Religion, Suffrage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Host David Myers welcomes historian Ellen DuBois to discuss her recently published book about the life, legacy, and contradictions of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Ellen emphasizes Stanton’s central role in launching the women’s suffrage movement alongside Susan B. Anthony and her enduring relevance to modern debates over women’s rights, religion, and democracy. Ellen explores Stanton’s partnerships with Anthony and Frederick Douglass, her disappointment during Reconstruction when women were excluded from expanded voting rights, and her increasingly controversial critiques of organized Christianity through works like The Woman's Bible. The conversation also confronts Stanton’s racist and nativist rhetoric, with Ellen examining how her elite class background and the prejudices of 19th-century America shaped some of her most troubling views. Ellen argues that Stanton’s vision of women’s equality, bodily autonomy, and expanded democracy remains deeply connected to present-day political struggles over issues such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, conservative Christian activism, and modern “household voting” proposals.

Dr. Ellen DuBois is a Distinguished Research Professor of United States History at UCLA. Ellen earned her B.A. in History from Wellesley and her PhD from Northwestern University. She taught at the University at Buffalo before joining the UCLA faculty until her retirement in 2017. She has published many works, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life (Hachette 2026), Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote (Simon & Schuster 2020), Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America 1848–1869 (Cornell 1999), and Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (Yale 1997) which won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association.