Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902), the eighth of eleven children, was born in Johnstown, New York, to Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady. Stanton was an American social activist and leading figure of the early woman’s movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women’s rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized woman’s rights and woman’s suffrage movements in the United States. [1]
Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women’s rights, she was an active abolitionist together with her husband, Henry Stanton and cousin, Gerrit Smith. Unlike many of those involved in the women’s rights movement, Stanton addressed a number of issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights. Her concerns included women’s parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce laws, the economic health of the family, and birth control.[2] She was also an outspoken supporter of the 19th century temperance movement.
After the American Civil War, Stanton’s commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the women’s rights movement when she, along with Susan B. Anthony, declined to support the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African-American men while continuing to deny women, black and white, the same rights. Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women’s issues beyond voting rights, led to the formation of two separate women’s rights organizations, the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, and the more conservative and religiously based American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890, however, though Stanton opposed the merger of the two organizations they united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Despite her opposition to the merger, Stanton became the organization’s first president, largely because of Susan B. Anthony’s intervention. In good measure because her book, the Women’s Bible, was seen as an attack on Christian values and because of her positions on issues such as divorce, she was never popular among the more religiously conservative members of the new unified organization.
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