Elizabeth Cady Stanton

May 1860, the tenth annual National Woman's Rights Convention was held. Elizabeth Stanton was greeted warmly when she took the stage, but the audience was stunned when she proceeded to talk about the institutions of marriage and divorce. When she finished delivering her speech a heated debate broke out. The debate continued after the convention with some taking Elizabeth Stanton's side and others siding with Wendell Phillips. In her autobiography Eighty Years & More Elizabeth states "What I said on divorce thirty-seven years ago seems quite in line with what many say now. The trouble was not what I said, but that I said it too soon, and before the people were ready to hear it.  It may be, however, that I helped them to get ready; who knows?'

In 1861 the Civil War began. Women put aside their issues to concentrate on the war effort. As the war waged on women took public jobs, learned to take care of themselves, and learned how to manage business and family affairs. These were all goals that the women's movement had been encouraging for years.

Stanton and Anthony decided to form a Woman's Loyal League, (Elizabeth Stanton was voted president of the league), to advocate the immediate emancipation and enfranchisement of the Southern slaves.  They wrote, published, and issued tracts. For months these petitions were circulated.  There are now, in the national archives in the Capitol building in Washington D.C., petitions signed by three hundred thousand people. The Woman's Loyal League sent appeals to the President, House of Representatives, and Senate urging emancipation and the passage of the proposed 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the National Constitution. The war ended in 1865.

After women's efforts in the war, most women felt suffrage was their basic right. They thought surely they would be given the vote. However, they were wrong.  With no active woman's rights movements to protest this injustice, not only were they not granted the vote, but some of women's previously won rights were taken away. The removed rights include: the law which gave mothers equal guardianship of their children, and widows certain property rights. Stanton and Anthony petitioned that women be included in the 14th Amendment. They gained 10,000 signatures to be sent to Washington. The people they counted on for support turned their backs on them, stating it would be too hard to get the bill passed if it included women and the women would have to wait.

In May 1866, during a women's rights convention, Susan Anthony proposed that the movement convert itself into the American Equal Rights Association and work for universal suffrage. Her proposal was accepted.

In 1867, Sojourner Truth spoke to warn women should not wait for the black men to get their vote because then the black woman would be no better off. Stanton, Anthony, Lucy Stone, and many others fought hard to see women included; but when the referendum was held all women lost. Afterward, Stanton and Anthony set out on a lecture tour. At the end of their tour George Francis Train offered to give them money to start a woman suffrage paper called The Revolution.

In 1868 Stanton and Anthony began publishing The Revolution. In 1869 there was a division among the women and the movement split. Some of the women disagreed with the publication and its financial supporter.  Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association to lobby for a 16th amendment that would outlaw disfranchisement based on sex. Later that same year, Lucy Stone founded the rival American Woman Suffrage Association. Sojourner Truth affiliated herself with Stanton and Anthony's organization.  Despite their efforts the 15th amendment did not include voting rights for woman. It would be another fifty years before women obtained the right to vote in the United States.

In 1868 Stanton unsuccessfully bid for a U.S. Congressional seat in New York.

Stanton was active internationally and spent a lot of time in Europe with her daughter Harriot Stanton Blanch.  In 1888 she helped prepare for the founding of the International Council of Women.

In 1890 the two suffrage associations merged against Stanton's objections. The new organization was named the National American Woman Suffrage Association.  Stanton became its first president. 

On January 17, 1892, Stanton, Anthony, Stone, and others addressed the issue of suffrage before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1895 Stanton published the Woman's Bible, Part I which caused the National American Woman Suffrage Association to dissociate itself with her because of her religious views.  Part II of the Woman's Bible was published in 1898.

In 1898 Elizabeth Stanton wrote her autobiography with the help of Susan B. Anthony.

On October 26 1902, at 3 pm, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton died; she had been seriously ill for months.

 (Gurko, 1974), (Stanton, 1993/1898),(http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/resources/timeline.html) & (http;//www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1112.html)