Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815 to 1902, wrote the American women's rights movement's founding document and a large part of its argument for decades afterward: she drafted the Declaration of Sentiments for the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848, and she wrote much of what Susan B. Anthony afterward delivered from platforms and to congressional committees.
She met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, where the women delegates were refused their seats, and the convention at Seneca Falls came out of that refusal. She also argued against the Fifteenth Amendment in explicitly racist terms, and that is why the movement split in 1869.
What she wrote in 1848, and what it demanded
What she wrote in 1848 was an indictment rather than an appeal. She grew up in Johnstown, New York, in a judge's household and read in his law office, and the Declaration of Sentiments is built like a legal document: it takes the Declaration of Independence as its model, keeps its structure, and substitutes man for King George. Its opening charge sets the terms of everything that follows.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
The convention was called at about a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier, and one hundred people signed the Declaration: sixty eight women and thirty two men. The grievances it lists are legal and economic before they are anything else.
- The denial of the elective franchise.
- The property and wages of a married woman, held by her husband.
- The law of divorce and the custody of children, written by men.
- The closing of the colleges and the professions to women.
- The exclusion of women from the ministry and from any voice in church affairs.
- The different standard of morals applied to men and to women.
Eleven resolutions were put to the convention. Ten passed unanimously. The ninth did not, and it is the one that mattered:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Frederick Douglass spoke for it and it carried by a narrow margin. Stanton's own demand, the vote, was the only part of her document that the room would not accept without argument.
How the partnership with Susan B. Anthony worked
The partnership worked by division of labor: Stanton wrote and Anthony moved. Anthony was not at Seneca Falls in 1848 and the two met afterward, and thereafter Stanton produced the addresses, the resolutions, the appeals to legislatures and much of the doctrine, while Anthony organized the conventions, the petition drives and the state canvasses and delivered the speeches in public. Stanton was the first president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which the two of them formed in May 1869, and she later held the presidency of the merged National American Woman Suffrage Association from its formation in 1890. The two also compiled the History of Woman Suffrage with Matilda Joslyn Gage, which is the reason so much of the campaign's paperwork survives.
What she argued against the Fifteenth Amendment
She argued against the Fifteenth Amendment on racial grounds, in print, and the argument is not a matter of interpretation. The American Equal Rights Association had been formed in 1866 to demand the vote for Black men and for women together. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified and put the word male into the Constitution for the first time. When the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, proposed to enfranchise Black men and not women, Stanton opposed it and made her case in terms of the comparative fitness of voters: that educated white women should not be governed by Black men and by immigrant men, whom she characterized in racial and ethnic terms as unfit for the ballot she was denied. Frederick Douglass, who had spoken for her ninth resolution in 1848, argued against her in public on exactly this point.
The split of 1869 and the merger of 1890
The split of 1869 followed directly from that argument. In May 1869 Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which opposed the Fifteenth Amendment and pressed for a federal amendment for women. In November 1869 Lucy Stone and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported the Fifteenth Amendment and worked state by state. The two organizations ran as rivals until they merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Wyoming Territory had already given women the vote in 1869, the first place in the United States to do it, which was the kind of result the state by state strategy could deliver and the federal strategy could not.
What else she wrote
She wrote steadily to the end, and the later work cost her standing inside her own organization. The Woman's Bible, her commentary on the passages of scripture used against women, was treated by the National American Woman Suffrage Association as a liability, and the organization she had helped to build voted to dissociate itself from the book. Her position was consistent: she had always argued that the ballot was one item in a longer list that included property, wages, divorce, custody, education and the pulpit, and she declined to drop the rest of it to make the vote easier to sell.
Her last years, and what she did not live to see
Stanton died in 1902. Congress did not pass the Nineteenth Amendment until 4 June 1919, Tennessee ratified it as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920, and it was certified on 26 August 1920. Anthony died in 1906 and Sojourner Truth in 1883, so none of the three women whose names are attached to the early campaign saw the result. What survives instead is the paper: the Declaration of Sentiments, the resolutions, the addresses to legislatures and the volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, which is where what was actually said can still be read.