Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers

Campaign retired. All transcriptions available in LOC.gov


Completed Pages: 3,456
Registered Contributors: 768
Launched June 4, 2019 and completed June 15, 2020.

About this Campaign

Suffrage was an important but not singular goal for Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Since childhood, she rebelled against the role assigned to women and chafed at being denied a university education because of her gender. As a young woman, she became involved in the temperance and antislavery movements, through which she met abolitionist reformer and journalist Henry Brewster Stanton (1805-1887). They married in May 1840.

While honeymooning in England, Stanton became outraged when she and other women were barred from a major antislavery convention. The incident spurred her and Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), a Quaker minister from Pennsylvania and one of the American delegates to the London meeting, to organize a women’s rights convention. The event took place in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York and is considered by many as the beginning of the American woman suffrage movement. There Stanton put forth her daring Declaration of Sentiments, including the then-radical demand for women's voting rights, a goal that would consume the women's movement for more than seventy years.