Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments

About the Author

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York, the daughter of Margaret Livingstone and Daniel Cady. Stanton's father was a distinguished lawyer and jurist who ultimately served on the state's highest court. Stanton was one of eleven of children, many of whom did not survive to adulthood. Young Elizabeth received tutoring in Greek and mathematics; she also became an accomplished equestrian. Judge Cady allowed her free run of his library, giving her access to any book she wished to read, including law books. Cady alternated praising his daughter's accomplishments with telling her he wished she had been born male, creating in her a determination to succeed at academic as well as domestic activities. By reading her father's law books, she also learned that women were accorded a second-class status in the legal realm, planting the seed that eventually matured into her campaign for women's rights.

Stanton furthered her education at Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York. Willard's school provided the best female education available for its time. Stanton studied the classics, algebra, geometry, philosophy, and history as well as proper female deportment and etiquette. After her graduation in 1833, Stanton lived with a cousin, the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, in whose circle she was exposed to reformist sentiment. It was at Smith's residence that she met a fellow abolitionist, Henry Stanton, whom she married in 1840. Stanton accompanied her husband to London in that year, where he was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. She met another American delegate, Lucretia Coffin Mott, who, because of her gender, could not take her seat at the convention. All the female delegates were allowed only to observe the proceedings in silence. Mott and Stanton commiserated about the injustice dealt the women and vowed to do something about it. This fateful meeting eventually culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention.

Upon their return from Europe, the Stantons settled with her family so that Henry could study to law. They moved to Boston in 1842, where Henry practiced law. The couple also began their family in 1842; their last of six children was born in 1856. Elizabeth became an avid participant in Boston's intellectual life, where she met luminaries such as Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry actively participated in antislavery activities, although he was more closely allied with the conservative wing of abolitionism, rather than the Garrisonian wing. He and Elizabeth disagreed on a number of issues, particularly that of women's rights. Indeed, throughout her life she refused to refer to herself as “Mrs. Henry Stanton”; instead she used “Elizabeth Cady Stanton” or “E. C. Stanton.” In 1847 the Stantons left Boston for Seneca Falls, in Upstate New York, because of Henry's health.

Seneca Falls was a small community in the Finger Lakes region. While children and her household occupied some of Stanton's time, she missed the intellectual stimulation of city life. As she became involved in her new home, Stanton made the acquaintance of women who agreed that something needed to be done to improve the rights of women. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt, Martha Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock organized a convention to discuss the rights of women. The Seneca Falls Convention, where Stanton presented her Declaration of Sentiments, gave birth to other women's rights conventions around the country, including the first national convention, in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. The conventions continued until the outbreak of the Civil War.

In 1851 Amelia Bloomer introduced Stanton to the woman who would become her lifelong friend, Susan B. Anthony. The two women had complementary gifts; Stanton was the better writer and Anthony the superior organizer. The unmarried Anthony was free to travel and speak out on women's rights, while Stanton stayed home and saw to her family but wrote Anthony's speeches. Together Stanton and Anthony provided decades of leadership for the nascent feminist movement. Following the Civil War, Stanton and Anthony formed the Equal Rights Association supporting universal suffrage and tried to get women included in the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizens as exclusively male for the first time in the Constitution. Stanton took a hard-line stance that neither the Fourteenth nor the Fifteenth Amendment (which gave black men the right to vote) should be passed unless woman suffrage was included. The women were told that it was “the Negro's hour,” and both amendments passed without provisions for woman suffrage, but some of the feminists embarked on their own crusade to gain the vote for women.

Stanton and Anthony split from the more conservative feminists like Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, differing on passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the approach to organizing the suffrage movement. Stanton and Anthony organized the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and Stone and Howe the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), both in 1869. The NWSA believed that the goal should be an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with the Fifteenth Amendment as the model. The organization also propounded a broader agenda of women's rights in general, not just the vote. The AWSA, on the other hand, supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and worked on gaining votes for women state by state. The NWSA counted among its supporters Sojourner Truth and Matilda Joslyn Gage, who became a leader in the suffrage movement and, in an interesting aside, was the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz.

Stanton put her writing skills to good use on behalf of the feminist movement. Together with Anthony and the feminist Parker Pillsbury, she wrote and edited a feminist periodical called Revolution in 1868. She also published a number of works including her autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898). With Anthony and Gage she wrote volumes 1 through 3 of The History of Woman Suffrage (published in six volumes 1881–1922, with the later volumes completed by Anthony, Gage, and Ida Husted Harper). Stanton's Woman's Bible (1895) is an intriguing publication, offering a feminist interpretation of scripture.

As Stanton's children matured, she was able to more actively pursue the cause of women's rights. She made speeches and worked to pass suffrage laws in several states, including New York, Michigan, and Kansas. Senator Aaron A. Sargent of California introduced the woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. Senate for the first time in 1878 at the behest of Stanton and Anthony. It contained the exact wording that would finally become law in 1920.

The suffrage movement gained strength when the NWSA and AWSA merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association and elected Stanton its first president. Stanton served the organization until her death on October 26, 1902. Throughout her long life, Stanton worked tirelessly for women's rights. Her ideas were often considered too radical for the mainstream, and eventually it was Anthony who received most of the adulation from young suffragists, whose primary goal was the vote. In a great disservice to Stanton, the Nineteenth Amendment is also referred to as the “Susan B. Anthony amendment.” With the revitalization of the feminist movement in the 1960s, Stanton has been restored to her proper place of importance as a founding mother of modern feminism.