Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In 1840, Elizabeth got married to Henry Brewster Stanton who was an antislavery orator and a journalist. The couple had seven children

Elizabeth Cady Stanton died due to a heart attack on October 26, 1902, in the New York City at her daughter’s home.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York. Daniel Cady, her father, was a reputed lawyer, a congressman and also the judge of the New York Supreme Court. Her mother too belonged to a wealthy family. Elizabeth had 10 siblings but most of them didn’t survive till adulthood.

She received her early education from the school at the Johnstown Academy and later on she joined Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary from 1830–1833. There she studied French, Latin, Mathematics, Greek, religion and science.

She embraced the causes of women’s rights and as her father was a lawyer, she was easily exposed to the legal hurdles of women’s equality. She was absolutely outraged by the way husbands used to treat and subjugate their wives as well as regulate their wives’ properties.

After marriage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton moved back to New York, in 1847, and she tried to focus exclusively on being a wife and a mother. However, she soon got bored and became an abolitionist and women’s rights activist.

She soon made friends with like-minded women and decided upon spending the rest of her life in fighting for the women’s right to vote along with bringing the gender-neutral divorce laws and increased economic prospects for women.

On July 19 and 20 of 1848, she, along with several other women, organised the first ever women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls. She also wrote the Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence in order to assert the equality of women with men and proposed female suffrage.

The convention was a hit and in 1850, she got invited at the National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts to speak on the women’s rights.

In 1851, she became friends with Susan B. Anthony—renowned feminist y—and together they focussed on forming the Woman’s State Temperance Society, which, however got disbanded within a year. Both Elizabeth and Susan started focussing on women suffrage soon after.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a prominent figure of the early women’s rights movement. Throughout her life, she fought relentlessly for equal rights for women with regards to property rights, parental and custody rights, and for the women’s right to vote. It was a result of her efforts that the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1920, which gave women the right to vote.