Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Eleazar Cady died in 1826, aged 20 and just out of Union College, the last of Daniel Cady's sons to die before adulthood. The 10-year-old Elizabeth went to her father and promised to be everything her brother had been. He answered, Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy. She set about proving the substitution possible: second prize in Greek at Johnstown Academy, the only girl in the advanced mathematics and language classes, arguments with her father's law clerks over dinner. What she found in his statute books was worse than exclusion. New York law handed a married woman's property, her wages and her children to her husband. In 1840 she married the abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton and struck the word obey out of the ceremony.

Seneca Falls in 1848 and the document she wrote for it, the half-century of work with Susan B. Anthony, the rival organizations and their merger in 1890, the scriptural commentary that got her formally repudiated by her own association in 1896 — BriefHistory carries that record. What it cannot carry is the arithmetic underneath it. She produced most of that argument from a house in Seneca Falls with seven children in it and a husband whose law and politics kept him away close to 10 months a year.

When Congress moved to enfranchise Black men and not women, Stanton did not only argue that the order was wrong. She asked in print whether women should stand aside and let Sambo walk into the kingdom first, warned readers of The Revolution against the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, and objected to being governed by men who could not tell a monarchy from a republic. Frederick Douglass, a friend of decades who had escaped slavery, told her the vote was a matter of survival for Black men and could not wait its turn. She did not retract. In her last years she pressed for a constitutional amendment requiring voters to read and write English, and her daughter Harriot published a rebuttal of her mother in the suffrage press.

Two years before the end she signed a document leaving her brain to Cornell for study. Her family ignored it and buried her at Woodlawn beside Henry. Then the movement she had built put her away. Opponents quoted her heresies against ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, younger suffragists answered by elevating Anthony and diminishing Stanton, and the 1923 program at Seneca Falls omitted her name until her daughter insisted from the platform. No serious biography appeared until 1940. In 2020 New York put her in Central Park, but only after the first design — Stanton and Anthony leaning over a scroll listing 22 other women — was scrapped and Sojourner Truth was seated at the table with them.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Declaration of Sentiments speech
  Written for the Seneca Falls Convention and read there in July 1848
• The Revolution company
  The weekly she co-edited — men their rights and nothing more, women their rights and nothing less 1868
• History of Woman Suffrage book
  She was primary author of the first three volumes, and told it from her own wing 1881
• The Solitude of Self speech
  Delivered three times in three days and the one she thought her best 1892
• The Woman's Bible book
  Seven printings in six months, and a formal repudiation from NAWSA 1895
• Eighty Years and More book
  The memoir, which leaves out the split and barely mentions her husband 1898

• 1826 aged ~11 Her last surviving brother dies and her father tells her he wishes she were a boy Eleazar Cady was 20 and had just graduated from Union College.
• May 1, 1840 aged 24 Marries Henry Brewster Stanton without promising to obey him The honeymoon was the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, which voted to seat its women behind a curtain.
• July 1848 aged 32 Writes and reads the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls
• 1851 aged ~36 Amelia Bloomer introduces her to Susan B. Anthony Anthony organized and Stanton wrote. It lasted 51 years.
• May 1869 aged 53 Founds the National Woman Suffrage Association after the movement splits The break was over whether to accept the vote for Black men first.
• 1892 aged ~77 Delivers The Solitude of Self and declines reelection as NAWSA president
• 1896 aged ~81 NAWSA votes 53 to 41 to disavow The Woman's Bible Anthony objected. Stanton told her to resign in protest. She refused.
• October 26, 1902 aged 86 Dies in New York City, 18 years before the Nineteenth Amendment The day before, she asked her doctor to hasten it if the breathing could not be fixed.
• August 26, 2020 Central Park unveils its first monument to real women Stanton, Anthony and Sojourner Truth, after the two-woman first design was rejected.

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. broke with over the Fifteenth Amendment
• Carrie Chapman Catt 1859–1947
  Suffrage leader whose national organizing was instrumental in securing ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. inherited the association
• Alice Paul 1885–1977
  Strategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. finished the demand
• Margaret Sanger 1879–1966
  Birth-control advocate who transformed reproductive health access while leaving a deeply contested legacy involving eugenics. took up voluntary motherhood
• Gloria Steinem b. 1934
  Writer and organizer who became one of the most visible leaders of second-wave feminism. successor movement
• Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005
  First Black woman elected to Congress and first woman to run for a major party's presidential nomination. ran on ground she cleared