Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the best known and most conspicuous advocate of woman's rights in the nineteenth century. For almost fifty years she led the first women's movement in America. Stanton set its agenda, drafted its documents, and articulated its principles. Her followers grew from a scattered network of local reform groups into a national population of political active woman. Although, Stanton's feminism was not limited to suffrage, she believed that women had been predestined to an inferior status by unshakable attitudes based on Judeo- Christian tradition, English common law, American statutes, and social customs. She frequently compared the position of woman to that of slaves, and she worked to abolish both forms of bondage (Griffith 60). In addition to suffrage, she promoted co-education, equal wages, property rights for wives, child custody rights for mothers, and reform of divorce laws. Stanton was the first person to launch every major advance achieved for woman in the nineteenth century and many of the reforms occurring in the twentieth century. So why did Elizabeth Cady Stanton believe there were so many rights denied to the female sex? I believe that this becomes apparent by looking at her childhood.
Almost from the start, Elizabeth was a rebel. Her father, Daniel Cady, was a judge and Congressman, and her mother, the former Margaret Livingston, was the daughter of a Revolutionary War officer. Elizabeth was the fourth of six children, of whom only one was a boy (www.rootsweb.com). .
Her brother Eleazer's death, when she was eleven years old, was a turning point in Elizabeth's life. Not only was she faced with death, but she was also tormented at her father's grief. Judge Cady mourned the loss of his only son and the hopes that had died with him. However, determined to take her brothers place, Elizabeth set out to master such traditional masculine skills, such as mathematics, Greek, Latin, and riding.
