More than one hundred years after her death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stands—along with her close friend Susan B. Anthony—as the major icon of the struggle for women’s suffrage. In spite of this celebrity, Stanton’s intellectual contributions have been largely overshadowed by the focus on her political activities, and she is yet to be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the nineteenth century. Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton’s thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women’s subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton’s numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton’s own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton’s views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition. Contributors: Barbara Caine, Richard Cándida Smith, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Kathi Kern, Michele Mitchell, and Christine Stansell.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was not only one of the most important leaders of the 19th century women's rights movement but was also the movement's principal philosopher. Davis argues that Stanton's work reflects the tapestry of American political culture in the second half of the 19th century.

In this subtly crafted biography, the historian Lori D. Ginzberg narrates the life of a woman of great charm, enormous appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who turned the limitations placed on women like herself into a universal philosophy of equal rights.

Thomas Byers Memorial Outstanding Publication Award from the University of Akron Law Alumni Association Much has been written about women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Historians have written her biography, detailed her campaign for woman’s suffrage, documented her partnership with Susan B. Anthony, and compiled all of her extensive writings and papers. Stanton herself was a prolific author; her autobiography, History of Woman Suffrage, and Woman’s Bible are classics. Despite this body of work, scholars and feminists continue to find new and insightful ways to re-examine Stanton and her impact on women’s rights and history. Law scholar Tracy A. Thomas extends this discussion of Stanton’s impact on modern-day feminism by analyzing her intellectual contributions to—and personal experiences with—family law. Stanton’s work on family issues has been overshadowed by her work (especially with Susan B. Anthony) on woman’s suffrage. But throughout her fifty-year career, Stanton emphasized reform of the private sphere of the family as central to achieving women’s equality. By weaving together law, feminist theory, and history, Thomas explores Stanton’s little-examined philosophies on and proposals for women’s equality in marriage, divorce, and family, and reveals that the campaigns for equal gender roles in the family that came to the fore in the 1960s and ’70s had nineteenth-century roots. Using feminist legal theory as a lens to interpret Stanton’s political, legal, and personal work on the family, Thomas argues that Stanton’s positions on divorce, working mothers, domestic violence, childcare, and many other topics were strikingly progressive for her time, providing significant parallels from which to gauge the social and legal policy issues confronting women in marriage and the family today.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton—along with her comrade-in-arms, Susan B. Anthony—was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to equality uniquely American in character. Her writing and life make clear why feminism as a liberation movement has flourished here as nowhere else in the world. Born in 1815 into a conservative family of privilege, Stanton was radicalized by her experience in the abolitionist movement. Attending the first international conference on slavery in London in 1840, she found herself amazed when the conference officials refused to seat her because of her sex. At that moment she realized that "In the eyes of the world I was not as I was in my own eyes, I was only a woman." At the same moment she saw what it meant for the American republic to have failed to deliver on its fundamental promise of equality for all. In her last public address, "The Solitude of Self," (delivered in 1892), she argued for women's political equality on the grounds that loneliness is the human condition, and that each citizen therefore needs the tools to fight alone for his or her interests. Vivian Gornick first encountered "The Solitude of Self" thirty years ago. Of that moment Gornick writes, "I hardly knew who Stanton was, much less what this speech meant in her life, or in our history, but it I can still remember thinking with excitement and gratitude, as I read these words for the first time, eighty years after they were written, ‘We are beginning where she left off.' " The Solitude of Self is a profound, distilled meditation on what makes American feminism American from one of the finest critics of our time.

More than one hundred years after her death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stands—along with her close friend Susan B. Anthony—as the major icon of the struggle for women’s suffrage. In spite of this celebrity, Stanton’s intellectual contributions have been largely overshadowed by the focus on her political activities, and she is yet to be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the nineteenth century. Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton’s thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women’s subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton’s numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton’s own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton’s views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition. Contributors: Barbara Caine, Richard Cándida Smith, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Kathi Kern, Michele Mitchell, and Christine Stansell.

This biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton is as spirited as the women's rights pioneer herself. Who says women shouldn't speak in public? And why can't they vote? These are questions Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up asking herself. Her father believed that girls didn't count as much as boys, and her own husband once got so embarrassed when she spoke at a convention that he left town. Luckily Lizzie wasn't one to let society stop her from fighting for equality for everyone. And though she didn't live long enough to see women get to vote, our entire country benefited from her fight for women's rights. "Fritz imparts not just a sense of Stanton's accomplishments but a picture of the greater society Stanton strove to change. Highly entertaining and enlightening." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "This objective depiction of Stanton's life and times makes readers feel invested in her struggle." — School Library Journal (starred review) "An accessible, fascinating portrait." — The Horn Book

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's inspiring and timeless speech. A perfect gift for anyone who cherishes dignity, equality, and solitude.

This book explores the theoretical relationship between feminism and transcendentalism through the ideas and activism of prominent 19th century female thinkers and activists. By analyzing the work of such important figures in post-Civil War American intellectual life_such as Ednah Cheney, Caroline Dall, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith_Tiffany Wayne demonstrates how transcendentalism provided a language with particular appeal to women and helped promote an emerging feminist movement with a similar goal of acknowledging women's right to self-development. Bridging the gap between the traditionally disparate fields of women's history and American intellectual history, this book is as much a re-visioning of transcendentalism_arguing for recognition of its more widespread and long-lasting influence in American cultural life_as a project in historicizing feminist theory.

The Woman’s Bible (1895-1898) is a work of religious and political nonfiction by American women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Despite its popular success, The Woman’s Bible caused a rift in the movement between Stanton and her supporters and those who believed that to wade into religious waters would hurt the suffragist cause. Reactions from the press, political establishment, and much of the reading public were overwhelmingly negative, accusing Stanton of blasphemy and sacrilege while refusing to engage with the book’s message: to reconsider the historical reception of the Bible in order to make room for women to be afforded equality in their private and public lives. Working with a Revising Committee of 26 members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Stanton sought to provide an updated commentary on the Bible that would highlight passages allowing for an interpretation of scripture harmonious with the cause of the women’s rights movement. Inspired by activist and Quaker Lucretia Mott’s use of Bible verses to dispel the arguments of bigots opposed to women’s rights and abolition, Stanton hoped to establish a new way of framing the history and religious representation of women that could resist similar arguments that held up the Bible as precedent for the continued oppression of women. Starting with an interpretation of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, Stanton attempts to show where men and women are treated as equals in the Bible, eventually working through both the Old and New Testaments. In its day, The Woman’s Bible was a radically important revisioning of women’s place in scripture that Stanton and her collaborators hoped would open the door for women to obtain the rights they had long been systematically denied. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.