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Join us for this chance to hear from a preeminent historian of women’s suffrage and the author of the definitive biography of American suffragist and women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
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 has been marked by controversy. From her speeches at Cooper Union to inspiring generations of women’s suffrage advocates and activists who lived and worked in our neighborhoods, historian Ellen Carol DuBois paints a fresh portrait of this complex crusader whose tireless work made contemporary feminism possible.
Born in 1815 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 reformers and embrace of nativist ideas tarnished her reputation, but her words still have the ability to move and agitate people today.