Feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Elizabeth Cady Stanton is credited with the authorship of "The Seneca Falls Declaration" (1848), the seminal of the United States feminist movement, which then was called woman's suffrage because women, along with African Americans and Native Americans, were still disenfranchised. The author points out that, after the death of her brother, young Elizabeth vowed to do all in her power to become manly, which, to her, meant becoming learned and courageous, so she studied Greek, learned to ride a horse like a man and developed an independent intellectual life. The paper relates that when she listed all the economic grievances in the "Declaration of Sentiments", from denial of educational opportunity to making her 'civilly dead' upon marriage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first to describe the double-standard, a concept that still lingers.

From the Paper:

"By the time, the married Elizabeth Cady Stanton moved with her family to Seneca Falls, NY, in 1937, her life had degenerated into the typical one of a rural woman of her era: too much looking after too many people, from children to servants. While she slaved, white men's rights were expanding and reformers, among them Susan Anthony and Lucretia Mott, recognized that "Jacksonian equality was rhetoric as far as women and slaves were concerned." Still, there had been other small movements. During the 1830s, it became possible for married women to own property that had brought into a marriage and the money they earned; this eventually undermined male dominance to a small degree. The changes had not, however, been altruistic, a representation of the uncommon notion that women were morally superior to men."

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