Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902) was a woman’s right’s leader extraordinaire and is. called the mother of the Suffrage Movement. At an early age she was inspired while visiting her father’s law office where she heard many “pitiful stories of married women who came for help when deprived under the law of their property and children. Active and intelligent, she rebelled against the view that women were mentally and legally inferior to men.” p. 342, Notable American Women.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton became particularly interested in women’s rights after what she observed and heard discussed in connection to women’s participation in the anti-slavery movement. In response to the exclusion of women delegates from the World’s Anti-Slavery convention in London, she vowed with Lucretia Mott to hold a women’s rights convention someday. She proceeded to study law with her father and also have seven children from 1842 to 1859. She then joined her husband’s law office in 1843 where she was exposed to “an active and stimulating life among abolitionists and liberal thinkers in Boston.’
After leaving Boston for the more rural and dull Seneca Falls New York, she asked her friends to direct their letters to Elizabeth Cady Stanton rather than Mrs. Henry B. Stanton for she felt that a woman should not submerge her identity in marriage. (in 1840, she had insisted that “obey” be omitted from her wedding ceremony to abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton.) In addition, she also spoke and circulated pamphlets in support of a married women’s property bill which helped pass it in 1848. The bill granted women the right to own real estate in their own name.
At this time she reunited with Lucretia Mott to fulfill their promise of organizing a Women’s Rights Convention. Eighteen grievances suffered by women were listed which included: lack of the franchise, the right to their own wages, their persons and their children. It called attention to women’s limited educational and economic opportunities and protested against the double standard of morality. At the now famous 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, over the opposition of both her husband and Lucretia Mott, she proposed a resolution advocating suffrage for women and it was “eloquently defended by Frederic Douglass” and then finally adopted. p. 343 NAW. The proposal was reintroduced at every successive women’s rights convention and became their rallying cry for generations of women as they campaigned for their enfranchisement. From that day forward, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote copiously in support of women’s rights.
In 1851, Cady Stanton was introduced to Susan B. Anthony which began their historic friendship that was to have a marked effect on the subsequent progress of American Feminism. They discovered a remarkable complementarity of their talents that outweighed their very different personalities and personal circumstances--it was a relationship of “opposites attract.” Each supplied abilities the other lacked. One primarily wrote prodigiously on every subject possible related to women’s rights and the other primarily spoke across the country on those same topics.
“In 1860, when more liberal divorce laws were being debated in the New York, newspapers and proposed in several other states, Cady-Stanton created a sensation in that year’s women’s rights convention when she wrote a resolution endorsing easier divorce. Previously in 1852, Cady-Stanton, in her address as President of the Women’s State Temperance Society, announced that drunkenness should be considered a sufficient cause for divorce.”
In 1862, Cady-Stanton and Susan B. Anthony turned their attention to abolition and secured over 300,000 signatures to a petition introduced to the Senate that demanded immediate abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment. After the war their attention once again returned to women’s rights and when amendments were proposed to give black males the right to vote, Stanton and Anthony demanded that these rights be extended to women as well. In 1868, they proposed the 16th Amendment providing suffrage be based on “citizenship irrespective of race, color or sex but it was ignored.”
In 1866, to test women’s rights to seek public office, Stanton ran unsuccessfully for Congress. She and Anthony worked tirelessly campaigning for women’s Amendment and
In 1869, Cady-Stanton began a twenty-one year tenure as President of the National Women’s Suffrage Association that she and Anthony organized that year. Besides Suffrage, they championed such causes as jury service, more liberal divorce laws and wider economic opportunities for women. In 1888, both Anthony and Stanton tried to cast ballots but were unsuccessful.
The friendship of Elizabeth Cady-Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was a remarkably productive as well as personal one. In 1865, Cady-Stanton wrote Anthony, “and all my future plans are based on you as a coadjutor. Yes, our work is one, we are one in aim and sympathy and we should be together.”
Elizabeth Cady-Stanton over her lifetime wrote on every subject possible related to women’s rights and 1885 she published The Women’s Bible, “a commentary that analyzed the Bible’s derogatory references to women and reinterpreted them in the light of other passages, as well as of reason and common sense. Upon her death in 1902 at the age of 86, for months afterward newspapers and magazines paid her tribute as the statesman(sic) of the women’s rights movement and the mother of woman suffrage. We all, men and women alike, owe her an enormous vote of gratitude for her efforts to emancipate women’s and men’s mind, freeing them from their psychological barriers.
“Realizing that they could not use the ballot intelligently and effectively if they concentrated only on the suffrage to the exclusion of other social issues, she urged women to reject encumbering traditions and to dare to question any edict of church or state which limited women’s sphere.” p. 342-347, Notable American Women. Our second and third wave women’s movements of this century owe a huge debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s lifelong progressive thoughts and actions!
“Failure is Impossible” was Susan B. Anthony’s parting message to the women of the world. No other person in the suffrage movement matched her single-minded dedication or her ability in leading the suffrage movement for over fifty years!
Susan Brownwell Anthony (1820-1906) was grounded in Quaker beliefs including the belief in the equality of women. She was a teacher in New York State who chafed under the fact that women teachers earned less than men and chose to leave teaching in 1849. “The atmosphere in her home where such men as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were frequent guests, turned her interests naturally to reform movements of the day, including temperance, anti-slavery and women’s rights.” p. 52, Notable American Women.
Through Amelia Bloomer, (after whom women’s “bloomers” are named) and who at the time was editor of a Seneca Falls Temperance paper, Susan B. Anthony was introduced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They subsequently became devoted friends and Stanton eventually convinced Anthony that a woman’s right to vote was paramount. In 1853 Anthony became disenchanted with the temperance movement and “her life had found a focus, she threw herself unreservedly into the women’s rights movement.”
What Susan B. Anthony lacked in skills of writing, speaking and an outgoing personality, she more than made up for in organizational ability and dogged perseverance. She and Elizabeth Cady-Stanton were a perfect match. Susan B. Anthony was named “The Napoleon of the Women’s Movement.” She was practical, strategic and intelligent and both men and women liked to discuss their work with her but she had an unwillingness to appear on a public platform in the beginning. “More than any other women’s suffrage leader, she was the victim of masculine ridicule, often in the form of abusive and coarse newspaper attacks....The fact that she remained unmarried enabled hostile critics to dismiss her feminism as merely the product of bitterness and frustration.” (Get the picture?)
Susan’s co-workers felt very differently about her. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “She has, indeed her faults and angles, but they are all on the outside. She has a broad and generous nature, and a depth of tenderness that few women possess.” p. 53, NAW.
She also worked diligently from 1856 to 1864 as New York’s principal agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society. She and Stanton worked tirelessly to get hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions for Negro emancipation. In 1865, when she learned that the republican reconstruction policy included Negro suffrage, but ignored the comparable demands of women she was greatly disappointed. The Fourteenth Amendment “not only failed to enfranchise women but for the first time introduced the word ‘male’ into the Constitution.” She felt it was women’s time first, then the Negroes, “particularly in view of the loyal support the women of the North had given to the war effort and the anti-slavery campaign.”
In an uphill battle, Susan B. Anthony was able to present to Congress in 1866 petitions with thousands of signatures asking for woman suffrage. She was defeated as were women’s suffrage petitions to New York’s Constitutional Convention in 1867 and ones in Kansas. She was forced to face the fact that the dominant Republican Party had no intention of granting women the right to vote. In response, Anthony and Stanton founded a women’s suffrage publication, “The Revolution,” in 1868. It was a “crusading paper, radical by the standards of the day,” that strongly opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments, advocating an ‘educated suffrage irrespective of sex and color,’ as well as equal pay to men and women for equal work, practical education for girls, the opening of new occupations to women and more liberal divorce laws.” p. 53, NAW.
In addition, Anthony organized a Working Women’s Association which encouraged employed women to form unions to win higher wages and shorter hours. Then, finding their publication, “The Revolution,” in debt, Anthony decided to go on a grueling lecture tour that lasted six years until 1876 when the debt was paid. She was a very popular speaker, but in the end the need for an organization devoted solely to women’s suffrage became apparent. Through the efforts of Anthony and Stanton, the first women’s suffrage amendment was introduced to Congress in 1868, but it received little attention. In response, Anthony and Stanton organized The National Women’s Suffrage Association in 1869 and for the rest of her life, this organization and its conventions became the “forum from which to guide, steady and prod her flock.”
It was at this point in 1869 that the group split in two. One half was in favor of Anthony and Stanton’s national approach and the other left to follow Lucy Stone who formed the American Woman Suffrage Association that focused on a state by state approach.
Susan B. Anthony, undaunted and with single-mindedness, entered upon a thirty-year period of almost ceaseless travel throughout the country in support of women’s suffrage. In 1870, they had their first success when women were granted the right to vote in Wyoming Territory. In 1872, Anthony cast a ballot in the Presidential Election, much to the chagrin of election officials. She was arrested and fined $100 which she refused to pay and that was the end of the protest. She had hoped that the issue would be brought before the Supreme Court, but it did not happen.
Anthony and Stanton wrote a chronicle of the movement and published 3 volumes in 1881, 1882, and 1886 to ensure that the women’s rights struggle would not be lost to history. It ended up being a 5,000-page historical record for posterity when a fourth volume was added in 1902.
It was at 80 that Susan B. Anthony stepped down from her leadership of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. She was honored as “Susan B. Anthony of the World.” In 1906, she attended her last woman suffrage convention where the unmatched, intrepid crusader for women’s rights spoke the words, “Failure is Impossible.”
Following her death at 86, throughout the world, newspapers, statesmen and sorrowful colleagues paid high tribute to her indomitable spirit. At this time, her goal of women’s suffrage was realized in only four states, but “she more than any other, had opened the way for the adoption of the 19th Amendment fourteen years after her death.”
In conclusion, I have to say what a privilege it has been to review the lives of these two remarkable women who worked tirelessly so that future women would have the right to vote. Gratitude to all of these “grandmothers” who worked so hard to pass on the gift of the right to vote that we now take for granted.