Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton is known as one of the most influential suffragists in the United States during the Progressive era. She was a feminist, abolitionist, supporter of reproductive freedom, supporter of the labor movement, supporter of divorce, and took many other controversial stances for the time. Many revere her for her work leading the Women’s Rights Movement along with Susan B. Anthony, but is she a figure we should remember with such high esteem? Did her controversial viewpoints outweigh her contributions to the Women’s Rights Movement, therefore discrediting her reputation of being a progressive thinker? These ideas will be explored by looking closer at her speeches, essays, and books written about Stanton to see if there is any evidence to suggest she was not as a liberal as we remember her.
As a child, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a devout Calvinist. However, this religion caused her much distress as she believed herself to be a “hopeless sinner, doomed to damnation,” and she struggled with this for much of her young life until she had the realization that people are inherently good, or they can become good1. This new philosophy influenced the rest of her work as a human rights advocate, which she began with abolitionism. Shortly after the two met, she was married to the abolitionist Henry B. Stanton in 1840, and they even went on their honeymoon to the World’s Anti Slavery Convention. Although she saw abolitionism as important work, the women’s rights movement called to her as she realized the lack of rights held by the white women of the United States. She believed that the laws concerning women were “not surpassed by any slaveholding code in the Southern States; in fact they [were] worse, by just so far as woman, from her social position, refinement, and education, in on a more equal ground with the oppressor”2. This is where our controversy begins: why did Elizabeth Cady Stanton fight for the rights of black people before turning around and comparing white women's struggles to theirs? Was she just a product of her time, or was she making precise political calculations to persuade men into giving her the vote?
1 Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
2 “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and ...,” accessed April 10, 2023, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qgf51.1.