Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on this day in 1815. She spent her life asking for something most of the country thought was absurd: the right to vote.
In 1848, Stanton helped organize the first women’s rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York. She wrote its Declaration of Sentiments, borrowing the language of the Declaration of Independence to declare that men and women are created equal. The demand for the vote was the most controversial idea in the room. Even some of her own allies thought it went too far. With Frederick Douglass speaking in its favor, it passed, narrowly.
Then she kept going. Stanton spent more than fifty years organizing, writing, and speaking, much of it alongside Susan B. Anthony, and in 1869 the two founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. She died in 1902. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, eighteen years later. Of the 100 people who signed the Declaration of Sentiments, only one is known to have lived to see it.
Her record wasn’t spotless. Stanton used racist arguments in the fight over Black men’s suffrage, and the vote she worked for was not won for Black women in practice until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Honoring her means telling all of it.
Rights are won over generations, by people who may never see the result. That’s worth remembering just after an election, when the work of showing up doesn’t end. Leading Ladies Vote carries that work forward.
Our vote is our power.