Founding Mother: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Seneca Falls Convention began a six decade career of women’s rights activism by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and daughter Harriot, 1856. Harriot would also become a leading advocate of women’s rights.

- Source Unknown

Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up in a home with twelve servants. Early in her marriage Cady Stanton had a more modest lifestyle in Seneca Falls, New York.
- Kenneth C. Zirkel

Young Susan B. Anthony sometimes helped in the Stanton household. “Susan stirs the pudding, Elizabeth stirs up Susan, and Susan stirs up the world,” explained Elizabeth’s husband Henry Stanton.
- Project Gutenberg

When her children were older Cady Stanton toured eight months each year as a paid lecturer. One winter she traveled forty to fifty miles a day by sleigh, often in sub-zero temperatures, when western railroads were not running
- Source Unknown

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A Unique Partnership
She has been called the “outstanding philosopher” of the women’s movement. Even in childhood Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a passion for equality. In order to compete with boys she studied the “books they read and the games they played,” beginning a lifelong habit of intellectual curiosity. Later, as the mother of seven children, she sometimes felt like a “caged lioness.” Elizabeth wrote speeches and prepared arguments for her friend Susan B. Anthony to deliver on the lecture circuit.

On the Road
Cady Stanton took to the lecture circuit in middle age promoting suffrage and other women’s issues including divorce reform (particularly in the case of drunken or abusive husbands), the right to own property independently, and child custody (left exclusively to the husband after marital breakup). Often involved in controversy, her personal demeanor could be disarming. “My pail full of arguments against is getting emptied and the pail of arguments for is filling up,” wrote one audience member.

Boston
As a young couple Elizabeth Cady Stanton and husband Henry lived for a time in Massachusetts, a center of nineteenth century reform. “I consider myself in a kind of moral museum and I find that Boston affords as many curiosities in its way as does the British museum in its.” she wrote.