Woman Making History: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in 1815 in upstate New York. She was the eighth of eleven children (only five of whom lived into adulthood) born to a prominent family. Her father was a judge. Like many families in their time and social class, the Cady family owned slaves.

Cady Stanton was formally educated, attending a co-ed school until she was sixteen. In 1830, she enrolled in Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, but did not graduate, instead leaving with a deep distrust of Christianity she held for the rest of her life.

In 1940, Cady Stanton was married to anti-slavery activist and orator Henry Brewster Stanton. They honeymooned at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Cady Stanton and her husband had seven children between 1842 and 1859. Throughout the course of their forty-plus year marriage (they remained together until Brewster Stanton's death in 1887), Cady Stanton and her husband lived apart more often than together. While they agreed on many issues, including abolition, they disagreed on others, the most notable being women's rights.

In 1847, the Cady Stanton family moved to Seneca Falls, New York. Though Cady Stanton loved motherhood and her children, she was unhappy with the isolation and lack of intellectual stimulation she found in Seneca Falls. This experience, as well as previous experiences of women's second-class citizenship in the abolitionist movement, sealed Cady Stanton's commitment to women's rights. She and others, including Lucretia Mott, organized the nation's first women's rights convention, in Seneca Falls, in 1848. Cady Stanton drafted the convention's Declaration of Sentiments, based on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which, among other things, stated boldly that men and women were created equal, and demanding voting rights for women.