Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902)

• Author: Ellen Carol Dubois
• Pages: 2476-2477

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Elizabeth Cady was born in Johnstown, New York, to Daniel Cady, influential legal reformer, and Margaret Livingston Cady, from one of the state's oldest landed families. She received the best education available to young women, at Emma Willard's Troy Academy, but resented the fact that only men could attend college. At the age of twentyfive, she married Henry Brewster Stanton, noted abolitionist orator and organizer. Honeymooning with him in

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London to attend an international antislavery convention, she met Lucretia Mott, dean of American female abolition, who served as her mentor in the ideas of women's rights.

Eight years later, in 1848, Stanton and Mott called the first American women's rights convention. Held in Stanton's home town in New York, the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION demanded a whole list of reforms, at the head of which was political rights. Three years later, Stanton met SUSAN B. ANTHONY, a temperance advocate from nearby Rochester, and they began a lifelong collaboration. Together they petitioned, lobbied, and addressed the New York legislature to pass a comprehensive Married Women's Property Act, which it did in 1860. During the CIVIL WAR, they agitated for constitutional abolition and emancipation, black and woman suffrage.

In the RECONSTRUCTION years, Stanton's woman suffrage leadership became highly contentious. She and Anthony pushed first to have the invidious references to a "male" electorate removed from the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT and then to have "sex" included in the list of prohibited disfranchisements in the FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT. Once these amendments were ratified without including women's demands, they shifted their argument to an innovative constitutional construction in which woman suffrage was permitted by the Constitution as amended. In 1874, the Supreme Court struck down their argument, but for the rest of her life, Stanton insisted on the link between woman suffrage and the sovereignty and dignity of national CITIZENSHIP.

Stanton was identified with other reforms and aspects of women's emancipation. She called for reform in the laws and customs of MARRIAGE, to make it an egalitarian and more easily dissolvable pact. From there, she undertook a campaign for what she called "self-sovereignty," the establishment of an ethic of female sexual and reproductive self-determination. In this, she was closely allied with the free-love radical Victoria Woodhull in the early 1870s...