Two documents which connect Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who helped women organize to secure the right to vote, are being offered for sale.
The newly discovered 1853 documents certify Mr. P.S. Kingsley and Mrs. Angeline Kingsley of Minetto in Oswego County, NY, as members of the first organization founded by Anthony and Stanton, the Women’s New York State Temperance Society, formed in 1852.
In 1851, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in Seneca Falls, NY, where only three years prior a convention launched the women’s rights movement in the United States. The following April Anthony founded the Woman’s State Temperance Society at a temperance convention in Rochester.
The issue of temperance and women’s rights were closely linked at this time. It thus represents the beginning of an extraordinary partnership between the two women, one that would ultimately lead to the groundbreaking work they did to secure the right of women to vote.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton addressed 400 to 500 people at the April 1852 convention and called for the total rejection of alcohol — “Let us touch not, taste not, handle not, the unclean thing”—and linked divorce reform to the need to protect wives and children from abusive “confirmed drunkards.”
The lessons Stanton and Anthony learned during their new Society’s formation would provide invaluable experience for their later suffrage work. They came to argue that rights for women could not be achieved without securing political and legal rights, including the right to vote.
On June 17, 1852 the (male led) New York State Temperance Society met in Syracuse for its annual convention. Anthony, Gerrit Smith, and Amelia Bloomer were delegates appointed to the convention by the Woman’s State Temperance Society.
Because the convention refused to accept the credentials of the women delegates or allow them to speak, the women and their supporters adjourned to the Wesleyan Chapel where they held their own meeting. Anthony delivered a speech, which was published in the July, 1852 issue of the Lily. It is one of her earliest addresses.
The certificates recently made public are rare as they bear the February 1853 signatures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President, and Susan B. Anthony and Mary Vaughan as Recording Secretaries. The documents acknowledges the payment of fifty cents for a year’s membership.
The Raab Collection of Philadelphia, which acquired the documents from heirs of the original recipient, are offering them for sale.
Illustration courtesy of The Raab Collection.
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