Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Author. Orator. Reformer. Revolutionary. These are titles that the world has given Elizabeth Cady Stanton. You can see her full biography here:  Elizabeth Cady Stanton | National Women's History Museum. But in Johnstown, New York, we see Elizabeth as our most famous daughter.

Elizabeth was not only born in Johnstown on November 12, 1815, she was inspired here, she was married here in 1840, and she became a mother here in 1842. 

 

At age 11, as she tried to comfort her father after the death of his only son to survive to adulthood, Eleazer, he sighed and said, “Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy.”  That was the moment that Elizabeth vowed to be as good as a boy in her father’s eyes. She became an excellent horsewoman and learned Greek so well that she shared the coveted Greek prize with a boy at The Johnstown Academy.  Her father’s response to her accomplishment? “Ah, you should have been a boy.”

 

As a girl, she learned how unfair the laws were to women in her father’s law office. When she vowed to cut those laws out of the law books her father, Judge Daniel Cady, told her she would have to go all the way to Albany to the Legislature to change a law.  He certainly never imagined that she would do just that – winning married women’s property rights.

 

Elizabeth would return to Johnstown with her children many times, sometimes leaving them in the care of her mother while she went on the lecture circuit. In 1884, she returned for the summer to work on the third volume of The History of Woman Suffrage with her good friend, Susan B. Anthony, who was staying in town at Mrs. Henry’s Board House.

 

Because Elizabeth was the first woman in America to call for voting rights for women at the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, and because she was inspired in her hometown, Elizabeth has made Johnstown the home of women’s suffrage.

 

Follow in Elizabeth's footsteps in our one-hour, one-mile Walking Tour. 

Learn how we continue her legacy of serving women at Elizabeth Gives Back.

Learn how to exercise the voting rights she fought so hard for at Elizabeth Votes.

Discover other important women’s history resources at Elizabeth Learns.