Scope and Content Note
The papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) cover the years 1814 to 1946, with most of the material concentrated between 1840 and 1902. The collection is composed of correspondence, speeches, articles, drafts of books, scrapbooks, and printed matter relating to Stanton and the woman's rights movement. This material reflects Stanton's role as a social reformer and a leading proponent of woman's rights for more than half a century. Stanton spoke and wrote widely about the political, economic, religious, and social wrongs perpetrated against women and provided leadership in organizations devoted to securing rights for women, particularly the right to vote.
Married to an abolitionist, Henry B. Stanton, Stanton was active in the antislavery movement in the decades preceding the Civil War and a proponent of African American rights during Reconstruction. Denied a university education because of her sex, she was an early proponent of higher education for women. A supporter of the temperance movement, though not particularly active in it, she insisted that drunkenness should be a cause for divorce. That drunkenness and cruelty, not divorce, were the real enemies of marriage, that the churches and canon law slowed women's progress, that laws must be changed to ensure property rights for married women, including the right to their own wages, that women must take their rightful place in business and the professions, that “self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice,” and that women and men should be equal before the law, in churches, and in society were among the basic themes which brought her widespread denunciation as well as many followers. Overall, however, she sought woman's right to vote as basic to all other rights and worked arduously for state laws and a constitutional amendment to that effect.
The collection elucidates the goals, tactics, and activities of many of the men and women associated with the woman's rights movement and depicts the external opposition as well as the internal division which the movement encountered. The correspondence provides glimpses into Stanton's family life illustrating how she balanced her family responsibilities with the demands placed on her as a leader in the movement. Her speeches and writings document in detail her stand on woman's rights and her concern for other contemporary social issues. Included in this series are drafts of Stanton's memoirs Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897, and a draft of The Woman's Bible.
Those papers donated by Harriot Stanton Blatch and originally arranged in scrapbooks have been dismantled and interfiled with the other papers that make up the collection. Blatch's notes on various items have been retained and are filed with the relevant manuscripts. The scrapbooks which were prepared by Susan B. Anthony (see Miscellany) have been kept as units except for the holograph material they contained. This material has been removed and interfiled in the papers with identifying notes.
The 2022 Addition consists of a letter from Stanton to Reverend Edward Payson Powell concerning the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.
Prominent correspondents represented in the collection include Susan B. Anthony, Daniel Cady, W. H. Channing, Lydia Maria Francis Child, Frances Power Cobbe, Paulina W. Davis, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Julia Ward Howe, Lucretia Mott, Emmeline Pankhurst, Wendell Phillips, Elizabeth E. Pike, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, John Osborne Sargent, Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith, Gerrit Smith, Henry B. Stanton, Lucy Stone, John Swinton, Theodore Tilton, Thurlow Weed, and John Greenleaf Whittier.