Elizabeth Cady Stanton

1815-1902

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an abolitionist, an atheist and one of the founders of the women's rights movement. She was the main force behind the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first convention to be called for the sole purpose of discussing women's rights, which she hosted in her hometown. Seneca Falls was smack dab in the middle of the so-called Burnt-over District of Upstate New York where new ideas caught fire and found fertile ground. In the early Nineteenth Century it was was wall-to-wall dreamers, reformers, abolitionists, teetotallers, polygamists, whack-job evangelicals, and what a later century would call hippie communes. Stanton was the primary author of its Declaration of Sentiments. Her demand for women's right to vote generated a controversy at the convention but quickly became a central tenet of the women's movement.

Husband: Henry Brewster Stanton (m. 1840; died 1887)

How lesbian was she? Well, there's no evidence, and she was married with children, so probably not. That doesn't stop the accusations of "straightwashing".

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Women's Rights Activists