Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Death, Burial, and Remembrance

Death, Burial, and Remembrance

Stanton died of heart failure at her home in New York City on October 26, 1902, 18 years before women were granted the right to vote in the United States. Survived by six of her seven children and by seven grandchildren, she was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been unable to attend a formal college or university, her daughters did. Margaret Livingston Stanton Lawrence attended Vassar College (1876) and Columbia University (1891), and Harriot Stanton Blatch received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Vassar College in 1878 and 1891 respectively.

After Stanton's death, her unorthodox ideas about religion and emphasis on female employment and other women's issues led many suffragists to focus on Anthony, rather than Stanton, as the founder of the women's suffrage movement. Stanton's controversial publishing of The Woman's Bible in 1895 had alienated more religiously traditional suffragists, and had cemented Anthony's place as the more readily recognized leader of the female suffrage movement. Anthony continued to work with NAWSA and became more familiar to many of the younger members of the movement. By 1923, in celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, only Harriot Stanton Blatch paid tribute to the role her mother had played in instigating the women's rights movement. Even as late as 1977, Anthony received most attention as the founder of the movement, while Stanton was not mentioned.

Over time, however, Stanton received more attention. Stanton was commemorated along with Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony in a sculpture by Adelaide Johnson at the United States Capitol, unveiled in 1921. Originally kept on display in the crypt of the US Capitol, the sculpture was moved to its current location and more prominently displayed in the rotunda in 1997. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton House in Seneca Falls was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965. Her house in Tenafly, New Jersey was declared a landmark in 1975. Years later, 37 Park Row, the site of the original office of Stanton and Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution, was included in the map of Manhattan historical sites related or dedicated to important women created by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March, 2008. She is commemorated, together with Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Ross Tubman, in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. By the 1990s, interest in Stanton was popularly rekindled when Ken Burns, among others, presented the life and contributions of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Once again, attention was drawn to her central, founding role in shaping not only the woman's suffrage movement, but a broad women's rights movement in the United States that included women's suffrage, women's legal reform, and women's roles in society as a whole.