Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnstown, New York, in 1815. Her husband, Henry Stanton, was an abolitionist, and when women delegates were barred from the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London she and Lucretia Mott resolved to hold a women's rights meeting. That meeting became the Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848, where Stanton was the main author of the Declaration of Sentiments. From 1851 she worked closely with Susan B. Anthony, with Stanton generally writing and Anthony organizing. She co-edited The Revolution, led the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1869 and co-wrote the History of Woman Suffrage. She died in New York City in 1902.

Admirers regard Stanton as the leading intellectual of the 19th-century women's movement, whose Declaration of Sentiments set its agenda and whose arguments on marriage, divorce and religion anticipated later feminism. Her decades of writing and lecturing helped build the campaign that ended with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, eighteen years after her death. Critics and historians also stress her failings. During the Fifteenth Amendment dispute she made elitist and racially condescending remarks, including use of the slur Sambo, which drew criticism from Frederick Douglass and split the suffrage movement. She focused mainly on educated, propertied women and spoke against the votes of immigrant men. The Woman's Bible was controversial even among fellow suffragists.