100 Years Ago – Elizabeth Cady Stanton Writes the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments

One hundred years ago, women won the right to vote.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most consequential women in the battle for women’s rights. She fought for equality on all fronts. In her later years, she even took on the Bible as the root cause of women’s subordinate status in society. She came from a highly educated and wealthy New York family. Marriage and motherhood, with seven children, did not deter her from making equality for women her life’s work. On her honeymoon in 1840, in London, she and her husband attended the World Anti-Slavery convention. When she was relegated to the balcony because she was a woman, she joined with Lucretia Mott, another anti-slavery crusader, to fight for women’s equality.

Together they planned the first women’s rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. Attended by about 300 women and men, the convention delivered the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments and marked the beginning of the women’s movement for equal rights. Cady Stanton wrote most of that document and based it on the Declaration of Independence. Channeling Thomas Jefferson, she wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.”

This message is produced by the Kanawha Valley chapter of the National Organization for Women with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council.