When They Were Girls

by Rebecca Deming Moore

Often his clients were widows who wept and complained that the property which they had brought into the family had been willed to their sons. Elizabeth could not understand why her father, who was wise and kind, could not help these poor women. Then Judge Cady would take down from the shelves a big volume and show her the law.

The students, seeing how interested she was in the laws about women, amused themselves by reading to her the most unfair laws that they could find. They often teased her, too, in order to hear her bright remarks.

Little Elizabeth was so distressed by the unfairness of the law in regard to women that she made up her mind to cut them all out of her father’s law books. She refrained from doing this upon learning that it would not help the situation.

Much to her disgust Elizabeth Cady could not go to college, as did her boy classmates, for at that time girls were not admitted. However, she entered the Willard Seminary for girls in Troy, New York, where she studied for some time. Later she went on with her studies at home, never losing her interest in laws for women.

In her twenty-fifth year Elizabeth Cady married Henry B. Stanton, a lecturer on antislavery, who later became a lawyer. After several happy years in Johnstown and Boston, the young couple settled in Seneca Falls, New York. By this time the champion of woman’s rights began to know by experience something of a woman’s home problems. She had a big house to manage with very little help, and her lively girls and boys needed constant care.

In her round of everyday duties, however, Mrs. Stanton did not forget the wrongs to women. She, together with Lucretia Mott and some others, called a big meeting, the first Woman’s Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls in 1848, to talk over this question.

At this meeting Mrs. Stanton and her coworkers presented a Declaration of Sentiments based upon the Declaration of Independence. They also presented eleven resolutions, one of which demanded the vote for women. Mrs. Stanton was entirely responsible for this resolution and placed great emphasis upon it. She believed that through the ballot for women all other rights for women could be secured.

The newspapers made a great deal of fun of all the reforms discussed at the convention, particularly the proposal that women should vote. In those days most people were quite ready to admit that a woman could manage her home capably and be bright and entertaining in company. However, they thought it very unwomanly that she should dream of helping to make laws to secure better schools or cleaner streets.

Mrs. Stanton was surprised and distressed to have her very serious purpose treated so lightly, but ridicule did not prevent her from upholding woman’s rights whenever she had an opportunity.

Three years after this she met Susan B. Anthony, the woman who was to be her lifelong friend and fellow-worker. Except for their lectures in the cause of temperance and antislavery, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony gave their whole lives to gaining more freedom for their fellow-women.