Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were two of America's most important leaders in the initial quest for women's rights in the nineteenth century. Both women had been active in other aspects of antebellum reform (including the antislavery and temperance movements) before meeting in 1851. The meeting confirmed their own views that the "maleness" of the nation's laws needed to be challenged and intensified their determination to build a mass movement for women's rights. Although they did not live to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote, Stanton and Anthony built the foundation for women's suffrage in the twentieth century.