Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton She was born Johnstown, New York (November 12, 1815).Elizabeth was an American social activist and leader of the early woman’s movements. When she was a child five of her sibling died in early life. “Daniel Cady, Stanton's father, was a prominent attorney who served one term in the United States Congress (Federalist; 1814-1817) and later became both a circuit court judge and, in 1847, a New York Supreme Court justice.” Actually she got familiar with law by her father. “Stanton's mother, Margaret Livingston Cady, a descendant of early Dutch settlers, was the daughter of Colonel James Livingston, an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.” “Unlike many women of her era, Stanton was educated. She attended Johnstown Academy, where she studied Latin, Greek and mathematics until the age of 16. At the Academy, she enjoyed being in co-educational classes where she could compete intellectually and academically with boys her age and older.” She was very successful in her education and won many awards. She felt sexual discrimination for the first time when she was graduating from Johnstown Academy. Because Union college just was accepting men so she went to Tory. When she was studying there, she was influenced by Charles Grandison Finney, an evangelical preacher and central figure in the revivalist movement. After hearing Finney speak, Stanton became terrified at the possibility of her own damnation: "Fear of judgment seized my soul. Visions of the lost haunted my dreams. Mental anguish prostrated my health. Dethronement of my reason was apprehended by my friends." “As a young woman, Elizabeth Cady met Henry Brewster Stanton through her early involvement in the temperance and the abolition movements. Henry Stanton was an acquaintance of Elizabeth Cady's cousin, an abolitionist and member of the "Six”. Stanton was a journalist, an antislavery orator, and, after his marriage to Elizabeth Cady, an attorney. Despite Daniel Cady's reservations, the couple was married in 1840 and the result was six children, carefully planned, between 1842 and 1856.” After their honeymoon in Europe, the Stantons moved into the Cady household in Johnstown, New York. “Henry Stanton studied law under his father-in-law until 1843, when the Stantons moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where Henry joined a law firm. While living in Boston, Elizabeth thoroughly enjoyed the social, political, and intellectual stimulation that came with a constant round of abolitionist gatherings and meetings. Here she enjoyed the company of and was influenced by such people as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Lowell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Throughout her marriage and eventual widowhood, Stanton took her husband's surname as part of her own, signing herself Elizabeth Cady Stanton or E. Cady Stanton, but she refused to be addressed as Mrs. Henry B. Stanton. Asserting that women were individual persons, she stated that, "[t]he custom of calling women Mrs. John This and Mrs. Tom That and colored men Sambo and Zip Coon, is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all." [26] She further refused to include the promise "to obey" her husband as part of her wedding vows, agreeing instead to treat him as an equal.” Her husband like other men disagreed with the notion of female suffrage. Since they were busy they lived often apart from each other. Their marriage which lasted for forty-seven years, ended with Henry's death in 1887. “In 1847, because of New England winters effect on Henry Stanton's fragile health, the Stanton moved from Boston to Seneca Falls, New York, situated at the northern end of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes found in upstate New York. Their house, purchased for them by Daniel Cady, was located some distance from town. The couple's last four children, two sons and two daughters, were born there, with Stanton asserting that her children were conceived under a program she called "voluntary motherhood," asserting her firm belief that women should have command over their sexuality and childbearing. As a mother who advocated homeopathy, freedom of expression, lots of outdoor activity, and a solid, highly academic education for all of her children, Stanton nurtured a breadth of interests, activities, and learning in both her sons and daughters. She was remembered by her daughter Margaret as being "cheerful, sunny and indulgent".” Early activism in the Women's Rights Movement “Before living in Seneca Falls, Stanton had become a great admirer and friend of Lucretia Mott, the Quaker minister, feminist, and abolitionist whom she had met at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London, England in the spring of 1840 while on her honeymoon. The two women became allies when the male delegates attending the convention voted that women should be denied participation in the proceedings, even if they, like Mott, had been nominated to serve as official delegates of their respective abolitionist societies. After considerable debate, the women were required to sit in a roped-off section hidden from the view of the men in attendance. They were soon joined by the prominent abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, who arrived after the vote had been taken and, in protest of the outcome, refused his seat, electing instead to sit with the women.” “By 1848, her early life experiences, together with the experience in London and her initially debilitating experience as a housewife in Seneca Falls, galvanized Stanton. She later wrote: "The general discontent I felt with woman's portion as wife, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic conditions into which everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women, impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measures should be taken to remedy the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular. My experience at the World Anti-slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences. It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step. I could not see what to do or where to begin -- my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion." In 1848, Stanton joined Mott and a handful of other women in Seneca Falls. “Together they organized the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20. Stanton drafted a Declaration of Sentiments, which she read at the convention. Modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence, Stanton's declaration proclaimed that men and women are created equal. She proposed, among other things, a then-controversial resolution demanding voting rights for women. The final resolutions, including female suffrage, were passed, in no small measure, because of the support of Frederick Douglass, who attended and informally spoke at the convention. Soon after the convention, Stanton was invited to speak at a second women's rights convention in Rochester, New York, solidifying her role as an activist and reformer. In 1851, Stanton was introduced to Susan B. Anthony on a street in Seneca Falls by Amelia Bloomer, a feminist and mutual acquaintance who had not signed the Declaration of Sentiments and subsequent resolutions despite her attendance at the Seneca Falls convention. Although best known for their joint work on behalf of women's suffrage, Stanton and Anthony first joined the temperance movement.” Later years “Stanton maintained a broad focus on women's rights in general rather than narrowing her focus only to female suffrage in particular. After passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 and its support by the Equal Rights Association and prominent suffragists such as Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, the gap between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other leaders of the women's movement widened as Stanton took issue with the fundamental religious leanings of several movement leaders. Stanton went on to write many of the more important books, documents, and speeches of the women's rights movement. In 1881, Harper & Brothers Publishers issued the first volume of The History of Woman Suffrage, a seminal, six-volume work containing the full history, documents, and letters of the woman's suffrage movement.[ While Stanton, along with Anthony and Gage, wrote the first three volumes. Stanton’s other major writings included The Women's Bible, Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences 1815-1897, her autobiography, published in 1898; and The Solitude of Self, or "Self-Sovereignty.In 1868 Stanton—together with Susan B. Anthony and Parker Pillsbury began publishing a weekly periodical, Revolution, with editorials by Stanton that focused on a wide array of women's issues”. “Stanton died at her home in New York City on October 26, 1902 nearly twenty years before women were granted the right to vote in the United States. Survived by six of her seven children and by seven grandchildren, she was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. After Stanton's death, her radical ideas about religion and emphasis on female employment and other women's issues led many suffragists to focus on Anthony, rather than Stanton, as the founder of the women's suffrage movement. Because of her ongoing involvement in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Anthony was more familiar to many of the younger members of the movement.[85] By 1923, in celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, only Harriot Stanton Blatch paid tribute to the role her mother had played in instigating the women's rights movement.[86] Even as late as 1977, attention was paid to Susan B. Anthony as the founder of the movement, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not mentioned.” (All these information are taken from Wikipedia)