Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a singular leader, thinker, and organizer whose fight for women’s emancipation stretched from the 1840s to her death in 1902, a full fifth of America’s history. Yet her legacy is marked by controversy.
In a new biography, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life (Basic Books, 2026) historian Ellen Carol DuBois paints a fresh portrait of this complex woman whose work helped make contemporary feminism possible.
Born in 1815 in Johnstown, in Fulton County, NY, into a family deeply marked by the tumult of the American Revolution and surging evangelicalism, Stanton was captivated by Enlightenment ideas about individual freedom and transformed by early experiences in what she called “the school of antislavery.”
Though most remembered for her fight for the vote, she was also an early crusader for women’s reproductive autonomy and reforming the institution of marriage, and against Christianity’s subordination of women.
Her rifts with Black American reformers and embrace of nativist anti-immigrant ideas however, have forever tarnished her reputation.
Ellen Carol DuBois is distinguished professor of history at UCLA. Her works on the US woman suffrage movement include Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, and Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote.
Upcoming Author Event
Ellen Carol DuBois will discuss her book in a virtual and in-person event at National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester on Thursday, March 5 at 6:30 pm. Tickets are $20 for members and $30 for non-members. You can register here.
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