Women’s rights conventions were held annually until the Civil War, drawing most of their support from the abolitionist and temperance movements. After the war, feminist leaders split over the exclusion of women from legislation enfranchising black men. Abolitionists argued that it was “the Negro’s Hour,” and inclusion of female suffrage would jeopardize passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which enfranchised ex-slaves. Feeling betrayed by their old allies, Cady Stanton and Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment. Their protest alienated the more cautious wing of the movement and produced two competing suffrage organizations.

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In 1869, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe–well known as the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic–and others formed the moderate American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), while Cady Stanton, Anthony, Martha Wright and the radical faction founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Lucretia Mott, now an elderly widow, sought in vain to reconcile the two camps.

Both organizations sought political equality for women, but the more radical NWSA actively promoted issues beyond suffrage. Guided by the original Seneca Falls Resolutions, the NWSA demanded an end to all laws and practices that discriminated against women and called for divorce law reform, equal pay, access to higher education and the professions, reform of organized religion, and a total rethinking of what constituted “woman’s sphere.” Cady Stanton spoke about women’s sexuality in public, and condemned the Victorian double standard that forced wives to endure drunken, brutal and licentious husbands. Anthony countenanced–and occasionally practiced–civil disobedience; in 1872 she was arrested for illegally casting a ballot in the presidential election.

By the time the two rival organizations merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), much had been accomplished. Many states had enacted laws granting married women property rights, equal guardianship over children, and the legal standing to make contracts and bring suit. Nearly one-third of college students were female, and 19 states allowed women to vote in local school board elections. In two western territories–Wyoming and Utah–women voted on an equal basis with men. But full suffrage nationwide remained stubbornly out of reach. The NAWSA commenced a long state-by-state battle for the right to vote.

NAWSA’s first two presidents were Cady Stanton and Anthony, both now in their seventies. Old age did not mellow either one of them, especially Cady Stanton. Ever the rebel, she criticized NAWSA’s narrow-mindedness, and viewed with increasing suspicion its newly acquired pious prohibitionist allies. NAWSA’s membership should include all “types and classes, races and creeds,” and resist the evangelical infiltrators who sought to mute the larger agenda of women’s emancipation.

Cady Stanton had long advocated reform of organized religion. “The chief obstacle in the way of woman’s elevation today,” she wrote, “is the degrading position assigned her in the religion of all countries.” Whenever women tried to enlarge their “divinely ordained sphere,” the all-male clerical establishment condemned them for violating “God’s law.” Using the Scriptures to justify women’s inferior status positively galled her. In 1895, she published The Woman’s Bible, a critical commentary on the negative image of women in the Old and New Testaments. Even Anthony thought she had gone too far this time, and could do little to prevent conservative suffragists from venting their wrath. During the annual convention of NAWSA, both the book and its author were publicly censured. Henceforth, mainstream suffragists would downplay Cady Stanton’s historic role, preferring to crown Susan B. Anthony as the elder stateswoman of the movement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902 at the age of 83, and Susan B. Anthony in 1906 at 86. By then a new generation of suffrage leaders emerged–younger, better educated, and less restricted to the domestic sphere. The now respectable middle-class leadership of NAWSA adopted a “social feminist” stance, arguing that women were, in fact, different from men, and therefore needed the vote in order to apply their special qualities to the political problems of the nation.

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