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Anne Gascon

Ms. Montes

U.S History

19 March 2019

GPO: Communicating Ideas

Remembering Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Impact Toward Women's Rights

As Elizabeth Cady Stanton once stated, “Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the

dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.”. Good day to all of who has Stanton

in mind and in their heavy hearts, and let us all gather to mourn for our loss of a great woman,

and celebrate all that she has worked hard for in the majority of her adult life. Elizabeth was a

woman who was an author, lecturer, and chief philosopher of women's rights and suffrage

movements, and had helped plan out an agenda for women’s rights that supported the movement

until the 20th century. As she was a loving daughter, she was also a great wife to Henry Brewster

Stanton, an abolitionist who was also her partner to advocate for rights. She was an anti-slavery

activist who had worked hard alongside her husband and other abolitionists in New York and

Boston, and throughout her adult life, she has worked with other icons such as Lucretia Mott,

who she had met at a World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, which she attended while on a

honeymoon with Henry Stanton.

Stanton was a significant figure to many, now including myself. She spent her whole life

using her privileges to an advantage, and used the fact that she had the best education a woman

can have at that time(1800s). She learned discriminatory laws while studying law in the office of

her father, which led her to become a determined woman who wanted to gain equality for her
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gender. In 1848, Stanton had contributed to help organize the first ever women's rights

conference. It didn’t stop there; Stanton had fought for the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment.

She went and demanded to vote, but got denied to do so; yet she still fought hard to gain rights.

In her speech ​Address on Women’s Rights​, she had stated that “​As the nations of the earth

emerge from a state of barbarism, the sphere of woman gradually becomes wider but not even

under what is thought to be the full blaze of the sun of civilization is it what God designed it to

be.”. To me, this sentence caught my eye when I was reading one her speech. This quote

expresses that God intended women to have a big role as time goes on, but it’s not recognizable-

people brush the topic and the idea of women being superior or even equal to, under the carpet.

It’s somewhat like an analogy; the quote mentions barbarism, which can link to men. She’s

trying to explain that as the world evolves and is revolving around men, women is in the

opposite condition. This quote among other quotes and speeches have influenced and helped our

society gain suffrage and many rights and new amendments.

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Works Cited
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Address on Women’s Rights”. September 1848, Seneca Falls.