Elizabeth Cady Stanton had some shocking ideas in the mid-1800s. She believed women were equal to men and should have the same legal rights. And women should be able to vote, too!

Stanton had the opportunity to go to school—something most young women lacked. She was an excellent student and her father, a judge, often discussed the law with her. She was active in the abolition movement and married a well-known abolitionist, Henry Stanton.

When Elizabeth and Henry Stanton traveled to London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention, she met Lucretia Mott, another delegate. But because Mott was a woman, she was not allowed to speak at the convention. Women had to sit behind a screen in the upstairs gallery.

Stanton and Mott realized women needed to gather together to fight for women's rights. With three other women, they called the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. Stanton made her first speech, declaring, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal…" After what famous document did she pattern that speech?

A few years later, Stanton met fellow reformer Susan B. Anthony, and a lifelong friendship began. Stanton, a mother of seven children, did not want to travel around the country speaking for women's rights. But Anthony, an unmarried woman with no children, was free to travel. Stanton wrote most of the speeches and documents of the early women's movement, and Anthony presented them and organized people to carry out their ideas.

After the Civil War, Stanton served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. After her children were grown, she lectured around the nation, speaking about the law, politics, religion, the crusade against liquor, and women's equality. At the age of sixty-five, she wrote a three-volume book on the history of the woman's suffrage movement.

In spite of all her hard work, Stanton did not live to see women vote; she died in 1902, just eighteen years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.