Join us for this chance to hear from a preeminent historian of women’s suffrage and the author of the definitive biography of American suffragist and women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a singular leader, thinker, and organizer whose fight for women’s emancipation stretched from the 1840s to her death in 1902, a full fifth of America’s history. Yet her legacy has been marked by controversy. From her speeches at Cooper Union to inspiring generations of women’s suffrage advocates and activists who lived and worked in our neighborhoods, historian Ellen Carol DuBois paints a fresh portrait of this complex crusader whose tireless work made contemporary feminism possible.

Born in 1815 into a family deeply marked by the tumult of the American Revolution and surging evangelicalism, Stanton was captivated by Enlightenment ideas about individual freedom and transformed by early experiences in what she called “the school of antislavery.” Though most remembered for her fight for the vote, she was also an early crusader for women’s reproductive autonomy and reforming the institution of marriage, and against Christianity’s subordination of women. Her rifts with Black reformers and embrace of nativist ideas tarnished her reputation, but her words still have the ability to move and agitate people today.

Ellen Carol DuBois is a distinguished professor of history at UCLA and is one of the pioneers of modern U.S. women’s history.

In the 1970s, she helped to open up a field that has grown extraordinarily prolific and influential. Her work has provided a model for revisioning the history of women’s suffrage in terms of women’s political agency, the internal conflicts and shifts within suffragism itself, and suffragism’s connections to general themes and developments in political history.

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 lives in Los Angeles.