What Happened
Elizabeth Cady Stanton traces her life from a childhood spent meeting her father's expectations to her work as a primary architect of the women’s suffrage movement. The narrative chronicles her evolution from a skeptical student during religious revivals to a public figure navigating legislative assemblies and hostile lecture crowds. Stanton details the exhaustion of the lyceum circuit, the challenges of raising children while organizing political reform, and her fifty-year partnership with Susan B. Anthony. She recounts experiences ranging from an observation of Mormon polygamy in Salt Lake City to the scrutiny of marriage and divorce laws in New York, consistently analyzing the legal and social constraints placed upon women throughout the nineteenth century with an unsentimental, sharp, and exacting eye.
Key figures
- Susan B. Anthony
Steadfast friend and tireless collaborator for half a century.
- Daniel Cady
The author's father and a judge who influenced her legal interests.
- Henry Brewster Stanton
The husband who accompanied Elizabeth to London.
- Seneca Falls
The location of the first Woman's Rights Convention.
What it's really about
- Legal Equality
- The struggle to reform laws governing suffrage, marriage, and property.
- Intellectual Independence
- Rejecting theological dogma and traditional domestic constraints.
Why it's memorable
- Stanton and her classmates ironing their clothes by sitting on them during French lessons.
- Susan B. Anthony debating clergymen and editors from the back of a lumber wagon.
Where it lands
The record concludes with Stanton’s eightieth birthday and a massive index of the reformers who shaped the nineteenth century.
For your book club
- How did Stanton's domestic life as a mother of seven influence her political priorities?
- What role did her international travels play in shaping the American suffrage movement?