Women’s Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Declaration of Independence
January 21, 2026
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton may be one of the most important American reformers in American history. While Susan B. Anthony is widely remembered for her efforts to secure voting rights for women, Stanton’s contributions to the women’s suffrage movement have largely faded from public memory. Yet it was Stanton who provided the intellectual foundation for the entire movement, grounding women’s rights in the same natural rights philosophy that had justified American independence from Britain.
Born in November 1815 in Johnstown, New York, Stanton grew up in an affluent family in a region that would become a hotbed of American reform movements. Her father was a lawyer, and young Elizabeth often observed women coming to his practice seeking legal help with alcoholic husbands, divorce, and custody issues. Her father was sympathetic and would sometimes give these women money from his own pocket, but he knew the law offered them no real recourse. The experience left a lasting impression, as did her father’s lament that she wasn’t a boy who could take over the firm after her brother’s death.
From Abolitionism to Women’s Rights
Stanton’s path to the women’s rights movement ran directly through abolitionism. Central New York in the mid-19th century was home to numerous reform movements, with Frederick Douglass just down the road in Rochester and abolitionists scattered throughout the small towns of the region. Stanton met her husband Henry through the abolition movement, and the couple spent their honeymoon at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
It was there that Stanton’s consciousness was raised in a way that would shape the rest of her life. She and fellow American delegate Lucretia Mott were not allowed to sit in the assembly hall with the male delegates. Instead, they were forced to sit behind a curtain. Between sessions, the two women sat on a park bench outside, discussing their shared humiliation and the broader treatment of women in society. They began hatching plans for what would eventually become the Seneca Falls Convention.
The abolitionist movement proved to be crucial training for women’s rights advocates, both intellectually and practically. The more radical strain of abolitionism, associated with William Lloyd Garrison, taught Americans to think about slavery as a systemic corruption rather than simply a collection of individual moral failings. Stanton and other early feminists applied this same analytical framework to the condition of women, recognizing that the institutions of American democracy were themselves tainted by what we would today call sexism.
The Declaration of Sentiments
In the summer of 1848, Lucretia Mott passed through the area, and Stanton seized the opportunity to finally organize the gathering they had discussed years earlier. The Seneca Falls Convention was thrown together relatively quickly and included both men and women, many of whom had been involved in the abolition movement. The document that emerged from those proceedings, the Declaration of Sentiments, would become the founding text of the American women’s rights movement.
The Declaration of Sentiments was audacious for its time, yet in many ways it was anything but radical. The document deliberately echoed the Declaration of Independence almost word for word, beginning with “When in the course of human events…” and proceeding through a familiar structure of natural rights philosophy followed by a list of grievances. This was strategic. Just as Thomas Jefferson had described the Declaration of Independence as simply “an expression of the American mind,” Stanton presented her arguments in language and ideas that would be familiar and, in theory, uncontroversial to American audiences.
The key shift was grounding women’s claims in their nature as human beings rather than in their moral character or domestic role. Earlier advocates like Angelina and Sarah Grimké had argued for women’s rights based on women’s moral authority. Stanton moved the argument to natural rights: women, like men, are free and independent human beings, and government exists to protect their rights.
The grievances Stanton enumerated included women’s exclusion from the public sphere, denial of property rights, inability to keep the fruits of their own labor, and taxation without representation. These themes borrowed directly from the American Revolution. Yet the suffrage plank nearly derailed the entire convention. Many attendees who were willing to sign on to other demands refused to go as far as claiming women’s right to vote, viewing it as simply too radical.
Partnership with Susan B. Anthony
Stanton met Susan B. Anthony in 1851, and the two would remain friends and collaborators until Stanton’s death in 1902. Anthony had not attended the Seneca Falls Convention and came to women’s rights through the temperance movement rather than abolitionism. But the partnership proved remarkably productive. As Anthony herself acknowledged, Stanton was the superior intellectual: “She forged the thunderbolts and I fired them.” Stanton had tremendous theoretical aptitude, while Anthony was more practical and politically savvy.
Their partnership was tested severely after the Civil War. With the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the 14th and 15th Amendments addressing citizenship and voting rights for freed Black men, Stanton and Anthony hoped for universal suffrage that would include women. When it became clear that inserting “sex” into the 15th Amendment would likely sink the entire measure, the women’s movement split. Frederick Douglass, who had bravely signed the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, argued that the personal safety of freed Black men was so endangered that they could not wait. It was the “Negro’s hour.”
Stanton broke not only with abolitionists but with other women’s rights advocates over this question. Her response to being passed over revealed an uglier side: at times elitist and racist, she could not accept that freed Black men would gain the vote before educated white women like herself. This damaged her reputation and contributed to her falling out of favor with the broader movement.
A Forgotten Legacy
Susan B. Anthony’s pragmatism and warmer public persona made her the more beloved figure. She refashioned herself as “Aunt Susan” in her later years, mentoring the next generation of suffragists. When Carrie Chapman Catt, Anthony’s protégée, addressed Congress in 1917 as victory approached, she argued that it did not matter what Jefferson personally believed about women’s suffrage. The moment the Declaration of Independence was written, suffrage became inevitable as “the natural consequence” of its principles.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton provided that intellectual connection between 1776 and 1920. She saw that the Declaration’s claims about human equality and natural rights applied to women as fully as to men, and she articulated that vision in terms Americans could recognize. That her grave went unvisited in 2016 while Anthony’s was covered in “I Voted” stickers speaks to how thoroughly her contributions have been forgotten. But without her thunderbolts, there would have been nothing for Anthony to fire.