“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” —Declaration of Independence
The story about women’s suffrage begins with Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Susan B. Anthony did get the education she wanted, but then she was forbidden to speak in public against slavery.
• On a farm near West Brookfield, Mass., lived Lucy Stone, the eighth of nine children. In 1820s, farm life was hard. Lucy cared for livestock and grew food. She nursed her babies and kept the little ones from falling into fireplaces or down wells. She cooked meals over open fires, raised chickens, grew vegetables, and lived a rigid life.
More than anything, Lucy wanted to go to college. In the 1840s, only one college was open to women and that was a frontier college in Ohio called Oberlin. Because her father refused to pay for it, Lucy taught school for $16 a month which was half what a male teacher was paid. She stitched shoes and sold berries and chestnuts at the farmer’s markets.
She began saving for college when she was 16 and it took her nine years to save the $70 she needed to enter Oberlin in 1843. Today, that $70 would equal $1,800. To conserve her cash, she slept on top of her trunk on the ship’s deck under the stars when she went by ship across Lake Erie from Buffalo to Cleveland.
Lucy Stone’s plans were to earn her living on lecture tours. Her musical voice charmed a young man named Henry Blackwell. He was seven years younger than she and it took him years before she agreed to marry him.
In 1854 they wed and Henry declared that, as Lucy’s husband, he would have “no legal right to her earnings, her property or her body.” Lucy did not take Henry’s last name and kept her own.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived a privileged life in Johnstown, N. Y. because her father was a successful lawyer and judge. Hired men and women did the work at home and a black slave named Peter watched over Elizabeth and the other children.
She left home to attend the Troy Female Seminary one of the many secondary schools just for girls in the early 1800s. There she studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, science, and literature. Once she finished school, Elizabeth returned home to live a proper young lady’s life. She wed Henry Stanton in May 1840. By 1847 she was the mother of four children.
When Stanton had tea with Lucretia Mott, that very night, she wrote an announcement of a Women’s Rights Convention. Taking pens to paper, they wrote a draft of a document they called “A Declaration of Sentiments.” In it they made their own case for women’s rights.
When the meeting opened July 19, 1848 at Seneca Falls, those present heard Stanton and McClintock’s Declaration.
Its 942 words rocked the United States.