Elizabeth Cady Stanton

(1815 - 1902)

When Elizabeth Cady married Henry Brewster Stanton at the age of twenty-five in 1840, she demanded that the word obey be deleted from her vows. She presented her Declaration of Sentiments, outlining the rights American women should be entitled to as citizens, at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 which she co-organized, also proposing a resolution for women’s suffrage, the first of its kind in the United States. Thirty years later, she drafted an amendment giving women the right to vote; it was offered in Congress every year until women’s suffrage was granted in 1920, eighteen years after her death.