Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a singular leader, thinker, and organizer whose fight for women’s emancipation stretched from the 1840s to her death in 1902, a full fifth of America’s history. Yet her legacy is marked by controversy.
In a new biography, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life (Basic Books, 2026) historian Ellen Carol DuBois paints a fresh portrait of this complex woman whose work helped make contemporary feminism possible.
Born in 1815 in Johnstown, in Fulton County, NY, into a family deeply marked by the tumult of the American Revolution and surging evangelicalism, Stanton was captivated by Enlightenment ideas about individual freedom and transformed by early experiences in what she called “the school of antislavery.”
Though most remembered for her fight for the vote, she was also an early crusader for women’s reproductive autonomy and reforming the institution of marriage, and against Christianity’s subordination of women.
Her rifts with Black American reformers and embrace of nativist anti-immigrant ideas however, have forever tarnished her reputation.
Ellen Carol DuBois is distinguished professor of history at UCLA. Her works on the US woman suffrage movement include Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, and Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote.
Upcoming Author Event
Ellen Carol DuBois will discuss her book in a virtual and in-person event at National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester on Thursday, March 5 at 6:30 pm. Tickets are $20 for members and $30 for non-members. You can register here.
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Nearly every article on the site seems to be trying very hard to virtue signal and check boxes. I cannot donate/support a page like this.
Hi John,
I’m sorry to hear you feel that way. There is no intent at “virtue signalling” – a vague term the political right uses in avoidance of actual discussion, nor “checking boxes,” whatever that might mean to you.
If you’d prefer your history delivered in the format you’re familiar with from school, you probably should look elsewhere.
If you prefer an understanding of history that’s inclusive of a variety of perspectives, doesn’t just repeat old tropes and popular understandings and misunderstandings – in other words, history that is careful, considered, and complicated, this is your place.
Either way, I’m happy to have you here, but if there is something you disagree with, why not express why you disagree, and present your evidence to the contrary?
John Warren