Description

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a pioneering force in the fight for women’s rights, shaping the movement from the 1840s through her death in 1902. Her intellect, vision, and enduring influence on modern feminism are now brought to life in this definitive biography, published in time for Women’s History Month.

In ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (Basic Books; available March 3, 2026), Ellen Carol DuBois—the preeminent scholar of women’s suffrage—offers a fresh portrait of one of America’s most influential reformers. Drawing on archival research and Stanton’s own writings, DuBois traces her life, from her upbringing in a family shaped by the American Revolution and evangelical revivalism, through her partnership with Susan B. Anthony and leadership in the women’s rights movement, to her later years spent in Great Britain, where she absorbed new ideas about socialism and reform.

Though most remembered for her fight for the right to vote, Stanton was far more radical: an early advocate for women’s reproductive and sexual autonomy; a critic of marriage and religion’s subordination of women; and a thinker who made Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality women’s own. Her unwavering belief in the equality of the sexes and in individual freedom made her both a visionary and a catalyst, admired and condemned in equal measure.

However, DuBois does not shy away from Stanton’s flaws—her cultural blind spots, her conflicts with Black reformers, and her elitism often shadowed her brilliance. Yet she also shows how Stanton’s pursuit of women’s emancipation shaped the trajectory of American democracy itself.

More than a century after her death, Stanton remains a nineteenth-century feminist whose words still move, and unsettle, readers today. ELIZABETH CADY STANTON restores her as a central, complex crusader in the struggle for equality, illuminating her intelligence, moral ambiguity, and power.