Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a social activist, abolitionist and a leading figure in the early women’s rights movement.
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902 (From The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs collection/Public domain)
In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton played a key role in organizing the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York where she presented a Declaration of Sentiments. The document called for extensive reforms to the inferior status of women and the convention initiated the American suffragist movement. She was also an active abolitionist.
Stanton continued to be active for 50 years after the first convention, and was the principal author of the Declaration of Rights for Women presented at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. She worked closely with fellow suffragist Susan B. Anthony starting in 1851.
In 1878 she drafted a federal suffrage amendment that was introduced in every Congress thereafter, until women were granted the right to vote in 1920. Stanton died in 1902 and wrote The Woman’s Bible and her autobiography Eighty Years and More, among copious a series of articles and pamphlets.
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