VISION

When Elizabeth was young, her father noticed how intelligent she was (she spoke many languages and was clearly a gifted writer), and said to her, "Oh Lizzie, if only you were a boy..." She took this as a challenge!

Elizabeth is a fascinating person, a visionary thinker, a gutsy and brilliant writer who was WAY ahead of her time. Her father, Judge Cady, would listen to women cry in his study because of laws like the one that prohibited them from divorcing an abusive husband. Elizabeth vowed that when she grew up, she would tear out the pages from the law books that made women cry -- and sure enough, by lobbying legislatures and campaigning tirelessly for decades, she and her allies did just that. They overturned the most restrictive and repressive laws that violated women.

At the Seneca Falls Convention, she was the one who suggested women needed the right to vote. Many of the other attendees thought this idea was absolutely crazy -- that politics was a dirty game, a man's world. When her father heard she was calling for women to vote, he came to town to "check on her sanity", and her husband, an abolitionist leader, left town rather than be there for this outrageous talk!

There was a lot of name calling and nasty press that followed, but that didn't deter Elizabeth and her fellow activists from continuing what became the cause of their lives.