Elizabeth Cady Stanton Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York, into a prominent family shaped by law, politics, and the traditions of the early republic. Her father, Daniel Cady, was a respected attorney, judge, and later a justice of the New York Supreme Court; her mother, Margaret Livingston Cady, came from a lineage woven into the state's civic life. The death of her beloved older brother, Eleazar, deepened her resolve as a girl to master the subjects that were reserved for men, especially law. She read in her father's office, learning firsthand how statutes and precedents trapped married women in legal dependency. Educated at the Johnstown Academy, where she studied alongside boys, and then at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, she absorbed rigorous instruction while recoiling from the era's religious revivals. Experiences in Troy, including exposure to the fervent preaching that warned women to accept subordination as divinely ordained, spurred a lifelong skepticism toward doctrines that justified inequality.

Marriage and Awakening to Reform
In 1840 she married Henry Brewster Stanton, a vigorous abolitionist orator and later a New York legislator. Rejecting the word "obey" in her vows, she signaled her rebellion against the legal and social restraints of marriage. On their wedding journey the couple attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton met the Quaker reformer Lucretia Mott. Women delegates, including Mott, were excluded from full participation. The indignity of being seated apart sharpened Stanton's perception that women's rights required their own movement. Back in the United States, she lived first in the reform circles of Boston and then, from 1847, in Seneca Falls, New York, raising a growing family while hosting conversations with reform-minded friends such as Amelia Bloomer and Ernestine Rose. She dabbled in dress reform, briefly adopting the practical "bloomer" costume that Bloomer popularized, before abandoning it when ridicule distracted from the cause.

Seneca Falls and the Declaration of Sentiments
With Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt, Stanton organized the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls in July 1848. There she drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, asserting that "all men and women are created equal". The document cataloged civil and social injuries suffered by women, from property rights to education and church exclusion, and it advanced a daring resolution for woman suffrage. When debate grew wary, Frederick Douglass rose to argue that the vote was the keystone of reform; the suffrage plank passed narrowly. Stanton emerged as a principal theorist of women's rights, unafraid to challenge marriage laws and the church's teachings as foundations of subordination.

Partnership with Susan B. Anthony
In 1851 she met Susan B. Anthony through Amelia Bloomer, beginning one of the most consequential collaborations in American reform. Often confined by childrearing in Seneca Falls, Stanton became the movement's strategist and writer, while Anthony traveled incessantly as its organizer and public face. Stanton later summarized the partnership by saying she forged the thunderbolts and Anthony fired them. Together they pressed for legal reforms in New York, helping to secure significant changes to married women's property and guardianship laws by 1860. Stanton addressed the New York legislature and judges, asserting that the common law's doctrine of coverture was incompatible with republican ideals.

War, Reconstruction, and Movement Divisions
During the Civil War, Stanton and Anthony formed the Women's Loyal National League in 1863 to support the Union and to press for the abolition of slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment. Their petition campaign gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures, an unprecedented mobilization led by women. After the war, Stanton joined the American Equal Rights Association, working with figures such as Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass for universal suffrage. The movement split over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which enfranchised Black men but left women without the vote. Stanton and Anthony, insisting that sex should not be a permanent barrier to citizenship, argued against adopting a new oligarchy of sex. In the heat of public debate, Stanton's rhetoric could be harsh and racially insensitive, drawing rebukes from Douglass, Stone, and others who believed Black male suffrage was an urgent necessity after emancipation. The fracture became organizational in 1869: Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), while Lucy Stone, Henry Browne Blackwell, and their allies formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).

Ideas, Writing, and Public Leadership
Stanton's influence radiated through her writing and editorial work. With Anthony and Parker Pillsbury, she edited The Revolution (1868, 1870), a newspaper advocating woman suffrage and labor reform; its early funding from the flamboyant George Francis Train sparked controversy. She argued not only for the ballot but for comprehensive equality: liberalized divorce laws, women's control over wages and property, access to higher education and the professions, and more equitable domestic relations. A gifted polemicist, she crafted speeches for Anthony and others while raising seven children: Daniel Cady Stanton, Henry Brewster Stanton Jr., Gerrit Smith Stanton, Theodore Weld Stanton, Margaret Livingston Stanton, Harriot Eaton Stanton (later Harriot Stanton Blatch), and Robert Livingston Stanton. Her circle included reformers such as Sojourner Truth, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Abby Kelley Foster, and Theodore Weld, and her thinking was shaped as well by early mentorship from her abolitionist cousin Gerrit Smith.

History, Philosophy, and Controversy
From 1881, Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage began publishing the multivolume History of Woman Suffrage, an ambitious chronicle and argument that preserved the movement's record while advancing its case. Stanton later produced her autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898), reflecting on a lifetime of agitation. In the 1890s she turned sharply to religious critique, publishing The Woman's Bible (1895 and 1898), which challenged biblical interpretations that subordinated women. The work provoked an outcry; the newly formed National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), created in 1890 by merging NWSA and AWSA, officially disavowed the book. Stanton had served as NAWSA's first president from 1890 to 1892 before passing leadership to Anthony, and she continued to distance herself from strategies that, in her view, trimmed the movement's principles to win favor. Her 1892 address, Solitude of Self, delivered before the House Judiciary Committee and then to NAWSA, distilled her philosophy: each human being requires full self-sovereignty and the equipment for an independent life, regardless of sex, class, or creed.

Later Years and Legacy
In her later years Stanton lived largely in New York City, writing, mentoring younger activists, and corresponding with allies across the Atlantic. Her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch carried the torch, organizing working women and importing English suffrage tactics to American streets. Friends and counterparts such as Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and later leaders including Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt built organizations that blended Stanton's broad vision with disciplined campaigning for a federal amendment. The amendment first introduced in Congress in 1878, championed by Senator Aaron A. Sargent and widely known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, bore the imprint of Stanton's arguments even as she knew she might not live to see its victory.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton died on October 26, 1902, in New York City, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. She did not witness the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, yet her ideas animated the generations that secured it. The friendships and debates that marked her life, with Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Martha Coffin Wright, and others, reflected a movement both principled and contentious. Stanton's legacy endures in the insistence that suffrage was only a beginning: the ballot, education, economic independence, and freedom of conscience together formed her measure of equality.

Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written by Elizabeth, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Justice - Learning - Freedom - Faith.

Other people realated to Elizabeth: Henry Ward Beecher (Clergyman), Robert G. Ingersoll (Lawyer), Thomas W. Higginson (Clergyman), Crystal Eastman (Lawyer)