A PAGE FROM THE LOST DIARY
OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
From Wikipedia:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls Convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements in the United States. Stanton was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1892 until 1900.
Susan B. Anthony is often credited with founding the woman’s rights movement in the United States. However she and Elizabeth Stanton were lifelong friends and co-workers in both the slavery abolitionist movement and woman’s rights movements. Following the end of the Civil war in 1865, they focused their attentions on woman’s rights. It may be said that Elizabeth Stanton provided the philosophical and legal direction to the movement while Susan Anthony was its visible face. Susan Anthony was often quoted as saying, “Elizabeth developed the thunderbolts which I fired.”
Elizabeth Stanton was married and had a husband and several children to look after. Susan was unmarried and free to travel and represent the cause at meetings around the country, before the U.S. Congress and, when necessary, going to jail for her activities.. This difference in their circumstances probably accounts for the public’s perception of Anthony as the principal representative of the Suffragette movement.
Stanton’s father was a lawyer and Justice of the New York Supreme Court. It has been said that he sometimes wished he had had a son. Perhaps it was this wish that caused him to coach young Elizabeth in the rudiments of the law and allowed her to mingle with the other lawyers and law clerks in his office.
By the age of thirty-three, in 1848, she was a seasoned advocate for both the abolition of slavery and the nascent woman’s rights movement. In that year she joined a group of Quaker women in Seneca Falls, New York in organizing “a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” It was held in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20, 1848, two years before Elizabeth met Susan B. Anthony.
The Seneca Falls Convention is generally identified as the start of the woman’s rights movement in the United States.
As a principle speaker, Elizabeth Stanton delivered a, now famous speech, and a document, entitled A Declaration of Rights and Sentiments which was modeled after the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The convention adopted her Declaration and one hundred participants signed it. Following the convention, Fredrick Douglas promoted the Declaration as a, “grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights of women.”
Perhaps because of her awareness of the inflammatory nature of the Declaration Stanton kept a secret diary in which she contemplated the importance of the document, its possible social consequences and the potential effect it might have on her life and family situation. The diary was lost and not seen again until after her death in 1902. The entry presented here is dated July 16, 1848, three days before her presentation at the Seneca Falls Convention.
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Sunday 
July 16, 1848
Most of the preparations for the convention are completed. Only the construction of the speakers platform and its patriotic bunting remain to be finished. The Quaker-ladies are even now preparing the refreshments we will serve following the speeches.
For the tenth time I have reread my own presentation. I am satisfied that I have copied the structure of the Declaration of Independence. I believe that by doing so I have added strength and justification to the grievances I am claiming and the resolutions that I will be proposing. But I keep wondering if it is too aggressive? Have I unjustly criticized all men? Certainly, I know there are good men in this world. And yet, even the best of men, or should I say the most of men, have fallen into the mind-set of oppressing women. I blame the social pressure of our times as much as any overtly malicious interest in doing harm to women…still, they continue to see us as less than full citizens…almost as slaves. This cannot continue!
My sincerest hope is that my Declaration of Rights and Sentiments will be taken seriously and given full consideration. If we can persuade the New York state legislature to accept and act upon some of the resolutions I am presenting, which should result in changes in the voting, divorce and property rights of women in this state, then perhaps it will serve as a model and legal precedent for other states to follow. This will be a long and arduous fight. It is not likely that I will live to see the miracle of universal suffrage for women in the United States.
More immediately, I am concerned for the consequences that releasing the Declaration may hold for my family and me. Will local women, even some of our friends and family, consider my husband, my children and me as outcast of society? Are there some hidden financial punishments that local banks and businesses can inflict upon us?
Yes, I worry about these things…but the cause of woman’s rights is too great…I must go on.
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Don Conway is an award-winning Architect and Writer (two golds and a silver medal from a national writing competition) also a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University. Says he is working hard on book number four.