ABSTRACT
Less than three weeks short of her 87th birthday, Elizabeth Cady Stanton passed away in the New York City apartment that she shared with her son Robert and her recently widowed daughter Margaret Lawrence. 2 The previous day (25 October 1902) 'the grand old woman' of the nineteenth-century 'woman's rights' movement had dictated a letter to Theodore Roosevelt in which she stated:
As you are the first President of the United States who has ever given a public opinion in favor of woman suffrage, and when Governor of New York State, recommended the measure in a message to the Legislature, the members of the different suffrage associations in the United States urge you to advocate, in your coming message to Congress, an amendment for the enfranchisement of American women, now denied their most sacred right as citizens of a Republic. 3
This, the last of the hundreds of letters, articles, and other writings that flowed from her active and perceptive mind, reflects the core of the various causes to which she had dedicated more than fifty years of her busy life. Her reform interests included, but were not limited to, abolition, property rights for wives, child custody rights for mothers, liberalization of divorce laws, coeducation, 'dress reform', and above all suffrage. 4 Although her interests were many, as Lois Banner has written: 'As a reformer and public figure, Cady Stanton was first and foremost a feminist. '5
