In the Smith household, Elizabeth was exposed to a number of new people as well as to new social and political ideas. Her aunt and uncle were egalitarians not only in the ideal, but in the everyday, sense. Their home was open to African Americans on their way to freedom in Canada as well as to Oneida Indians they had befriended. It also teemed with activists and intellectuals who discussed, debated and strategized about the social and political events of the day—chief among them abolition.
Her uncle, Peter Smith, was a staunch advocate of racial equality who sought an end to American slavery. Gerrit and his friends in the abolition movement would not only influence Elizabeth, but introduce lifelong challenges as she and other social reformers sought to bring full equality to all people, regardless of color, creed, or gender. He was already an extremely prominent and influential abolitionist orator.
Beginning his career as a journalist, Stanton met Theodore Weld while attending the Rochester Manual Labor Institute and Weld was touring the country to learn more about manual labor schools. Both were compelling public speakers. Both were committed to social and political reform.
And both had been influenced by Charles Finney. In Rochester, Stanton first met Finney when he was serving as replacement pastor at a local church.
Like Weld—and in stark contrast to his future wife—Stanton was thoroughly impressed by Finney as an orator and theological thinker. He was simply full of awe and admiration for the man. Lane was based on the manual labor model and initially was a great success. Nearly half the students at the seminary—Stanton and Weld among them—withdrew from the institution in protest. Stanton then began working alongside Weld, first as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, then as an officer of the organization.
Studying law under Daniel Cady after he and Elizabeth married, Henry then became a lawyer and a political operative. He aspired to hold office himself, and succeeded in doing so for a short time in the early s. In the s, Stanton was a frequent visitor to the Smith household and a chief contributor to their many discussions about social and political issues. When Elizabeth and Stanton met in , she was under the illusion that he was already married.
So her earliest interactions with him were as simply an acquaintance who shared his interest in abolition, not as a potential love interest. After succumbing to family pressure and breaking her engagement to Stanton, Elizabeth had a change of heart, and the two married hastily in May They then went to London, where Henry was due to serve as a delegate at the World Antislavery Convention. Significantly, Henry gave a speech in favor of full participation by the women present, but his support stopped there.
His passion was for abolition. The suffragists and feminists argued that women needed more social and political freedom than they currently had. Certainly American slavery was cruel and unjust, but the system of oppression that permitted it was the same system that allowed men to rule over women with arbitrary and capricious authority.
A woman who was married to a kind and egalitarian man was simply lucky. The legal system still maintained the power of all men over their wives, no matter how cruel and unkind they may be.
The minister performing the ceremony was troubled by this detour from convention, and Elizabeth was convinced that the lengthy prayer he offered after the ceremony—lasting nearly an hour—was payback for this crucial omission from their marriage vows. There is no evidence that the matter troubled her husband. Even so, others in their reform-minded circles went further to advance equality in marriage. Theodore Weld, who wed the feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimke in , vowed to treat his wife as an equal partner in their marriage.
Marrying in , Henry Blackwell went much further, denouncing marriage as an institution that enforced male dominance over women. Other male reformers supported or worked alongside their wives in the suffrage struggle. Daniel Cady repeatedly lamented the fact that Elizabeth was female because he believed her intellect and forceful personality would go to waste in a woman. Women in the world they lived in were meant to attend to the hearth and home, not to go out into the world to become intellectuals or, worse still, rabble-rousing activists.
At the same time, her father was not completely unmoved by seeing Elizabeth act on her convictions. When Elizabeth responded by reminding him of all the laws that privileged men and harmed women, her father turned to his law books to provide her with another example that would help further illustrate her point.
While never more than outwardly lukewarm to her feminist efforts, Daniel Cady often provided support in this way—giving her legal ammunition to use in her writings and speeches. Elizabeth was accustomed to receiving only the dimmest signs of approval from her father. So as an adult, she neither expected nor needed the motivation of resounding applause for her suffrage work from Henry Stanton.
During this period, Henry studied law under Daniel Cady, before taking up a position in Boston in She also visited the utopian Brook Farm community, admiring its idealism, though not the spartan way of life of its inhabitants. Elizabeth loved Boston, and the art, culture, and intellectual life it had to offer.
The loss of all this made the adjustment to rural life difficult for her when, in , the couple moved to Seneca Falls in upstate New York.
By they had three children, and there would be more—each named in honor of a beloved family member or friend: David Cady born , Henry Brewster , Gerrit Smith , Theodore Weld , Margaret Livingston , Harriot Eaton and Robert Livingston In her earliest years as a wife and mother, Cady Stanton found fulfillment in managing a household.
In fact, she thrived on the day-to-day challenge to do so with order and efficiency. After a time, the novelty had worn off, and she found housework mundane and depressing. She also found herself sympathizing with everyday women who did not have the same access to power and privilege that she had. Assisting victims of domestic abuse in the area on several occasions, Cady Stanton saw how the same unjust laws that she had intuitively resented and wanted to change as a child were especially burdensome to women without means.
Just at this point in her life, an invitation for a visit came from Lucretia Mott, who was only eight miles away in Waterloo. In one afternoon, the group planned and announced the two-day meeting, the first of its kind. It was to be held only five days later. The event was a success that far exceeded the expectations of Cady Stanton and her convention co-planners. While a group of about fifty devoted social reformers from nearby Rochester and Syracuse were expected to participate, over two hundred people attended.
Nearly seventy signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which Cady Stanton had authored, modeling it after the American Declaration of Independence.
Anthony, playing complementary roles. Anthony was the strategist, tactician, and all-round logistics coordinator. Cady Stanton was the philosophical thinker, writer, and theoretician. Anthony, makes for a unique and compelling story. On the surface, the two could not have been more different. Cady Stanton was born of privilege, had a forceful and sometimes challenging personality, was fond of luxury, was a religious skeptic, and refused to believe that women had to choose between motherhood and public activism.
But for some reason, the contrasts between Cady Stanton and Anthony served to complement, rather than to compete with, each other. When Cady Stanton was unable to attend a convention, Anthony would often read the speech Elizabeth had written. Key Related Ideas The abolition movement was a training ground for women who supported suffrage.
Important People Related to the Topic Susan Brownell Anthony - : Raised as a Quaker in a family with a social activist background, Anthony was a teacher for fifteen years before becoming active in temperance. Anthony House. Frederick Douglass - : Douglass started life as a slave, but escaped to the North where he became a staunch abolitionist and lecturer. Wendell Phillips - : Phillips, a radical abolitionist, condemned the Constitution for promoting slavery and said that the South should be removed from the Union as long as slavery continued The National Park Service.
Related Nonprofit Organizations The League of Women Voters was founded in , six months before ratification of the 19th Constitutional amendment, which granted women the right to vote. It was formed to educate women in their new civic responsibility of voting. A nonpartisan organization, current primary efforts include increasing citizen participation in voting, campaign finance reform, civic education and participation, diversity among elected officials, and voting rights for the District of Columbia www.
The two groups joined because Susan B. Anthony felt that a split among suffragists would result in women never obtaining the vote. The women who founded NOW felt that women were discriminated in all areas of life, even though they had the vote. Anthony after women were excluded from the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which granted citizenship and suffrage to black men. Bibliography and Internet Sources Britannica Online. Mott, Lucretia Coffin. Britannica Online.
The National Park Service. Wendell Phillips — Ken Burns and Paul Barnes. State University of New York at Binghamton. Women and Social Movements in the United States, Kathleen Kerr, May Stanton also worked with Anthony on the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage — Matilda Joslyn Gage also worked with the pair on parts of the project. Besides chronicling the history of the suffrage movement, Stanton took on the role religion played in the struggle for equal rights for women.
She had long argued that the Bible and organized religion played in denying women their full rights. With her daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, she published a critique, The Woman's Bible , which was published in two volumes. The first volume appeared in and the second in This brought considerable protest not only from expected religious quarters but from many in the woman suffrage movement. Stanton died on October 26, More so than many other women in that movement, she was able and willing to speak out on a wide spectrum of issues - from the primacy of legislatures over the courts and constitution to women's right to ride bicycles - and she deserves to be recognized as one of the more remarkable individuals in American history.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Beauty pioneer Elizabeth Arden opened the doors of her first salon in Her company expanded internationally and changed the face of women's cosmetics.
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