Studium

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony met each other passing on a street corner in Seneca Falls, New York, 1851. Although they could not visit with each other that day, the meeting marked the beginning of the most powerful friendship of the women’s movement. Together they openly questioned the Constitution and the roles women were meant to play in society and politics. In doing so, they angered and inspired thousands of women to fight for women’s equality. The differences in their personalities and their ideologies caused tension in their relationship but they remained close allies and never let their disagreements go public. Stanton’s writing skills and Anthony’s lobbying abilities allowed them to write some of the most celebrated documents of the women’s suffrage movement. Unfortunately, they did not live long enough to see their goal achieved. Before her death Stanton wrote, “we are sowing winter wheat which the coming spring will see sprout and which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy” (Ward and Burns 1999, 188). Although they never lived to see women fully enfranchised under the Constitution, they never gave up hope that women all over the United States would have the right to vote. Stanton and Anthony’s differences complimented each other and often caused disagreements, but their loyalty to each other remained strong throughout the women’s suffrage movement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s differences and values can be traced to their childhoods. Stanton was born November 12, 1815. Her mother was a member of one of the oldest aristocratic families in New York State. Her father was a judge and a former shoemaker’s apprentice. Because of the marriage laws, Cady took control of his wife’s inheritance the moment they became husband and wife. Because her father was a judge, Stanton witnessed firsthand the differences between how men and women were treated under the law. Even when she was young, she noticed the “petty tyranny” faced by women. Even her father, who she greatly admired, once told her, “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy” (Ward and Burns 1999, 14). Throughout her childhood, she made it her goal to make her father proud and to have him tell her “well, a girl is as good as a boy after all” (Wards and Burns 1999, 14). The first step of being “as good as a boy” meant getting an education. Her father was less than thrilled with the thought of his daughter going to college. Stanton’s brother-in-law had to talk Cady into letting his daughter receive an education. Her first choice, Union College, would not let women take classes. So beginning in 1831, she spent three years at the Troy Female Seminary to receive her education. At that time, no college in America allowed women to attend classes. The Troy Female Seminary offered her the best opportunity to receive a secondary education. The headmistress, Emma Willard, taught her students that women who studied algebra, history, and music would become better wives and mothers. It was here that Stanton developed her writing style and became skeptical about Christianity.

After she graduated in 1833, she lived with her family in Rochester. Because her father had such conservative beliefs, she loved traveling to Peterboro, New York to visit her cousin Gerrit Smith. Smith and his family were members of the Underground Railroad. Stanton loved visiting because “the constant, rousing debates about reform and abolition made social life seem dull and unrewarding elsewhere” (Banner 1980, 17). She was energetic and playful. She loved dancing, singing, flirting, and beating law students at chess in her family’s parlor. In 1839, she met Henry Brewster Stanton, a full-time agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. She considered him to be “the most eloquent and impassioned orator on the anti-slavery platform” (Ward and Burns 1999, 18). Less than a year later, they were married. Instead of becoming Mrs. Henry Stanton, she chose to keep her name; she would choose to be known as Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Stanton began her career as a reformer in the anti-slavery movement. After traveling to England to attend The London Anti-Slavery Convention and watching the women delegates be turned away, she, along with delegate Lucretia Mott, decided to organize a meeting to discuss the issue of inequality among men and women. The meeting was held in Seneca Falls, New York, during the summer of 1848.

With the help of several other women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. The document, modeled after the Declaration of Independence, boldly stated that, “all men and women are created equal.” The speech focused on the same issues the authors of the Declaration of Independence had focused on over seventy years earlier. This time it was the women whose rights were being discriminated against. Women could not vote, had no legal voice, had no representation, were denied an education, and were denied equal opportunity in employment. Although these were the basic rights of male citizens, women should have been entitled to share them. In her speech, Stanton said that “women are man’s equal…. the women in this country ought to be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live… the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior that is required of woman in the social state, should also be required of man” (Dolbeare 1998, 246).

Unlike Stanton, Susan B. Anthony grew up in a family that did not have a lot of money. Anthony was the daughter of a Quaker farmer and a Baptist mother. She was raised as a Quaker and her father, Daniel, was so devout that he did not allow his children to play with toys, game, or sing because it would distract them from the “Inner Light.” Her parents were abolitionists and temperance advocates. Her parents taught her that men and women should be treated with equality. They also taught her that it was one of her responsibilities to make a better world. She attended public school until her teacher refused to teach her long division. Daniel Anthony then started his own school for his children and for the women who worked in his mills.

When Anthony was fifteen, she was sent away to boarding school with her sister. While at school, she became very critical of herself. She was shy and self-conscious about her writing abilities. In fact, she later told her biographer, “whenever I take my pen in hand I always seem to be mounted on stilts” (Ward and Burns 1999, 21). Her teacher only made things worse. The head mistress, who was suffering from Tuberculosis, told her students “’the distress she had [herself] undergone in mind and body’ was entirely due to her students’ shortcomings” (Ward and Burns 1999; 26). She returned home from school the next year when her father became bankrupt.

At age nineteen, she left home to become a teacher at a boarding school in Rochester, New York. She had several suitors but none of them met her standards. Inspired by her father’s reform-minded visitors, Anthony set her sights on becoming a full-time reformer. In 1848, she quit teaching school to work on her father’s farm and concentrate on the temperance movement. She was determined to see if she could become a reformer despite the fact that she was a single woman.

Anthony became a suffragist in the early 1850s. Most of her lobbying skills were learned after she shifted her focus to women’s rights. Throughout the last half of the 1850s, women’s rights advocates traveled to Saratoga Springs, New York to discuss the inequalities faced by women. The activists spent most of their time lecturing and fundraising. It was here that “Anthony honed her fundraising and networking skills…. In 1855 alone, Anthony sold 20,000 pamphlets on women’s rights” (Weatherford 1998, 70).

It was not until three years after the Seneca Falls Convention that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony met face to face for the first time. Women’s rights activist Amelia May Bloomer introduced the two women to each other. At the time of the meeting, Anthony had not yet begun her pursuit for equal rights. She was appreciative of women’s rights and the movement, but her focus was on temperance reform and the anti-slavery movement. Stanton, who had already begun working towards women’s suffrage, was able to convince Anthony to join the suffrage movement.

As a temperance advocate and teacher, Anthony had experienced her share of discrimination. In 1852, she was denied the opportunity to speak at a temperance rally, and in 1853 she was denied the opportunity to participate as a temperance delegate at the World’s Temperance Conference in New York City. As a teacher, her salary was only a fraction of what the men she replaced were paid. All these factors were influential in shifting her focus to fighting the discrimination faced by women.

Not much is known about how the early friendship grew between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Their early lives had very little in common. But they did share the belief that inequalities between men and women were unacceptable. According to Stanton, they “were at once fast friends. In the thought of sympathy we were one.” (Lerner 1971, 88)

Their different backgrounds and personalities made their friendship unique. Stanton was high-spirited and had a sense of humor, but confrontation was her weakness. Her need to please people was, at times, overwhelming. Because she wanted to be hospitable to everybody, she would not ask people to leave her home. On occasion, her home would be filled with so many visitors she would go away with her family to Johnstown. But after the Seneca Falls Convention, “she adopted the approach of making her position so public that no one could be unclear about her stance and of utilizing her substantial ability at formal debate to avoid informal confrontation” (Banner 1980, 59).

Stanton was radical and sometimes went to extremes when expressing her views. To show her support for a change in women’s attire, she wore bloomers. She wore them for several years but went back to wearing dresses in 1853 after receiving continuous criticism from her family in Johnstown and her sons going to school in New Jersey. Bloomers, according to Stanton, signified the need for reform in the way women dressed. In an 1852 letter to Susan B. Anthony, she wrote, “the present artificial form of woman is an offense to my eyes” (Gordon 1997, 195). Stanton found the bloomers to be practical and was optimistic about them becoming the new style in female attire. But even Stanton could not stand up to the public criticism. She “was vain about her appearance and loved fine clothes…. Too little was gained, she found, by trumpeting feminism in her attire and alienating strangers before she could get on with more important issues” (Banner 1980, 57). With this experience, Stanton learned two valuable lessons—first, credibility must be maintained at all times; second, trying to radicalize a conservative public does not generally work.

Susan B. Anthony was a serious woman with almost no sense of humor. She was shy and very critical of herself. She spent little time examining her childhood to find out how such a shy girl turned into such a radical political leader. She was an unmarried Quaker schoolteacher who valued her independence while becoming a leader in the women’s rights movement. Anthony would later tell a biographer, “I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper” (Ward and Burns 1999, 38). She would often criticize the marriages and pregnancies of her friends because once children entered the picture, she would watch her friends grow conservative and retire from the movement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s friendship was typical of many friendships between women during the nineteenth century. It was deeply emotional and was based on a foundation of trust and respect. Anthony was like a member of the family to the Stantons. Anthony always referred to Stanton as Mrs. Stanton while Stanton just called her Susan. All of the Stanton children would refer to Anthony as “Aunt Susan.” Anthony would visit the Stanton home after the seven children had gone to bed so she and Stanton could discuss the movement. The Stanton children, however, did not always welcome the friendship because it would sometimes be a higher priority for their mother. According to daughter Harriot Stanton, when they were together the children would be put “out of sight and out of mind” as she helped Anthony prepare a speech (Ward and Burns 1999, 85). Stanton even put Anthony in charge of weaning her daughter Margaret. “Aunt Susan,” a son would write, was “the only other person besides my mother who had ever spanked me” (Ward and Burns 1999, 85).

Their friendship was influential because the two women were opposites. Their differences complimented each other and provided strength to the other’s weaknesses. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had strong conversational and writing skills. Susan B. Anthony, on the other hand, was self-conscious about her speaking and writing abilities. Stanton often avoided administrative duties such as “organizing committees, arranging for halls, soliciting funds, and doing research” (Banner 1980, 59). She also hated having to pay attention to factual details. Anthony excelled at administrative duties and research; she found the factual details to be extremely important. When Stanton was preparing a speech, Anthony would show up at her home with books to fill in the factual details. Their differences allowed Stanton to fulfill both her domestic and reform obligations. Together, they would spend countless hours discussing and planning strategy, although because Stanton was preoccupied with child rearing, Anthony actually carried out the strategy. Clearly, each woman was a driving force behind the other. Stanton had often thought about retiring from the women’s movement to focus her attention on her family but Anthony’s pressure and encouragement motivated her to continue. She would mostly attend meetings close to Seneca Falls because she felt guilty about leaving her children.

In 1852, Anthony played an important role in Stanton’s election as president of New York State Women’s Temperance Society. According to Stanton, she “forged the thunderbolts and (Anthony) threw them” (Weatherford 1998, 71). Throughout the course of their friendship Stanton wrote most of Anthony’s speeches. Even after Stanton had become increasingly controversial and unpopular during the 1890s, Anthony frequently sought the advice of her closest friend. As Henry Stanton once told his wife, “well, my dear…you stir up Susan and she stirs up the world” (Lerner 1971, 90)

Together they would collaborate on many speeches. Stanton once said, “Our speeches may be considered the united product of our two brains” (Lerner 1971, 90). In 1854, Stanton and Anthony worked on an address to the New York State Legislature. The address called for a change in New York’s Constitution and demanded “the full recognition of all our rights as citizens of the Empire State” (Gordon 1997, 241). Stanton wrote the address while Anthony gathered “5,931 petition signatures for the ‘just and equal rights of women’”(Weatherford 1998, 71). The petition effort did not end until the end of that year due to Anthony’s hard work and determination. While getting petition signatures she held conventions in fifty-four counties discussing the suffrage movement. Their collaboration on this address became a model for how they would work together in the future.

In 1860, Stanton and Anthony worked together on another address to the New York State Legislature. The address compared the treatment of women with the treatment of slaves. They argued that both slaves and women had no identity. “He is Cuffy Douglas or Cuffy Brooks, just whose Cuffy he may chance be. She is Mrs. Richard Roe or Mrs. John Doe, just whose Mrs. she may chance to be” (Dolbeare 1998, 247). The address also touched on the fact that neither slaves nor women had a right to their earnings or their children. Nor did either group have any legal existence. “Cuffy has no legal existence; he is subject to restraint and moderate chastisement. Mrs. Roe has no legal existence; she has not the best right to her own person. The husband has the power to restrain, and administer moderate chastisement” (Dolbeare 1998, 247). They even went so far as to suggest that the treatment of women was worse than the treatment of black men. “…By just so far as women, from her social position, refinement, and education, is on a more equal ground with the oppressor” (Dolbeare 1998, 247). In New York, black men could vote, hold property, and become ministers in the church. Women could not vote, could not own property if they were married, and could not become ministers in the church.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony started out more radical than the other women in the movement. The two women opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it only extended the right to vote to black men. Most of their allies wanted the amendment to be ratified, but Stanton and Anthony adamantly opposed it. At a meeting of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) the two friends were disheartened to watch the organization express its approval of the amendment.

The two women were becoming too radical and ambitious for the rest of their allies. So in 1869, Stanton and Anthony broke away from the AERA to form their own organization. They wanted their new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association, to focus on women’s rights rather than focusing only on the right to vote. Among their goals were a sixteenth amendment that called for women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, equal pay for women, and divorce reform. In response to Stanton and Anthony, those in favor of the Fifteenth Amendment formed the American Women’s Suffrage Association (AWSA). Lucy Stone, its founder, said the AWSA was an organization for “those who cannot use the methods which Mrs. Stanton and Susan use” (Ward and Burns 1999, 123).

Although they believed in the same issues and had their own women’s rights organization, conflict between the two women was inevitable. For more than fifty years their friendship was surrounded in conflict, but their support for one another was never questioned. Anthony would often criticize Stanton “for having so many children, for disliking conventions, and for paying so little heed for details” (Banner 1980, 60). Marriage, according to Anthony, was just another barrier to the women’s movement. She was not opposed to marriage in general, she once told journalist/suffragist Ida B. Wells; she was opposed to the marriage of women who had a “special call for special work” (Ward and Burns 1999, 83). For this reason, Anthony often encouraged Stanton to leave behind her domestic duties to focus on reform. Early in their friendship Anthony wrote Stanton, “So, for the love of me, and for the saving of the reputation of womanhood, with one baby on your knee and another at your feet and four boys whistling, buzzing, hallooing ‘Ma, Ma,’ set your self about the work” (Evans 1997, 103).

Their frustrations with each other grew with time. After the Civil War, Stanton became less willing to engage in the politics of suffrage. She believed in women’s suffrage and in the movement but she was growing tired of the criticism against her radical beliefs. “Don’t speak to me of conventions. I can’t bear holding my tongue for fear of offending someone,” she told her friend (Ward and Burns 1999, 134). Often times she would not even attend meetings of the National Women’s Suffrage Association—the very organization she and Anthony founded. In 1871, Anthony became especially irritated when Stanton backed out of attending the NWSA convention. “How you can excuse yourself is more than I can understand,” wrote Anthony (Ward and Burns 1999, 134). Stanton’s excuse was that she and her husband needed money to pay for their children’s college education and giving lectures was the perfect way to raise money.

The friendship was strained even further just six months later. After stopping in San Francisco after a train trip from Chicago, Stanton and Anthony visited Laura Fair, a prostitute charged with the murder of her lover. At a lecture after the meeting, Anthony told the San Francisco crowd that, “if all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight” (Ward and Burns 1999, 135). The San Francisco papers the next day accused her of condoning prostitution and murder. It was the worst criticism she had experienced as a suffragist. The worst of it, she felt, was when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, her best friend, did not speak up to defend her. Anthony was always more than willing to defend Stanton after she had offended people. She was hurt that Stanton was not willing to return the support. Wrote Anthony, “she could do so much to put editors right to what I say and do” (Ward and Burns 1999, 135).

As they grew old, ideological changes also tested the friendship of the two women, but their support of each other remained strong. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was growing more radical and Susan B. Anthony was growing more conservative. In 1884, Stanton wrote a congratulatory letter to Fredrick Douglass on his marriage to a white woman. In the letter Stanton invited Douglass to speak at the upcoming NWSA convention and then sent the letter to Susan B. Anthony to sign. Anthony’s reply to Stanton was more of a scolding than a letter of support. Anthony strongly believed the topic of interracial marriage “has no place on our platform, anymore than the question of marriage at all…. The convention,” she wrote, was intended “to make everyone who hears or reads believe in the grand principle of equality of rights and chances for women” (Ward and Burns 1999, 178). A debate about interracial marriage would only take attention away from that purpose.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was much more controversial and radical compared to most members of the suffrage movement. She complained to a friend that, “Lucy (Stone) and Susan alike see suffrage only. They do not see woman’s religious and social bondage” (Ward and Burns 1999, 179). Stanton lost support to Anthony from the conservative suffragists because she would not focus her energy on the ultimate goal of women’s suffrage. She wanted to focus on equal rights for everybody.

By 1890, the NWSA and AWSA had made peace with each other and became the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. Although she had lost a lot of her supporters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected president of the new organization. Most delegates wanted Susan B. Anthony to be president but Anthony withdrew her nomination in favor of her friend. Even after the endorsement, Anthony had to lobby the delegates to elect Stanton president. The delegates chose Anthony to be vice president. Stanton believed that the goals of the NAWSA were too narrow. She wanted “the membership to include all types, classes, races and creeds” (United States v. Anthony 2002). Anthony privately agreed with Stanton but believed the right to vote should remain NAWSA’s priority.

Even after Anthony lobbied the NAWSA to elect Stanton as their first president, Stanton refused to change her position on the issues of women’s rights. Conservative delegates were irritated with Stanton’s radical platform. During her acceptance speech she called for equality for women in America’s churches and the NAWSA’s opposition to “all union of church and state” (Ward and Burns 1999, 183). The NAWSA, she said, should also oppose the introduction of “the name of God into the Constitution” (Ward and Burns 1999, 183). She proposed for legislators to not create any more divorce laws while women remain disenfranchised. Finally, Stanton told the delegates “We do not want to limit our platform to bare suffrage and nothing more…. Wherever a woman is wronged her voice should be heard” (Ward and Burns 1999, 183).

In 1891, Stanton disappointed Anthony when she declined an offer to live with her. Without a permanent home for almost fifty years, Anthony moved in with her sister in Rochester. She believed it was the perfect opportunity “to work steadily in tandem” with her life-long friend of over forty years. She wanted Stanton, who had been widowed earlier that year, to live and work with her. Anthony expressed her disappointment telling Stanton, “my constant thought was that you would come here, where the documents are necessary to our work, and stay for as long… as we must be together to put your writings in systematic shape to go down to posterity” (Ward and Burns 1999, 186). But Stanton, who truly loved and admired her friend, did not want to be “the subject to her every call for help” (Ward and Burns 1999, 186).

Stanton stepped down as president of the NAWSA in 1892. In her farewell speech The Solitude of Self, which she considered the best thing she had ever written, she talked about how most time is spent alone with our inner most thoughts and feelings and that all people are responsible for protecting themselves. Because of this, she argued that women should enjoy all the rights and privileges that men were able to enjoy. She spoke of individualism and how individual responsibilities brought dignity. To keep a person from completing his or her education, she said, was “like putting out eyes;” to deny property rights was “like cutting off the hands.” She ended her speech with a final question: “Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul” (Ward and Burns 1999, 197). Susan B. Anthony originally was disappointed in the speech because it focused too much on the general issue of women’s equality instead of the right to vote. She later changed her mind calling it “the strongest and most unanswerable argument and appeal ever made by the mortal pen or tongue for the full freedom and franchise of women” (Ward and Burns 1999, 189).

Stanton’s radical views eventually alienated her from the suffrage movement. In 1895, Stanton published The Women’s Bible. It was supposed to challenge the “religious doctrine that woman was ‘an inferior being, subject to man’” (Ward and Burns 1999, 199). In the first chapter, she questioned the biblical origins of man. She believed that the fact that Eve had been created out of the rib of Adam was an idea put into the Bible by a “wily writer” that was designed to create the foundation for a male dominated society. The accusations made in The Women’s Bible outraged the clergy and increased suffrage opposition. Anthony, whose religious upbringing taught her The Bible was not literally true, refused to help write the book fearing it would alienate their followers. As it turned out, Anthony’s assumptions were correct.

At the convention of the NAWSA, a resolution was proposed to disassociate the organization from Stanton and her ideas. The resolution said “This association is non-sectarian being composed of persons from all shadows of religious opinions, and has no official connection with the so-called Women’s Bible, or any other theological publication” (Ward and Burns 1999, 203). Despite her opposition to The Women’s Bible, Anthony, who was also president, stepped down from her chair to defend her friend. The efforts were not persuasive enough. The delegates voted fifty-three to forty-one in favor of the resolution. Stanton was furious. She wrote, “Much as I desire the suffrage, I would rather never vote than to see the policy of our government at the mercy of the religious bigotry of such women” (Ward and Burns 1999, 204). Stanton expected Anthony to resign her presidency from the organization but in the end Anthony could not give up her seat. “Instead of my resigning and leaving those half-fledged chickens without a mother, I think it my duty, and the duty of yourself and all the liberals to be at the next convention and try to reverse this miserable narrow action” (Ward and Burns 1999, 204).

Meanwhile, Susan B. Anthony was publicly becoming more conservative. Although she publicly spoke out against lynching in the South she did not want black people to be a part of the movement. Anthony agreed with the younger, more conservative delegates to not allow blacks into the NAWSA. In 1895, she asked Fredrick Douglass not to attend a suffrage convention because she believed he might push away Southern supporters. And in 1899 she voted to have the NAWSA publicly denounce segregation of the railroads.

As Elizabeth Cady Stanton became more and more controversial and received more criticism, she grew envious of the praise her friend was receiving. She also grew increasingly impatient with Anthony’s requests for help. She did not consider herself a person with an endless amount of ideas. Although their friendship was strained they never let their feelings go public. The closest they came to a public disagreement was when they disagreed over their endorsements of who should become president over the NAWSA after Anthony’s retirement. At Anthony’s seventieth birthday, Stanton de-scribed their friendship as being one of “hard work and self-denial” and said they were “thorns in the side of each other” (Banner 1980, 171). Despite their conflicts and disagreement, Stanton and Anthony valued their friendship and understood each other’s importance to achieving women’ssuffrage.

At the time of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s death on October 26, 1902, women had not yet achieved the right to vote. Anthony was devastated about the loss of her friend. “I cannot express myself at all as I feel. If I had died first she would have found beautiful phrases to describe our friendship, but I cannot put it into words,” she told a reporter (Ward and Burns 1999, 208). At the Stanton home to attend the funeral, she wrote to a friend that Stanton’s death was “an awful hush; it seems impossible—that the voice is hushed that I longed to hear for fifty years” (Ward and Burn 1999, 208). Stanton had planned her own funeral. She wanted to be buried in her regular clothes and the service to be conducted by a woman. At the head of her casket was the table on which she had written the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. On the casket was a framed picture, not of Stanton, but of Anthony—her loyal friend and ally throughout the women’s movement.

Although there was conflict and differences between Stanton and Anthony, they mobilized a generation of women to champion the cause of women’s rights. Stanton perhaps described their friendship best.

If there is one part of my life, which gives me more intense satisfaction than another, it is my friendship of more than forty years standing with Susan B. Anthony... Emerson says, ‘It is better to be a thorn in the side of your friend than his echo.’ If this adds weight and stability to friendship, then ours will endure forever, for we have indeed been thorns in the side of each other... I have had no peace for forty years, since the day we started together on the suffrage expedition in search of woman’s place in the National Constitution. (United States v. Anthony 2002).

Susan B. Anthony died four years after Stanton on March 13, 1906. Ten thousand people came to Rochester to pay their respects at her funeral. She had told a friend a few years earlier that at her funeral she wanted no tears. She wanted people to “pass on, and go on with the work.” (Ward and Burns 1999, 212). It would be fourteen more years until women were granted the right to vote.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were the two most important members of the women’s suffrage movement. They disagreed often, but their friendship was strong enough to overcome conflict. Their differences made their friendship unique and their contributions so powerful. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton once wrote, “I am the better writer, she the better critic… and together we have made arguments that have been unshaken by the storms of thirty long years; arguments that no man has answered” (Lerner 1971, 88).

Banner, Lois W. (1980). Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical For Woman’s Rights. Boston: Little Brown and Company.

Dolbeare, Kenneth M. (1998). American Political Thought. Chatham: Chatham House Publishers, Inc.

Evans, Sarah M. (1997). Born For Liberty: A History of Women In America. New York: Free Press Paperbacks.

Gordon, Ann D., ed. (1997). The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Vol. 1. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Lerner, Gerda. (1971). The Women in American History. Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Resources. (19 May 2002). PBS: Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Available online at: http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/resources/index.html.

United States v. Anthony. (16 May 2002). PBS: Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Available online at: http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/resources/index.html?body=us_vs_anthony.html.

Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. (1999). Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Weatherford, Doris. (1998). A History of the American Suffrage Movement. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.