Elizabeth Cady Stanton PDF

# Elizabeth Cady Stanton ## November 12, 1815 - October 26, 1902 ## The Right Is Ours. Have It, We Must. Use It, We Will. Ten-year-old Elizabeth Cady watched in horror as her father, a lawyer in Johnstown, New York, told a weeping woman that he could not help her. Her husband had died and left no...

# Elizabeth Cady Stanton ## November 12, 1815 - October 26, 1902 ## The Right Is Ours. Have It, We Must. Use It, We Will. Ten-year-old Elizabeth Cady watched in horror as her father, a lawyer in Johnstown, New York, told a weeping woman that he could not help her. Her husband had died and left nothing to her, even her home, which she had bought with money she had inherited. She was at the mercy of her son, who inherited everything and treated her poorly. That night, Elizabeth grabbed a pair of scissors and sneaked into her father's office. She wanted to cut out the pages from the law book that had ruined the poor woman. Her father stopped her. "When you are grown up," he said, "you must go down to Albany and talk to the legislators; tell them all you have seen in this office." From an early age, Elizabeth was primed to rebel. She was one of eleven children, only five of whom survived to adulthood, all girls. When the last of her brothers died, her father was crushed. "Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy!" he cried. Elizabeth set out to become the child her father wanted - someone who was educated and brave, curious about the world, and informed about its issues. She pushed boundaries as an adult. When she married Henry Stanton, she did not vow to obey her husband, as brides of the time did. She called him by his first name, instead of Mr. Stanton, as wives did then. She didn't go by Mrs. Henry Stanton and she didn't abandon her maiden name. She was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Period. In 1840, Elizabeth met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Elizabeth was on her honeymoon and found that she enjoyed traveling and meeting new people. Elizabeth took up scissors again when she wrote a controversial book, *The Woman's Bible*. She didn't like churches teaching that women were inferior to men. She cut and pasted Bible stories about women into a notebook. Next to these clippings, she wrote her own version. Then came the awful moment when the male delegates voted to ban women from participating in the convention. Clergymen, in particular, "were in agony lest the women should do or say something to shock the heavenly hosts," Elizabeth scoffed. But that didn't stop the women from airing their opinions. At hotels, on walks around the city, and in tea rooms, the women discussed their plight. In Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth found a mentor. Suddenly, Elizabeth saw the woman she could become. Home life did consume much of Elizabeth's time. She had seven children and enjoyed being a mother, but she also felt like a prisoner. "I pace up and down these two chambers of mine like a caged lioness," she moaned. In 1848, she was invited to join four other women at a friend's house in Seneca Falls, New York. There, she met up again with Lucretia Mott, and the women planned the 1848 Women's Rights Convention. Although the Declaration of Sentiments was a group effort, it is well known that Elizabeth was the main author. She knew how to inspire people with her words. In October 1848, Elizabeth spoke at a suffrage convention in Waterloo, New York. Although the woman's vote had been hotly debated in Seneca Falls, it quickly became the main goal of the movement. Elizabeth's words became a rallying cry: "The right is ours. Have it, we must. Use it, we will." Three years later, Elizabeth met Susan B. Anthony, and the two struck up a fierce, lifelong partnership. Elizabeth was the thinker and writer, Susan the speaker and organizer. Together, they became the driving force behind the suffrage movement. Side by side, they became icons of the cause - Susan tall and rail-thin, Elizabeth round and motherly. Elizabeth and Susan drew crowds of women to the movement, but their extreme positions also alienated people. After the Civil War, as Congress considered granting African American men the vote, the two at first pushed for women and black men to be enfranchised at the same time. "As in the war, freedom was the keynote of victory, so now is universal suffrage the keynote of reconstruction," Elizabeth said. But in their zeal for the woman's cause, they began to openly slander African Americans. No matter how much we love our friends, sometimes they can make us angry. It was the same for Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Despite their close relationship, they had epic arguments. Being single and childless, Susan could devote herself entirely to the suffrage cause. She was often frustrated that Elizabeth's role as a wife and mother claimed her attention for long stretches of time. Elizabeth's sense of humor and easygoing nature often clashed with Susan's rigid and unbending character. Yet their friendship endured. "How I wish I could see you," Elizabeth once wrote to Susan, "even if to fight all the time." The suffrage movement itself struggled with differences. When the Civil War broke out, some women wanted to focus solely on the war effort, while others wanted to continue the suffrage battle. After the war, women differed on whether to back the Fifteenth Amendment giving African American men the right to vote before women got it. In the 1860s, Susan and Elizabeth founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which didn't want any more men getting the vote before women did, while Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe started the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported the Fifteenth Amendment. As the suffrage battle limped into the 1900s, women split again over tactics. Because a few states had approved the woman's vote, some suffragists wanted to continue lobbying state by state. Others worked for the federal amendment, wanting to gain a national victory and prevent states, particularly in the South, from depriving African Americans of the vote. In addition, some women became militant, picketing and disrupting political meetings, while others continued to politely lobby and persuade lawmakers. Women were more deserving of the vote, Elizabeth declared, insulting black men as dirty, uneducated, and servile. Even as audience members cried out "Shame, shame, shame!" she would not relent. Despite the controversy and ill will that Elizabeth caused, she continued to be a leader of the women's movement. She took her father's advice to make her demands known to elected officials on many occasions. In 1854, she spoke out for the vote before the New York State Legislature. In 1866, she ran for Congress, winning only two dozen votes but proving that women could run for office even if they could not vote. And on January 18, 1892, she brought her case to a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. It was Elizabeth's words, written and spoken, that powered the early suffrage fight. The lioness had broken out of her cage.