On this day in 1815, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a pioneering champion of women’s rights, was born in Johnstown, N.Y. In advocating women’s suffrage in her manifesto, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, Stanton forged ahead of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister who joined Stanton in organizing the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

At the pathbreaking two-day conclave, Stanton, moving beyond the cause of voting rights, argued for a woman’s right to higher education, a professional life and a separate legal identity, including the right to own property and obtain a divorce.
“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” Stanton wrote. “To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. ... Wherever we turn, the history of woman is sad and dark, without any alleviating circumstances, nothing from which we can draw consolation.”

She became a key collaborator of Susan B. Anthony, another pioneering suffragist, who valued her organizational ability.

In 1854, Stanton received an unprecedented invitation to address the New York Legislature. Her speech led to legislation, passed in 1860, that granted married women separate rights to their wages and to equal guardianship of their children.