Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Key leader of woman’s suffrage and women’s equality

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a leading spokesperson, polemist, and organizer for women’s suffrage and equality, and relied heavily on America’s First Principles.

Born in Johnstown, New York on November 12, 1815, she was the daughter of a Federalist Congressman, who later became a Justice of the New York Supreme Court.  Despite the fact that her father owned a slave, Stanton would eventually become an adamant abolitionist.

Stanton met Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister, at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Energized by the convention’s refusal to allow women to openly participate in the proceedings (women were required to sit behind a curtain), Stanton and Mott resolved to hold a woman’s rights conference in America. Belatedly held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, the conference participants vigorously attacked the disenfranchisement of women and their unequal treatment as violative of the First Principles of free and just government.  This began the first significant organized movement for women’s equality – and it claimed the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as its own.

Stanton soon joined forces with Susan B. Anthony, and they eventually formed the National Women’s Suffrage Association in 1869.  Stanton’s interest in equal rights was much broader than just suffrage, and her efforts led to several significant legal social reforms after she addressed New York Legislature.

Stanton’s influential written statements and speeches in favor of women’s suffrage and gender equality were rooted in the First Principles of unalienable rights, the Social Compact, and equality, and helped lay the philosophical foundation for the spread of equality in America. 

She died on October 26, 1902.

For more about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her importance to our liberties today, buy a copy of  America’s Survival Guide.

 

 

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