Susan Zimet - Roses and Radicals: The Epic Story of How American Women Won the Right to Vote

Elizabeth Cady Stanton with her daughter, Harriot, 1856. Harriot was the sixth of Stantons seven children.

Even though Elizabeth wasnt a delegate to the convention, other American women wereseven in all. In the second half of the 1830s women had steadily grown more visibleand more vocalin the American abolitionist movement. This didnt please everyone, and it led to major antislavery organizations splitting apart. Nevertheless, on June 12, 1840, male and female abolitionists together entered Londons Freemasons Hall to officially represent the American movement.

But only the men would be allowed to participate.

This was hardly the first time Elizabeth Cady Stanton witnessed the disadvantages of being female. Born in 1815 in Johnstown, New York, Stanton was one of eleven children, but she would be one of only five, all women, to make it to adulthood. Elizabeth was eleven when her last brother, Eleazar, died. She would forever remember finding her father, Daniel Cady, sitting in the dark parlor, pale and immovable, by the casket. Entering the room, she climbed up on his knee. He put his arms around her, but then sighed, Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy!

However much this must have hurt to hear, Elizabeth pledged to somehow replace her brother, to be everything Eleazar no longer could be. Years later she wrote, All that day and far into the night I pondered the problem of boyhood. I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous. Elizabeth was already brave, and she would get a fine education, at least in terms of what was available to girls at this time. Despite demonstrating over and over that her mind was equal to that of even the brightest young man her age, she would not receive a true college education.

Elizabeth steadily came to realize that her goal of equality would not be so simple. Time and again, she would encounter the endless restrictions placed against girls, to the point that she summed up her own girlhood with these words: Everything we like to do is a sin.... I am so tired of that everlasting no! no! no! At school, at home, everywhere it is no!

Her father was a lawyer and later a judge, and as a child Elizabeth often overheard his conversations with women who came to him for legal counsel. Even if a woman was in a terrible marriage in which the husband spent their money on drinking, gambling, and other women, even if the man beat her, she could not leave him without losing claim to their children. Fathers held all legal rights.

Daniel Cady tried to help these women, but there was little he could do. When Elizabeth got upset, he showed her the relevant passages in his law books. Not only this; he told her that when she grew up she should talk to the legislators; tell them all you have seen in this officethe sufferings of these Scotchwomen.... If you can persuade them to pass new laws, the old ones will be a dead letter.