Notes from Ken Burns' documentary on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

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both completely different. Canton was wealthy. Very witty. Uncompromising revolutionary. Married, 7 children. Susan b Anthony was the opposite. Not wealthy. A good politician, could swing left or right. Born a Quaker. Not married.

Started around 1848. The first year they had a meeting about this. 4 of the 5 who organized it were quakers. Seneca falls, NY. At the convention were around 300 people and they all agreed to certain things women should have but the one that people just couldn’t agree to was the right to vote. Then a man stood up in the audience, it was Frederick Douglas, and he gave a very eloquent argument and that helped convince them all. They wrote a declaration based on the Declaration of Independence. This was 72 years after the declaration. It would be 72 more years until they got it. It was Canton who did this. Susan b Anthony met her like 3 years later.

Nowhere in the world did women have the right to vote.

Education was thought to be discouraging to suitors, potential male mates. So fathers wouldn’t let their daughters go to college. And no college would admit a woman anyway.

In Stanton’s wedding, she struck the word obey and made it a marriage between equals. And she kept her name.

Susan b Anthony started on the temperance movement. They thought it would help women by reducing domestic abuse and spousal rape.

Mostly susan b anything would speak. Just trying to get a crowd wherever she could. They sometimes felt like they just needed to wait for the current generation of women to die.

Stanton’s cousin was the guy who funded John Browns slave uprising. The cousin was committed to an insane asylum.

NY was the first state the fought and got some laws passed that they have their own right to own property independent of their husband.

All these people knew each other. Wa Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, anothony and Stanton. They did a lot for abolitionist as well and the 13th amendment abolishing slavery.

They found out that the 14th amendment contained the word “male”, saying basically that all citizens are men. They opposed the 15 amendment because they wanted women to be included, sex not just color. They started to get into a comparison about which is more urgent, the vote of blacks or women. It got ugly, arguing with Frederick Douglass

Even before they got the right, some states allowed women to vote on elections. It was up to the states to decide.

Susan b Anthony decided she had to not fight for black women’s right to vote because it woquld alienate too many senators and southern women.

Near the end of her life. Stanton was more radical, she wrote the Woman’s Bible. Which was about how men and women were created at the same instant and that god was androgynous not created in his image. This made the women suffragettes concerned, and so they voted to dissociate themselves form Stanton, who started their movement 30 years earlier.

“It is better to be a thorn in the side of your friend than his echo.” Emerson.

They finally got the vote in 1919. 72 years after that first meeting.