19th Century
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1815–1902 · Suffrage
The vote is the handle. Self-ownership is the point.
In their words
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
Stanton organized the 1848 Seneca Falls convention and wrote its Declaration of Sentiments, which charged law and custom with setting one half of humanity beneath the other. She tied the subjection of married women, their property, wages, children and bodies, to their exclusion from the ballot, and never conceded that the franchise was a privilege granted rather than a right withheld.
Why it matters for freedom
She took the country's own declaration literally and used it against the half of the population it excluded.
Who they stood against
the laws that made a married woman's property her husband's