Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most prominent women’s rights activists in the Women’s Rights Movement in the United States that started in 1848 and ended in 1920 with the enfranchisement of women. The importance of Stanton’s activity in this regard cannot be undervalued with the results of her accomplishments being an asset that all American women inherited in the modern days. Her path was full of controversies and speeches at a certain point filled with racist remarks and condemned by fellow suffragists back in her days and sometimes even today, it is easy to understand them after conducting a critical analysis of the historical events that shaped up her actions and thoughts.
Born in 1815 in Johnstown in New York, Stanton was raised in a family of a New York Supreme Court Judge, whose legal and political profession had a major impact on her development as a smart and active woman. She was educated enough to understand the intricacies of the legislation that deprived women as a gender of many rights that were at the same time naturally granted to men, and thus she had the ability to address these increasingly important issues with the powerful and emotional speeches that were based on her solid knowledge and widely recognized declamatory skills. In those times women in America were denied the possibility to go to college and get the higher education on the same terms with men. However, Stanton, who came from the upper class family, had the possibility to attend Johnstown Academy and subsequently the Troy Female Seminary (later known as Emma Willard School). She showed brilliant academic success and informally continued her education at her father’s office, studying legal books and having discussions on legal matters both with her father and other attorneys. As she describes in her autobiography, when she stumbled upon the women’s inequality in the legal books of her father, she would cut the pages out in the outrage. Feeling the dismay from not being able to study in the college and getting to know about the lack of women’s rights to vote, property, earnings, education and even her own children, she took her first steps on her way to become a suffragist and women’s rights activist. She realized that as women didn’t have the opportunity to change the legislation, they had to get the right to vote first and foremost, such right being the stepping stone to the future women’s rights revolution. But being denied this right, Stanton saw the opportunity to express her political and social views through participating in the abolition movement, which she entered with the help of her cousin and abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Smith also introduced Stanton to her future husband, Henry Brewster Stanton, who was a prominent abolitionist himself. The notable moment of her activism was her request to exclude the word “obey” from the wedding ceremony that she explained as her refusal to obey to her husband in the supposedly equal marriage they both were entering. The next and one of the most important landmarks in Stanton’s life was her and her husband’s visit to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention. While promoting the rights and freedoms of the black people, white man denied the rights of women to participate in the convention as the equal delegates, and at that moment Elizabeth and other women-participants, including Lucretia Mott, a Quaker, whom she will join eight years later, realized that the main focus of their activity cannot stay on the slavery anymore. The further seven years of Stanton’s life helped shape up her ideas and in 1848, after moving to Seneca Falls and meeting fellow thinkers, she take part in the organization of the Women’s Rights Convention and delivered the Declaration of Sentiments, which became the first and a very important document that renounced men’s right to define women’s destiny and proclaimed numerous women’s rights, such as right to elective franchise, right to be representatives in the government, rights to work, have earnings and profit, to get higher education, to get a divorce and to have custody of their children after the divorce and many others. During the next several years Stanton was often invited to speak on different occasions, and her speeches were spread in petitions in different states, giving rise to the movement throughout the country and empowering other women to actively stand for their rights. After meeting her future life-time friend Susan B. Anthony in 1851, both women participated in the Woman's State Temperance Society, but Stanton’s advocacy of the women’s right to divorce on the basis of drunkenness met criticism from other participants, and the woman decided to move in a different direction. Collaboration of Susan and Elizabeth ended up in spreading the movement’s power and getting a chance to re-shape the divorce legislation. During the Civil War Stanton organized the Women's Loyal National League that majorly helped in signing the petition for the Thirteenth Amendment. The war ended, the slaves were granted the freedom, but the women’s rights were still not addressed duly, and with the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, it became clear that women again are left behind. These events explain, though don’t justify, Stanton’s future racist speeches that were aimed at depriving the black man of their rights, until white and black women are deemed equal. In 1869 Stanton organized the National Woman Suffrage Association that spoke for the changes in the legislation on the federal level, rather than on the state-by-state basis. Though primarily advocating universal suffrage, Stanton decided to switch to the idea of the educated suffrage after the Civil War. The explanation was found in the fact that most of the black men didn’t have formal education, while many white women were educated and thus had more knowledge and understanding in the political, economic and social processes. In 1892 Stanton gave her last public speech known as The Solitude of Self in front of the House Judiciary Committee. This great speech contained all the issues that Stanton and her supporters addressed throughout their political and social life, with Stanton declaring: “In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.” Stanton also opposed any religion that treated women as unequal to men, arguing that the religious works were merely the texts written by humans. In the later years Stanton published three major works of the women’s rights movement: The History of Woman Suffrage, The Woman’s Bible and her autobiography Eighty Years & More.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton played a huge role in the formation and development of the organized women’s rights movement. During her sociopolitical career, she has shown women all over the country that the fight for their rights is not an indefinite future, but the present that shapes the future by active attitude and opposition to the male supremacy, first of all in the public life. She gave women the notion of the mother and wife, who is not bound by her family, but can be an active and recognized participant of the public life without having to abandon her role as a woman. The importance of her life work is visible now, when women are given the rights equal to men’s, and though she didn’t live to witness the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, her active life position made a change in the world, and the change gave boost to the movements throughout the world. For me it was important to learn about her achievements not only as a fighter for women’s rights, but also as a person, who wasn’t afraid to stand up against the inequality without the fear of not being accepted and with great moral and intellectual strength and desire since adolescence to learn more to be able to participate in discussions and address her causes professionally, with the deep understanding of what she is fighting for. Her example of an active person and a strong woman in particular can serve many people, who fight for their rights nowadays, and her works as a women’s rights activist can serve as a basis for the education of the modern women and men in the subject of human rights and women’s rights in particular.
Bibliography
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty years and more; reminiscences, 1815-1897.. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. History of woman suffrage, vol.1. Rochester, N. Y.: Fowler and Wells, 1889.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “The Solitude of Self”. Accessed October 25,
2013. http://www.womenspeecharchive.org/files/The_Solitude_of_Self_1192139082217.pdf.
