Elizabeth Cady Stanton Is Known as the Woman Behind the Suffrage Movement. A New Book Reveals the Story Behind Her Tenacity
Her role as a historic hero or villain depends on the movement in question, but looking at her as a mother and daughter adds depth to her legend
Born in 1815 after the death of a much-desired baby boy, Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up with the painful knowledge that her father had longed for a son, and later recalled how, as a child of 11, she’d watched him grieve the death of another son, the only one of his five sons to survive infancy; young Elizabeth climbed onto his knee—only to hear him murmur, “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy.” Stanton later described the moment as decisive. “Then and there I resolved,” she wrote in her memoirs, “[to] study and strive to be at the head of all my classes,” concluding that “the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous.”
In Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life, historian Ellen Carol DuBois finds ample evidence, in Stanton’s early life, of a mind ready to meet inequality head-on. Though Stanton is best remembered as a key organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first women’s rights convention in United States history—and primary author of its resulting Declaration of Sentiments, DuBois shows that Stanton’s intellectual contributions ranged far beyond the vote. Long flattened into a simple role as the “mother” of American suffrage, Stanton has more recently been pigeonholed in a different way: remembered frequently for her racist rhetoric during Reconstruction. “Neither version,” DuBois tells Smithsonian, “clarifies the full breadth—and radicalism—of her ideas.”
Drawing on decades of scholarship and Stanton’s own lucid prose, DuBois traces the evolution of Stanton’s thinking—from early theories of women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy to a radical critique of marriage—revealing the extraordinary range of this foundational feminist thinker. Over five decades, Stanton produced hundreds of speeches and essays. She co-wrote the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage, and, in 1895, late in her life, published The Woman’s Bible, a controversial book that challenged scriptural justifications for keeping women subordinated to men.
DuBois is candid about Stanton’s blind spots, especially her racial and class prejudices, which surfaced most sharply during moments of political defeat. After the Civil War, when women’s suffrage stalled, Stanton often aimed her fury not at the white male politicians blocking reform but at Black men, whose enfranchisement before women she resented. Many of her peers held similar views, DuBois notes; what distinguished Stanton was how forcefully—and publicly—she voiced them. “As she had said of herself, if told that something she did was wrong, she was only more determined to do or say it,” DuBois says, “to resist what she called ‘the eternal no, no, no.’”
What also emerges is the improbability of Stanton’s intellectual output, given the duties of her private life. “I must say that I was astonished,” DuBois adds, “that in the same years she was offering some of her most original and courageous ideas about women’s emancipation, she was simultaneously caring for seven children and running, with not much help, a middle-class household. It is hard to think of any other woman in her time—or any other, for that matter—who could combine domestic responsibilities and public activism so fully and gracefully.”
Did You Know? What did Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocate for?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an early (and radical) proponent of women's bodily autonomy, advocating for “voluntary motherhood” among all women. Though opposed to abortion, she argued for the novel idea that women could refuse their husbands’ entreaties. As Stanton once put it in an interview, she was seeking to spread “the gospel of fewer children.”
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This article is a selection from the March 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine
