The Stanton House: Shaping a Reformer

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton moved into this house in 1847, she was a socially conscious wife, mother, and housekeeper, and when she and her family left in 1862, she was a leader of the nation's emerging women's rights movement. Here, overlooking the factories along the canal, she tended to her family while struggling with the traditional role of women in American society, where women had no vote, few property rights, and social submission to men. Here, she helped plan and articulate a then-radical vision for women in American society: equal rights. Stanton formed alliances with Mary Ann M’Clintock of nearby Waterloo and Susan B. Anthony of Rochester, and with them and others she gave energy, focus, emotion, and substance to a movement that would shape modern America. In Seneca Falls and Waterloo, in living rooms and front porches, in private and in public, a group of five women started a movement that would transform American society. In 1848, those five women summoned reformers from across the Northeast to the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, where for two days as many as 300 women and men considered the role of women in a democratic society and emerged with the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that shaped a reform movement for decades to come.

Seneca Falls, New York · United States