At a Glance
Johnstown, the Law Office, and a Political Education Without a School
Elizabeth Cady's intellectual formation took place in circumstances that were simultaneously privileged and frustrating — privileged because her father's position as a prominent lawyer and judge gave her access to a world of ideas and argument that most women of her era could not reach; frustrating because that access only sharpened her awareness of the systematic exclusion that barred women from the professional and political life that men of her class took for granted. She grew up spending time in her father's law office, listening to clients — many of them women — describe legal situations in which their interests were subordinated by law to those of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, and developing the detailed knowledge of women's legal disabilities that would eventually produce the Declaration of Sentiments and a lifetime of advocacy for legal reform.
Judge Daniel Cady was, by his daughter's account, a man of genuine intelligence and genuine affection for her — but also a man who embodied the conventional views of his era on women's proper sphere, and whose occasional expressions of regret that she had not been born a boy were both a tribute to her abilities and a reminder of the limits within which those abilities were expected to operate. Elizabeth's response to this situation was not acceptance but a determination to demonstrate, and eventually to formally argue, that the limits were unjust and should be removed — that a daughter was worth as much as a son, that women's intellectual and political capacities were equal to men's, and that a society that refused to acknowledge this was failing both its stated principles and its moral obligations.
She attended Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York — one of the best educational institutions available to women in the 1830s — and received there a rigorous academic education that was unusual for women of her era. But the seminary's education, however good, was not the education that Johnstown's best male students received at the colleges and law schools that were closed to women, and the awareness of this differential — of the systematic inferiority of the education available to women, not because women were less capable but because society had decided to keep them less educated — was one of the foundations of her subsequent radicalism.
Antislavery, Gerrit Smith, and the Education of a Reformer
Her connection to the antislavery movement came primarily through her cousin Gerrit Smith, one of the wealthiest men in New York and one of the most generous financiers of the American antislavery movement. Smith's estate in Peterboro, New York, was a centre of reformist activity — a gathering place for abolitionists, women's rights advocates, and other reformers — and the Cady family's visits to Peterboro exposed Elizabeth to the world of organised reform from which her subsequent career would grow. It was at Peterboro that she met Henry Brewster Stanton, an antislavery lecturer who was one of the movement's most effective speakers, and whose combination of political commitment and personal charisma she found compelling.
Their marriage in 1840 — with "obey" deleted from the vows at Elizabeth's insistence, and with Henry's support for his wife's reformist activities an explicit part of their understanding of their relationship — was the beginning of a partnership that was genuinely collaborative even as it operated within the constraints of a society that expected women to subordinate their ambitions to their husbands' careers and their children's needs. Henry's antislavery work took him to London for the World Anti-Slavery Convention in June 1840, and Elizabeth accompanied him as a newlywed — an experience that would prove more formative for her subsequent career than anything in her formal education.
The London convention's refusal to seat women delegates — including not only Stanton but Lucretia Mott, the formidable Philadelphia Quaker who was one of the American antislavery movement's most important figures — was the event that crystallised Stanton's understanding of the connection between antislavery and women's rights. She and Mott, seated in the gallery watching the male delegates debate the fate of enslaved people from which they had been excluded, made a resolution between them to organise a women's rights convention when they returned to America. It took eight years for that resolution to be kept, but when it was kept, at Seneca Falls in July 1848, it produced the most important document in the history of American women's rights.
The Declaration of Sentiments and the Architecture of a Movement
The Seneca Falls Convention of 19 and 20 July 1848 was organised in approximately one week — a remarkably short time for an event of its historical significance — by Stanton, Mott, and three other women who placed a notice in the Seneca County Courier announcing a convention "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women." The document that Stanton drafted for the convention — the Declaration of Sentiments — was one of the most effective pieces of political writing in American history precisely because it did not try to invent a new language for women's rights but appropriated the most powerful political language in the American tradition and applied it, systematically and devastatingly, to the condition of women.
The Declaration of Independence had declared that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, and had listed the specific grievances against King George that justified the American Revolution. Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments declared that all men and women are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, and listed — with the same rhetorical structure as Jefferson's document — the specific grievances against male domination that justified the women's rights movement. The parallels were not merely rhetorical; they were a deliberate argument that the logic of the American founding was on the side of women's equality, and that those who opposed it were betraying the principles to which the nation had formally committed itself.
The resolution calling for women's suffrage — the right to vote — was the most controversial of the twelve resolutions that the convention adopted, and it was the one that Stanton had to fight hardest to include. Even Lucretia Mott was initially reluctant to include it, fearing that the demand for the vote would make the entire convention seem ridiculous. It was Frederick Douglass — the only prominent Black abolitionist present at Seneca Falls — who spoke most forcefully in support of the suffrage resolution, arguing that the right to vote was the most fundamental of political rights and that no convention that omitted it could claim to be serious about women's equality. The resolution passed, by a narrow margin, and established women's suffrage as the central demand of the movement for the next seventy-two years.
The Stanton-Anthony Partnership and Fifty Years of Agitation
Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Susan B. Anthony in 1851, and the partnership that followed was one of the most remarkable in the history of American reform. The two women were complementary in almost every relevant respect: Stanton was the intellectual, the writer, the maker of arguments; Anthony was the organiser, the campaigner, the person who translated arguments into political action. Stanton, who had seven children and was rooted to her domestic responsibilities in ways that made extensive travel difficult, wrote the speeches; Anthony delivered them and organised the campaigns that gave them political effect.
The partnership was genuine and deep, though not without its tensions. Anthony was more focused than Stanton on the single issue of women's suffrage; Stanton consistently pushed beyond suffrage to a comprehensive critique of the legal, social, and theological foundations of women's subordination that Anthony sometimes found politically counterproductive. Their disagreements over tactics and priorities were real, but they operated within a framework of mutual respect and shared commitment that sustained the partnership for the rest of their lives.
The post-Civil War years produced the most painful episode in Stanton's public life — her opposition to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which extended citizenship and voting rights to Black men without doing the same for women. Stanton's position — that the constitutional moment of Reconstruction should have been used to establish universal suffrage regardless of race or sex, and that the failure to do so was a betrayal of women — was morally coherent but politically expressed in ways that were sometimes disturbingly racist, invoking the supposed degradation of Black male voters as a reason for the priority of women's suffrage. This aspect of her legacy is deeply troubling and cannot be minimised; it represented a failure of the universalism that her best work embodied, and a willingness to use the language of racial hierarchy in service of a cause she otherwise advanced through arguments for universal human equality.
The Woman's Bible and the Limits of a Movement's Courage
Stanton's publication of "The Woman's Bible" in 1895 and 1898 was the most radical act of her long career — a systematic critique of the Biblical passages used to justify women's subordination, arguing that the Bible as traditionally interpreted was not a divine mandate for gender hierarchy but a human document reflecting and reinforcing the patriarchal culture of its authors, and that women's liberation required a theological as well as a political and legal transformation. The argument was not new — freethinkers and radical Protestants had been making versions of it for decades — but Stanton's willingness to make it under her own name, at the age of eighty, in defiance of the mainstream women's suffrage movement's tactical caution, was characteristic of the quality that made her simultaneously the movement's most important intellectual and its most controversial figure.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association's official repudiation of "The Woman's Bible" at its 1896 convention was a demonstration of exactly the kind of institutional timidity that Stanton had spent her career opposing. The suffrage movement, by the 1890s, had decided that the most effective path to the vote was through respectability — through demonstrating that women's suffrage was compatible with conventional religion, conventional domesticity, and conventional morality. Stanton's theology, which challenged all three, was a liability that the movement's leadership were not prepared to carry, and their repudiation of her work was a measure of how far the movement had moved from the radical comprehensiveness of vision that had characterised the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848.
Death Before Victory and a Legacy That Outran Her Life
Elizabeth Cady Stanton died on 26 October 1902, in New York City, at the age of eighty-six. She had been working on an open letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arguing for women's suffrage at the time of her death. The Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote, was ratified eighteen years later, in 1920 — too late for Stanton, too late for Susan B. Anthony, who had died in 1906, and too late for most of the women who had fought for the vote at Seneca Falls in 1848.
Her legacy is complicated in the ways that the legacies of important people always are — enriched by her extraordinary intellectual contributions, troubled by her failures of racial solidarity in the Reconstruction era, and deepened by the scale of what she achieved against the full weight of a society that was determined to deny the humanity and the rights of both the enslaved and the female. She was one of the most important thinkers in the history of American democracy, and she was also a woman whose universalism was not, in practice, universal. Both things are true, and both need to be held in view if her legacy is to be understood rather than simply celebrated or condemned.