Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897
Glossary
A
- Anthony's 1872 Arrest
- Susan B. Anthony's deliberate act of voting in the 1872 presidential election to test whether the Fourteenth Amendment already guaranteed women's suffrage, resulting in arrest, a rigged trial before Judge Hunt (who refused to let the jury decide and imposed the verdict himself), and a $100 fine Anthony declared she would "never pay... a dollar of your unjust penalty" — a vow she kept.
- Related: Susan B. Anthony
D
- Daniel and Margaret Cady
- Stanton's parents: her father a distinguished New York lawyer and judge (and briefly a congressman), "a man of firm character and unimpeachable integrity" but reserved enough that his children "regarded him with fear rather than affection"; her mother, Margaret Livingston, "a tall, queenly looking woman" descended from Revolutionary War officer Colonel James Livingston. Stanton traces her lifelong desire to "participate in the rights and duties of government" partly to her mother's deep interest in her father's 1815 congressional campaign, which coincided with her own birth.
- Related: Peter (Family Servant), The World's Anti-Slavery Convention (1840)
- Domestic Life at Seneca Falls
- Stanton's account of the isolating grind of housekeeping and childrearing after moving from Boston to Seneca Falls in 1847 — managing a household, mediating neighborhood disputes, acting as an unofficial physician, and feeling "mental hunger" for intellectual company. She explicitly credits this frustration, alongside the London convention and her reading on women's legal status, as one of the direct causes of the Seneca Falls Convention.
- Related: The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848)
F
- Fourier's Phalanstery and Cooperative Households
- The utopian socialist model Stanton says took on "new significance" for her once she understood, from grinding personal experience, "the impossibility of woman's best development if in contact, the chief part of her life, with servants and children" — an early instance of Stanton connecting her domestic frustrations to broader structural critiques of how households and labor were organized.
- Related: Domestic Life at Seneca Falls
- Frederick Douglass
- The abolitionist leader and Stanton's early and vocal ally, whose paper The North Star and public presence supported the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention when much of the press mocked it. He and Stanton later split over the Fifteenth Amendment's prioritizing Black male suffrage over women's suffrage, a rupture the memoir engages with directly as an unresolved tension within reform coalitions.
- Related: The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848), The Fifteenth Amendment Split
G
- Gerrit Smith
- The wealthy Peterboro, New York abolitionist and reformer named among the central New York network that supported the early women's movement, whose family and estate recur throughout the memoir as a hub of reform activity and hospitality, including financial support for Anthony's legal defense after her 1872 arrest.
- Related: The Central New York Reform Network, Anthony's 1872 Arrest
H
- Henry Brewster Stanton
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton's husband, an abolitionist lawyer and orator whom she married on May 10, 1840, in order to travel with him as a delegate to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. He spoke eloquently in favor of admitting women delegates to that convention, and the couple went on to have seven children, whose upbringing Stanton treats throughout the memoir with the same seriousness she gives her public reform work.
- Related: The World's Anti-Slavery Convention (1840), Daniel and Margaret Cady
L
- Lucretia Mott
- The Quaker minister and abolitionist Stanton met at the London anti-slavery convention, whose "broad, liberal thinker" mind on politics, religion, and reform "opened to me a new world of thought." Eight years later, at Mott's invitation to spend a day with a circle of Quaker women in Waterloo, Stanton's outpoured "torrent of long-accumulating discontent" led directly to the decision to call the Seneca Falls Convention.
- Related: The World's Anti-Slavery Convention (1840), The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848)
M
- Matilda Joslyn Gage
- A Syracuse-based reformer and one of Stanton's key collaborators, named among the movement's early central New York network alongside Gerrit Smith and Beriah Green, who assisted Anthony's legal defense after her 1872 voting arrest and co-authored The History of Woman Suffrage.
- Related: The History of Woman Suffrage, Anthony's 1872 Arrest
P
- Peter
- One of the Cady family's Black menservants in Stanton's childhood, a devout Episcopalian who took the young Stanton and her sisters everywhere with him, including to the segregated "negro pew" at church — where, in one of the memoir's most pointed early scenes, one of the Cady children slipped away from the whites-only pew to sit beside him rather than let him sit alone. Stanton recalls him as "the only being, visible or invisible, of whom we had no fear."
- Related: Daniel and Margaret Cady
Q
- Quaker Reform Families
- The network of Quaker families — the Hunts, Posts, Hallowells, and the Waterloo circle around Lucretia Mott — whose religious commitment to equality made them early, essential hosts and organizers for the nascent women's rights movement. The Seneca Falls Convention itself grew directly out of a single afternoon's conversation among Quaker women at Richard Hunt's home.
- Related: Lucretia Mott, The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848)
S
- Stanton's Eightieth Birthday Celebration
- A public celebration organized by Susan B. Anthony on November 12, 1895, under the auspices of the National Council of Women rather than the National Woman's Suffrage Association — a choice Stanton notes with a hint of ambivalence, given that suffrage had been her "special life work." The event is framed in the memoir's closing pages as public recognition of "the debt the present owes to the past."
- Related: Susan B. Anthony, The Woman's Bible
- Susan B. Anthony
- Stanton's closest collaborator for over fifty years, described as the movement's tireless organizer and public speaker to Stanton's writer and theorist — "Mrs. Stanton is a fine writer, but a poor executant; Miss Anthony is a thorough manager, but a poor writer," in Theodore Tilton's 1868 assessment, which Stanton quotes approvingly. Stanton devotes multiple chapters to Anthony's career, including her 1872 arrest for voting and her decades of self-sacrificing, chronically indebted financial devotion to the cause.
- Related: The History of Woman Suffrage, Anthony's 1872 Arrest
- Susan B. Anthony's Later Career
- The final stretch of Anthony's public life the memoir documents: her 1883 tour of Europe (during which she showed far more interest in political questions and historical monuments than in art galleries), her advocacy for a federal suffrage amendment before Congress, and her steady rise from "the most ridiculed and mercilessly persecuted woman" to the movement's most honored figure by the 1880s and 1890s.
- Related: Susan B. Anthony, The History of Woman Suffrage
T
- The Central New York Reform Network
- The cluster of reformers Stanton describes settling near Seneca Falls: William Henry Channing and Frederick Douglass at Rochester, the Anthony, Post, and Hallowell Quaker families, Matilda Joslyn Gage at Syracuse, and Gerrit Smith at Peterboro. Stanton presents this dense regional web of abolitionist and reform-minded families as the social soil the women's movement grew out of.
- Related: Frederick Douglass, Matilda Joslyn Gage
- The Declaration of Sentiments
- Stanton's founding document for the Seneca Falls Convention, modeled directly on the Declaration of Independence, cataloging the legal and social subordination of women — including the convention's most controversial demand, a call for woman suffrage. Its language and structure gave the new movement's grievances a document of the same moral register as the nation's founding text.
- Related: The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848)
- The Fifteenth Amendment Split
- The 1869 rupture between Stanton/Anthony and former abolitionist allies over the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised Black men without addressing women's suffrage. Stanton frames her position through the logic she'd already voiced during the Kansas fight: if "white" were coming out of state constitutions, "male" should come out too — arguing women and Black Americans had "stood... on equal ground as ostracized classes" and should be enfranchised together rather than sequentially.
- Related: The Kansas Campaign (1867), Frederick Douglass
- The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848)
- The founding convention of the organized American women's rights movement, called with only five days' notice and held over two days at the Methodist Church in Seneca Falls. Stanton, Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, and Martha C. Wright organized it; the press response was near-universal ridicule, and most attendees who had signed the resulting Declaration of Sentiments quietly withdrew their names under social pressure — though Frederick Douglass and the antislavery press stood by the convention.
- Related: Lucretia Mott, The Declaration of Sentiments
- The History of Woman Suffrage
- The multi-volume documentary history of the movement Stanton co-authored with Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, referenced throughout the memoir as a parallel, more comprehensive project — Stanton notes the project's demands "ruthlessly swallowed up every vestige of Miss Anthony's bank account" during the years of its compilation.
- Related: Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage
- The Kansas Campaign (1867)
- A statewide referendum on extending suffrage to both women and Black men, which Stanton and Anthony campaigned across the state to support, only to find Eastern Republican allies quietly working to keep the two suffrage questions separated, fearing that linking them would doom Black male suffrage. Stanton recounts the betrayal as formative: "we learned, afterward, that they used what influence they had to keep the abolitionists and Republicans of the State silent."
- Related: The Revolution (Newspaper), The Fifteenth Amendment
- The Lyceum Lecture Circuit
- The national network of paid lecture bureaus (based in Boston, New York, and Chicago) that Stanton joined in 1869, touring "from Maine to Texas" for eight months a year for twelve years alongside contemporaries like Anna Dickinson and Wendell Phillips — grueling travel that nonetheless became the movement's main financial engine and public platform for over a decade.
- Related: Susan B. Anthony's Later Career
- The Married Woman's Property Bill
- New York legislation, passed the same year as the Seneca Falls Convention, granting married women property rights previously denied them under coverture. Stanton notes she, Ernestine L. Rose, and Paulina Wright Davis had petitioned legislative committees for it for years before its passage, and that even conservative Dutch families supported it, wanting inheritances to reach daughters rather than "dissipated, thriftless sons-in-law."
- Related: The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848)
- The Revolution
- The suffrage newspaper Stanton edited (with Parker Pillsbury) and Anthony published, launched after the Kansas campaign with funding help from the controversial financier George Francis Train. It ran for two and a half years before folding into another paper, leaving Anthony personally responsible for roughly $10,000 in debt that took her years of lecture fees to repay — Stanton calls her time editing it "one of the happiest of my life... and the most useful."
- Related: The Kansas Campaign (1867), Susan B. Anthony
- The Seneca Falls Conversation Club
- A weekly discussion group Stanton organized in imitation of Margaret Fuller's "Conversationals," in which members took turns presiding, delivering short essays, and discussing assigned topics — a deliberate effort, Stanton notes, to bring together "the best minds in the community" including those outside the village's small social elite, and to give women practical experience with parliamentary procedure.
- Related: Domestic Life at Seneca Falls
- The Woman's Bible
- Stanton's late-career, deliberately provocative critique of scripture's treatment of women, published in two parts (1895 and 1898) by a revising committee she assembled after early recruits like Frances Willard and Lady Somerset withdrew, fearing the project too radical. It caused a sensation on publication — "the clergy denounced it as the work of Satan" — and was formally censured by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, straining Stanton's relationship with the movement she had helped found.
- Related: Susan B. Anthony's Later Career
- The World's Anti-Slavery Convention (1840)
- The London gathering Stanton attended on her honeymoon with new husband Henry Stanton, where women delegates from American anti-slavery societies — including Lucretia Mott — were formally excluded from participating after a full day's debate, despite having equal standing with men in their home organizations. Stanton calls it the seed of the American women's rights movement: walking home arm in arm with Mott, "we resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women."
- Related: Lucretia Mott, The First Woman's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, 1848)
- Theodore Tilton's Portrait of Stanton and Anthony
- A widely quoted 1868 character sketch, reproduced in the memoir, contrasting the two women's complementary strengths and describing them together as "two sticks of a drum, keeping up what Daniel Webster called 'The rub-a-dub of agitation'" — one of the most vivid outside descriptions of the Stanton-Anthony partnership that the book itself preserves.
- Related: Susan B. Anthony