An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

(Nov. 12, 1815-Oct. 26, 1902). Women's rights leader. She was born in Johnstown, New York. Stanton graduated from Emma Willard's Female Seminary in Troy, New York, in 1832. She had an early interest in the abolition of slavery and the temperance movement. Stanton attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London with her husband, Henry Stanton, in 1840, where the exclusion of female delegates inspired a friendship with Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister. In 1846 the family moved from Boston to Seneca Falls, New York. On July 19-20, 1848, she held a women's rights conference at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls. Stanton met Susan B. Anthony in 1851, and from then until her death they worked together for women's rights. During the Civil War, Stanton founded the Women's Loyal National League, which supported the Union and gathered 300,000 signatures demanding the immediate abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment. When the American Woman Suffrage Association was founded in May 1869, she was chosen president and served in that capacity for twenty-one years. She moved to New York City after her husband's death in 1887. Stanton was the primary author of the Woman's Bible, published in two parts in 1895 and 1898. Her major writing, with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, was the three-volume History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1886). Her memoirs, Eighty Years and More, was published in 1898. Stanton died in New York City. Stanton is commemorated in the Episcopal calendar of the church year on July 20. See Bloomer, Amelia Jenks; see Truth, Sojourner; see Tubman, Harriet Ross.

Glossary definitions provided courtesy of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY,(All Rights reserved) from “An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, A User Friendly Reference for Episcopalians,” Don S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum, editors.