Mrs.

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ring at approximately the same time were in fact very different. While the abolitionist movement was fighting a tradition of tyranny against the African-American, the women's movement was fighting a tradition of protection. Many men and women felt that each sex had its own place in the world. Women were to be protected from such things as voting and politics. The difference between the two movements is emphasized by the fact that it took women 50 more years to achieve suffrage than it did African-American men.





When Elizabeth Cady married abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, she'd already observed enough about the legal relationships between men and women to insist that the word obey be dropped from the ceremony.

An active abolitionist herself, Stanton was outraged when the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, also in 1840, denied official standing to women delegates, including Lucretia Mott. In 1848, she and Mott called for a women's rights convention to be held in Seneca Falls, New York. That convention, and the Declaration of Sentiments written by Stanton which was approved there, is credited with initiating the long struggle towards women's rights and woman suffrage.


Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
(click image for a larger version)
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Modifications © 2003 Jone Johnson Lewis. Licensed to About.com.

After 1851, Stanton worked in close partnership with Susan B. Anthony. Stanton often served as the writer and Anthony as the strategist in this effective working relationship. After the Civil War, Stanton and Anthony were among those who were determined to focus on female suffrage when only voting rights of freed males were addressed in Reconstruction. They founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and Stanton served as president.

When the NWSA and the rival American Woman Suffrage Association finally merged in 1890, Stanton served as the pre...