1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

STANTON, ELIZABETH CADY (1815-1902), American reformer, was born in Johnstown, New York, on the 12th of November 1815, the daughter of Daniel Cady (1773-1859), a Federalist member of the National House of Representatives in 1815-1817 and a justice of the supreme court of New York state in 1847-1855. She was educated at the Johnstown Academy and at the Troy Female Seminary (now the Emma Willard School), where she graduated in 1832. In 1840 she married Henry Brewster Stanton (1805-1887), a lawyer and journalist, who had been a prominent abolitionist since his student days (1832-1834) in Lane Theological Seminary, and who took her on a wedding journey to London, where he was a delegate to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention. He was a member of the New York Senate in 1850-1851, was one of the founders of the Republican party in New York, and from 1868 until his death was on the staff of the New York Sun. Mrs Stanton, who had become intimately acquainted in London with Mrs Lucretia Mott, one of the women delegates barred from the anti-slavery convention, devoted herself to the cause of women's rights. She did much by the circulation of petitions to secure the passage in New York in 1848 of a law giving a married woman property rights; and in the same year on the 19th and 20th of June in Seneca Falls (q.v.), whither the Stantons had removed in 1847 from Boston, was held, chiefly under the leadership of Mrs Mott and Mrs Stanton, the first Woman's Rights Convention. She spoke before the New York legislature on the rights of married women in 1854 and on drunkenness as a ground for divorce in 1860, and for twenty-five years she annually addressed a committee of Congress urging an amendment to the Federal constitution giving certain privileges to women. With Parker Pillsbury (1809–1898) she edited in 1867–1870 The Revolution, a radical newspaper, which in 1870 was consolidated with the Christian Enquirer. To the Woman's Tribune she made important contributions, publishing in it serially parts of the Woman's Bible (1895), which she and others prepared, and her personal reminiscences, published in 1898 as Eighty Years and More. With Susan B. Anthony and Mathilda Joslyn Gage she wrote The History of Woman Suffrage (3 vols., 1880–1886). She was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1865–1890. Her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856–), also became prominent as a worker for woman's suffrage.