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In 1848, Stanton and Mott called for a
women’s rights convention, the first ever held specifically to address the subject, at Seneca Falls, New York. At the
Seneca Falls Convention , Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed women were equal to men and deserved the same rights. Among the rights Stanton wished to see granted to women was suffrage, the right to vote. When called upon to sign the Declaration, many of the delegates feared that if women demanded the right to vote, the movement would be considered too radical and its members would become a laughingstock. The Declaration passed, but the resolution demanding suffrage was the only one that did not pass unanimously.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al. 1887.
History of Woman Suffrage , vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 73.
Along with other feminists (advocates of women’s equality), such as her friend and colleague Susan B.
Anthony , Stanton fought for rights for women besides suffrage, including the right to seek higher education. As a result of their efforts, several states passed laws that allowed married women to retain control of their property and let divorced women keep custody of their children.
Jean H. Baker. 2005.
Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists . New York: Hill and Wang, 109. Amelia
Bloomer , another activist, also campaigned for dress reform, believing women could lead better lives and be more useful to society if they were not restricted by voluminous heavy skirts and tight corsets.
The women’s rights movement attracted many women who, like Stanton and Anthony, were active in either the temperance movement, the abolition movement, or both movements. Sarah and Angelina
Grimke , the daughters of a wealthy slaveholding family in South Carolina, became first abolitionists and then women’s rights activists.
Angelina Grimke. October 2, 1837. “Letter XII Human Rights Not Founded on Sex.” In
Letters to Catherine E. Beecher: In Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism . Boston: Knapp, 114–121. Many of these women realized that their effectiveness as reformers was limited by laws that prohibited married women from signing contracts and by social proscriptions against women addressing male audiences. Without such rights, women found it difficult to rent halls in which to deliver lectures or to hire printers to produce antislavery literature.
Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the women’s rights movement fragmented. Stanton and Anthony denounced the Fifteenth Amendment because it granted voting rights only to black men and not to women of any race.
Keyssar, 178. The fight for women’s rights did not die, however. In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the
National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which demanded that the Constitution be amended to grant the right to vote to all women. It also called for more lenient divorce laws and an end to sex discrimination in employment. The less radical Lucy
Stone formed the
American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in the same year; AWSA hoped to win the suffrage for women by working on a state-by-state basis instead of seeking to amend the Constitution.
Keyssar, 184. Four western states—Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho—did extend the right to vote to women in the late nineteenth century, but no other states did.
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