Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The principal author of the Declaration of Sentiments and the intellectual engine of the early women's rights movement. At Seneca Falls in 1848 she took the cadence of the Declaration of Independence and turned it to a new purpose, holding the founding promise to account by writing in its own voice. She argued for the vote decades before it came, and did not live to see it. The argument was hers; the victory belonged to those who outlived her.