Claiming the Legacy of Women’s Suffrage

Aug. 27 -- Eighty years after the long struggle for a woman’s right to vote was won, feminists and so-called anti-feminists alike claim as their own the legacy of the two women who launched the American women’s rights movement.

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton first met Susan B. Anthony in 1851 she liked Anthony’s “earnest” face right away. Although their lifestyles and talents could not have been more different, they formed a partnership that would drive the women’s rights movement and the cause for women’s suffrage for 50 years.

Anthony and Stanton advocated “voluntary motherhood” at a time when sex almost always meant a real likelihood of pregnancy for a woman. They fought for a woman’s right to her own wages, her property, her body, and her children. And even more revolutionary for that Victorian era, Stanton advocated more liberal divorce laws for women in abusive marriages.

Although it didn’t happen during their lifetimes, most of Anthony and Stanton’s primary initiatives found some degree of success in the 20th century where women have greater access to government, jobs, birth control, raising their children and even divorce. Today 50 percent of American marriages end in divorce.

An Unlikely Pair

Anthony came from a Quaker family with a long history of social activism. She was a passionate abolitionist and temperance advocate. She never married or had children but was instead wed to the cause of women’s rights, according to Stanton.

Stanton married an abolitionist against her father’s will. She was a wife and mother of seven children who spoke against organized religion because she believed it reduced women to second-class status. She came from a traditional, upper class family and spent much of her young life trying to please a father who clearly favored sons.

“I wish you were a boy,” he once said to her as she showed him a hard-earned academic prize. But her conservative father, a lawyer and judge, did allow his daughter into his law office where she witnessed firsthand how the law treated women as men’s property rather than as citizens equal to men. She vowed to change women’s legal status.