Stanton grew up watching her father's law clients—women who could own nothing, control nothing, and leave nothing to their children—and resolved to change the law itself. In 1848 she co-organized the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights gathering in the United States, and spent the next five decades writing, organizing, and agitating for suffrage she would not live to see granted.
Elizabeth Cady's education was unusual for a girl of her era—she studied Greek and mathematics alongside boys at the Johnstown Academy and later attended Troy Female Seminary—but she chafed at being barred from Union College simply for her sex. Watching her father, a judge, turn away weeping women who had no legal recourse against abusive husbands sharpened her sense that the law itself needed rewriting.
Married to abolitionist Henry Stanton (on the condition that the word "obey" be struck from their vows), she met Lucretia Mott at the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where women delegates were barred from the floor. That injustice simmered for eight years until Stanton and four other women organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, where she read aloud her Declaration of Sentiments, modeled deliberately on the Declaration of Independence, demanding the vote and full legal personhood for women.
Stanton spent the rest of her life writing, lecturing, and clashing with allies and rivals alike, partnering with Susan B. Anthony for decades. She died in 1902, eighteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment finally passed—a gap that makes her early, radical insistence on full citizenship all the more striking.
Key people: Elizabeth Cady Stanton