Elizabeth Cady Stanton
b.1815 - 1902
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton in History of Women's Suffrage.
Elizabeth was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist and writer. From 1892 - 1900, she was President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. This organization was formed by the merger of two organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. It took someone as strong as Elizabeth to help smooth the way for the people to work toward a common goal.
Elizabeth worked with her good friend, Susan B Anthony, to ensure women's property rights, employment income rights and divorce rights; while also advocating for economic head of family and birth control protections for women.
Her Declaration of Sentiments, of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, is often credited, along with Susan B Anthony, as initiating the first women's rights and women's suffrage movement in the United States.
Elizabeth was well educated and the author of many books on women's rights. She authored her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, and The Woman's Bible and additional position papers on women's rights. In her early years, while raising her seven children, she often wrote speeches for Susan.
When Cady was married to Henry Stanton she insisted that the phrase, “promise to obey,” be removed from the wedding ceremony. Later she wrote, “I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation.”