International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was active in a number of reforms but is best known as one of the organizers of the American women's rights movement . She and Lucretia Coffin Mott coordinated the first women's rights convention in the United States in 1848 at Seneca Falls , New York. She also worked with Susan B. Anthony to found the Woman's State Temperance Society (1852–3) as well as the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869, serving as president from 1869 to 1890. In 1878 Stanton convinced California Senator Aaron A. Sargent to sponsor an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to grant women suffrage. The amendment was reintroduced in Congress each year until 1919, when Congress approved it and in 1920, 18 years after Stanton's death, it became the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Though most famous for the suffrage activity, Stanton also supported numerous causes such as temperance and abolition. Stanton's written works, along with the Declaration of Sentiments presented at Seneca Falls, include The Woman's Bible (1895) and her memoir Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898). In The Woman's Bible she gave a feminist reading of scripture and addressed the sexism she perceived in organized Christianity. Her text The Solitude of Self was given as a speech in the 1892 convention of the National American ... log in or subscribe to read full text