Founding Mother

The Seneca Falls Convention began a six decade career of women’s rights activism by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “It has been said that I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton on her partnership with Susan B. Anthony

Young Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady sometimes helped in the Stanton and Stanton household. “Susan daughter Harriot, stirs the pudding, Elizabeth 1856. Harriot stirs up Susan, and Susan would also become stirs up the world,” explained a leading advocate Elizabeth’s husband of women’s rights. Henry Stanton. Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up in a home Project Gutenberg with twelve servants. Early in her marriage Cady Stanton had a more modest lifestyle in A Unique Partnership Seneca Falls, New York. Kenneth C. Zirkel When her children were older Cady Stanton toured eight months She has been called the “outstanding philosopher” of the each year as a paid lecturer. One winter she traveled forty to fifty women’s movement. Even in childhood Elizabeth Cady miles a day by sleigh, often in sub-zero temperatures, when west- Stanton had a passion for equality. In order to compete ern railroads were not running. with boys she studied the “books they read and the games they played,” beginning a lifelong habit of intellectual cu- riosity. Later, as the mother of seven children, she some- times felt like a “caged lioness.” Elizabeth wrote speeches and prepared arguments for her friend Susan B. Anthony Boston to deliver on the lecture circuit. As a young couple Elizabeth Cady Stanton and husband On the Road Henry lived for a time in Massa- chusetts, a center of nineteenth Cady Stanton took to the century reform. “I consider my- lecture circuit in middle self in a kind of moral museum age promoting suffrage and I find that Boston affords and other women’s issues as many curiosities in its way as does the British museum in its.” including divorce reform she wrote. (particularly in the case of “I wish you were a boy”– Daniel Cady to his precocious daughter Elizabeth drunken or abusive husbands), the right to own property Young Elizabeth Cady Stanton listened independently, and child custody (left exclusively to as her father, a prominent attorney, the husband after marital breakup). Often involved in counseled a local woman whose hus- band had lost the family farm, inher- controversy, her personal demeanor could be disarming. ited from her family. Cady explained “My pail full of arguments against that there was no legal remedy. A is getting emptied and the pail of woman’s husband controlled property. arguments for is filling up,” wrote One of Stanton’s law students teased Elizabeth that he would own her one audience member. prized necklace and could trade it for cigars if they married. Elizabeth want- Notes for Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Woman’s B i b l e .” ed to take a scissors to her father’s law Challenging scriptural passages that seemed to sub- ordinate women was one of her most controversial books and cut out every statute dam- projects, making her appear too radical for some aging to women. reformers. Library of Congress

Low Point The women’s suffrage movement split over the 15th Amendment, Late in life, Elizabeth guaranteeing voting rights to black men but not women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her most celebrated essay, Cady Stanton broke with former abolitionist colleagues arguing in “The Solitude of Self” ad- a disparaging tone that educated women should vote first if there vocating self-reliance for women. It is available from the Commonwealth Museum website. must be a choice. A painful rift persisted for decades. (www.commonwealthmuseum.org) National Portrait Gallery