Elizabeth Cady Stanton Biography

In an autobiographical account, she described the occasion of her birth as follows:

“With several generations of vigorous, enterprising ancestors behind me, I commenced the struggle of life under favorable circumstances on the twelfth day of November 1815, the same year that my father, Daniel Cady, a distinguished lawyer and judge in the state of New York, was elected to Congress.”

Her name was Elizabeth Cady from Johnstown, New York. Her father Daniel, curiously enough, once litigated a case with Abraham Lincoln. After the aforementioned term in the U.S. Congress, Daniel Cady served as a justice on the New York Supreme Court. Elizabeth’s mother, Margaret Livingston Cady, provided the household with a progressive counterpoint to Judge Cady’s conservatism and was active in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements.

Young Elizabeth was very intelligent and, unlike most girls of her time, received a formal education. She attended Johnstown Academy, winning a number of awards and honors.

Her proof of academic excellence in a co-educational environment would play a strong role in developing her confidence as a woman in a male-dominated society and so, too, would another twist of fate. Her native Johnstown was situated in New York’s Mohawk Valley in the traditional territory of the Mohawk Nation. As the easternmost member of the original Five Nations of the Iroquois, the Mohawks had come to be known as the Keepers of the Eastern Door.

As with all the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks were and still are a matrilineal culture, meaning descent and inheritance are passed through the female line. Women in each of the Iroquois nations have also enjoyed leadership positions and a voice in the democratic system of governance since the founding of the Iroquois confederacy established after Deganawidah’s Great Law of Peace.

This happenstance of the location of Elizabeth’s upbringing and her eventual interaction with empowered Iroquois women would influence the young Johnstown native later in life and even alter the course of American history.

Elizabeth Cady often traveled to the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith, a prominent abolitionist. It was there she met fellow abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton. The two fell in love and the couple married in 1840. Elizabeth removed the word “obey” from her wedding vows. Commenting on the decision, she later wrote, “I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation.” In another harbinger of things to come, she adopted her husband’s name but also kept her own, thus becoming Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation.”

In a decision most would consider bereft of romance, the couple traveled to London on their honeymoon to attend the World’s Antislavery Convention. The newlyweds then returned to Johnstown and after a couple of years moved to Boston. There, Stanton enjoyed interacting with prominent abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.

While in London, Stanton had met the abolitionist Lucretia Mott (right side of painting) and the two had begun discussing women’s rights. Mott, like Stanton, was in close contact with Iroquois women. In Iroquois philosophy, all aspects of the universe are comprised of co-dependent halves, including genders. Thus, harmony between the genders was built into Iroquois culture and governance. Through interaction with the matrilineal culture of the Iroquois, Stanton and Mott acquired confidence that gender equality could be achieved in their own culture. The two women organized the first women’s rights convention in 1848, The Seneca Falls Convention.

At the convention, Stanton read her “Declaration of Sentiments.” Borrowing form and content from the United States Declaration of Independence, Stanton made her rebellious case for gender equality. She also proposed a controversial resolution for voting rights for women, a cause many attending women did not support. Frederick Douglass, present at the meeting, eloquently supported Stanton and the resolution was adopted. So began the long women’s voting rights campaign in the United States. 

In 1851, Stanton met Susan B. Anthony. The two formed a powerful, lifelong team in the advancement of women’s rights. Stanton is most often celebrated for her spirited commitment to women’s suffrage, but she was a powerful voice for a broad range of women’s rights issues that included property, divorce, custody, income, employment, health, spousal abuse, and birth control.

The Portrait Monument featuring Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B, Anthony by Adelaide Johnson, Rotunda, U.S. Capitol

As the women’s movement gathered followers, its leaders often disagreed on important positions. One irreconcilable split occurred over the issue of the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage based on race. Anthony and Stanton opposed the amendment if it did not simultaneously include a call to enfranchise women. Others in the women’s movement supported the amendment regardless of whether it would include women or not. The clash led Anthony and Stanton to found the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA).

Other prominent suffragists would join NWSA, which was then considered the radical wing of the movement. One such woman was Matilda Joselyn Gage (pictured in the center of the painting). Gage, like Stanton and Mott, was in close contact with Iroquois women, especially Mohawks. In fact, she was given an honorary adoption into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation in 1893. This honor gave her a voice in naming a chief. Ironically, that same year Gage was arrested for the civil disobedience of voting in a school board election in Onondaga County, New York.

Meanwhile, Stanton now in her mid-seventies had just delivered her famous “The Solitude of Self” speech to the United States Congress the previous year. In echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Stanton declared, “The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives… is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.”

Over the years, Stanton had also unapologetically condemned religious views she felt restricted women’s freedom and impeded their progress. Fearing a backlash and loss of support for the suffrage cause, the women’s movement largely disassociated itself from Stanton in her last years.

After more than fifty years of championing women’s rights, Stanton died of heart failure on October 26, 1902 at the age of 86. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.