Elizabeth Cady Stanton ( 1815-1902):
In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton initiated the call for a women’s rights meeting at Seneca Falls, New York. The members of this historic convention issued the Declaration of Sentiments and resolutions, among them the demand for woman suffrage. Historian Ann D. Gordon writes that, in the early 1860s, Stanton “gave new direction to the women’s rights movement by making it a vehicle for expressing women’s interest in politics.” (“ Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” American National Biography at 564). In the autumn of 1866, while living in New York, Stanton offered herself as a candidate for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District. She did this, according to two of her children, “in order to impress the public with the fact that constitutionally women had a right to run for office.” (Stanton and Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, II, at 114-15.) She received only two dozen votes but provoked wide discussion on the question of women’s rights.
Party Affiliation:
Republican [?] Equal Rights Association [?]
Photograph:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the 1860s about the time she ran for Congress.
"Portrait of Elizabeth Cady Stanton," Brooklyn in the Civil War, Brooklyn Public Library
http://www.brooklynlibrary.org/civilwar/cwdoc097.html
Resources:
Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Candida Smith (eds), Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
Ann D, Gordon, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (vols. 1-4) New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997-2006).
Elisabeth Griffin, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton's Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (vols. 1-2)(Reprint ed., New York: Arno Press, 1969).
[Additional Notes]:
Stanton was the daughter of activists: Judge Daniel Cady who was also a state assemblyman and member of Congress, and Margaret Livingston Cady. a reformer, writer, and co-founder of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. Stanton was educated at home and at noted educator Emma Willard’s seminary in Troy, New York. She learned about law and issues of injustice from her father and his law books.