Celebrating Elizabeth Cady Stanton at 200
Elizabeth Cady was the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge. Her fatherâs influence and her studies at a school that took the education of women seriously laid the foundation for her lifelong commitment to womenâs suffrage.
At age 25 she married Henry Brewster Stanton, a lawyer and abolitionist, with whom she would have seven children. Her seriousness about womenâs rightsâeven at that ageâwas evident in her refusal to allow the word âobeyâ in her marriage vows. She met another perfect partner, Susan B. Anthony, in 1851. Together with Anthony, whose great strength was organization and strategy (and, no doubt, a certain amount of child-minding), she formed a solid team in which she wrote and lectured ceaselessly. Their working partnership lasted half a century.