Women’s Rights Activist
She is born in Johnstown, New York, in 1815 to a lawyer, congressman, and state supreme court judge, and the daughter of a colonel who fought beside Washington in the War of Independence. She graduates from Emma Willard’s Female Seminary in Troy, New York, one of the most distinguished schools for women in the United States. The right to better education will be one of the principal demands of the women’s movement.
When she marries the journalist Henry Stanton, Elizabeth refuses to be called Mrs. Henry Stanton.
“There is a great deal in a name…Ask our colored brethren if there is nothing in a name.”[1]
The Right to Vote
Immediately after the wedding, she leaves with her husband for the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where she discovers that women can neither vote nor take the floor. Outraged, she leaves the convention, and as she is walking, she encounters another outraged woman, Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher from Philadelphia. Their friendship and collaboration will lead them to organize the first meeting about women’s rights in 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, in Seneca Falls, New York. The convention is an unexpected success. The Declaration of Sentiments is born, drawn up along the lines of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, as the fulfillment of the democracy which was established therein.
The Right to Happiness
For the first time in the history of women, the right to happiness is talked about.
“Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and of no validity.”[2]
“Inasmuch, then, as woman shares equally the joys and sorrows of time and eternity, is it not the height of presumption in man to propose to represent her at the ballot box and the throne of grace….?”[3]
The Right to a Voice
We presented ourselves there before them as an oppressed class, with trembling frames and faltering tongues, and we did not expect to be able to speak so as to be heard by all at first… but our trust in the omnipotency of Right was our only faith that we should succeed.”[4]
Not Rights Alone
However, the women of Seneca Falls do not consider suffrage merely a breakthrough toward equality with men; for them the entrance of woman as a collective force into public and political life will inevitably lead to a different and better world.
“Place women in equal power, and you will find her capable of not abusing it: give her the elective franchise, and there will be unseen, yet a deep and universal movement of the people to elect into office only those who are pure in intention and honest in sentiment!”[5]
Elizabeth Cady Stanton dies in 1902
In the Capitol building in Washington, alongside the statues of the Founding Fathers, there is a group of marble statues which depicts her together with the Founding Mothers.
Extract from Waldensian Cultural Centre Foundations’s brochure
www. fondazionevaldese.org
[1] From a letter to a friend, 1874
[2] From the relolutions read at the Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
[3] From the Solitude of Self, 1892
[4] From the opening address by Abigail Bush, president of the Convention of Rochester, 1848
[5] From a speech by Lucretia Mott to the American Equal Rights Association, 1867