Friday, March 6 at 4:00 pm
Talking Leaves...Books and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center present
Join us at Hallwalls Friday, March 6th in the late afternoon to celebrate with Ellen Dubois the publication of her new book, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life! Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a pioneering force in the fight for women’s rights, shaping the movement from the 1840s through her death in 1902. Her intellect, vision, and enduring influence on modern feminism are now brought to life in this definitive biography, published in time for Women’s History Month. This event is free to attend and will consist of a talk and signing, with books available for purchase. Purchase of your book from Talking Leaves Books and donations to Hallwalls are the best way to support this event.
"The life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton still has much to teach us. The invented prisons of race, sex, and class are still with us, but learning about successful past struggles against them can help to equalize the future."
—Gloria Steinem
In ELIZABETH CADY STANTON Ellen Carol DuBois — the preeminent scholar of women's suffrage — offers a fresh portrait of one of America's most influential reformers. Drawing on archival research and Stanton's own writings, DuBois traces her life, from her upbringing in a family shaped by the American Revolution and evangelical revivalism, through her partnership with Susan B. Anthony and leadership in the women's rights movement, to her later years spent in Great Britain, where she absorbed new ideas about socialism and reform.
Though most remembered for her fight for the right to vote, Stanton was far more radical: an early advocate for women's reproductive and sexual autonomy; a critic of marriage and religion's subordination of women; and a thinker who made Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality women's own. Her unwavering belief in the equality of the sexes and in individual freedom made her both a visionary and a catalyst, admired and condemned in equal measure.
However, DuBois does not shy away from Stanton's flaws — her cultural blind spots, her conflicts with Black reformers, and her elitism often shadowed her brilliance. Yet she also shows how Stanton's pursuit of women's emancipation shaped the trajectory of American democracy itself. More than a century after her death, Stanton remains a nineteenth-century feminist whose words still move, and unsettle, readers today. ELIZABETH CADY STANTON restores her as a central, complex crusader in the struggle for equality, illuminating her intelligence, moral ambiguity, and power.
Ellen Carol DuBois is distinguished professor of history at UCLA. Her pioneering works on the US woman suffrage movement include Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, and Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote. She spent the first two decades of her career on the Women's Studies faculty at SUNY Buffalo. She lives in Los Angeles.