While attending the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London (on her honeymoon in 1840), Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott, Sarah Pugh, Elizabeth Neall, and Ann Phillips - the first women she had ever known “who believed in the equality of the sexes.” In 1848, she and Lucretia Mott had tea with Mary M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright (Mott’s sister), and Jane C. Hunt in Waterloo, New York and together decided “to do and dare anything” toward the advancement of women’s rights. They worked on a Declaration of Sentiments, with Stanton as the primary author. It was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and asserted, “that all men and women are created equal,” reiterating that both genders “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” They argued that women were oppressed by the government and the patriarchal society in which they lived, and listed sixteen facts as evidence of that oppression - including women’s lack of representation in the government, their lack of property rights in marriage, and their inequality in divorce law, education, and employment opportunities. But the most controversial item was the call for women’s suffrage, the right to vote. “[T]he right by which all other [rights] can be secured,” said Stanton.

On July 19th and 20th, 1848, they held the first ever Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton read aloud their Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their acceptance of the Declaration, thereby challenging the legal and social structures of the day and officially starting the American Women’s Rights Movement.

In addition to mothering seven children, Stanton was a prolific writer for social change. Her publications include: A Petition for Universal Suffrage (1866), Self-Government the Best Means of Self-Development (1884), The Degradation of Disenfranchisement (1892), Solitude of Self (1892), The Woman’s Bible (1895 & 1898), and Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences 1815 – 1897 (1898).

Together with Susan B. Anthony, the two suffrage pioneers established the newspaper The Revolution in 1868, and wrote the History of Woman Suffrage (1881) with Matilda Joslyn Gage and Ida Husted Harper, to document women’s long struggle for the vote.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) believed that women should, “Do all you can, no matter what, to get people to think.”