy. In July 1923, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Stanton's Seneca Falls suffrage resolution, Alice Paul led the National Woman's party to the site to introduce the Equal Rights Amendment. The ceremony was planned and the program printed without any reference to Stanton. She was the only speaker to mention Elizabeth Cady Stanton.