Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it left women out
Elizabeth Cady Stanton drove the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first gathering called solely to discuss women's rights. With Susan B. Anthony she ran a record-breaking petition against slavery, then split the movement by refusing to support voting rights for Black men unless women were included too.
She was born on November 12, 1815, into the leading family of Johnstown, New York, whose mansion kept up to twelve servants. Her father, Daniel Cady, a conservative Federalist, was among the richest landowners in the state, a lawyer, one-term congressman and judge. Her mother, Margaret, nearly six feet tall and fiercely independent, sided with the radical Garrisonian abolitionists. Of eleven children, six died young, including every boy. One of the household's three Black manservants, Peter Teabout, was enslaved, probably until New York freed all enslaved people on July 4, 1827.
She was educated far beyond most girls of her time, the only girl in advanced mathematics and language classes at Johnstown Academy, a skilled debater and runner-up in its Greek competition. When her last surviving brother, Eleazar, died at twenty just after leaving Union College, ten-year-old Elizabeth promised her grieving father she would try to be everything the son had been, an early lesson in how little was expected of daughters.
Meeting Susan B. Anthony in 1851 began a partnership lasting decades. In the Civil War the pair set up the Women's Loyal National League and led what was then the largest petition drive in the nation's history, calling for abolition. Afterwards they led the American Equal Rights Association, but the Fifteenth Amendment, extending the vote only to Black men, divided reformers. Stanton and Anthony insisted suffrage belonged to both groups together, and they created the National Woman Suffrage Association, with Stanton as president. When the rift healed over twenty years later she became first head of the merged National American Woman Suffrage Association, largely an honorary role.
Stanton was also the lead writer on the opening three volumes of a vast History of Woman Suffrage, weighted toward her own faction, and led The Woman's Bible, which argued that scripture's treatment of women reflected human prejudice. She died on October 26, 1902.
Source: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
