Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry moved from Boston to Seneca Falls in 1847, taking up residence in this house. The house would play a key role in shaping Stanton’s feminist views. Burdened by the responsibilities of caring for the new house as well as three children, she soon realized that it is impossible for a woman to develop her full potential when her life is consumed with housework.
Yet Stanton's burdens did not preclude her from helping to organize the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention. Nor did it prevent her subsequently from becoming a leading writer, strategist, and coleader of the woman suffrage movement. (Nineteenth-century practice was to use the singular, woman or woman's, when referring to women as a class; later practice preferred the plural, women or women's.)
Prominent visitors to this house included Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, Frances Dana Barker Gage, William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, and Matilda Joslyn Gage.
Though located a few blocks away from Seneca Falls’s other woman’s-rights attractions, the Stanton House is part of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. The National Park Service spent lavishly to restore the house; the process is lauded as a model for the highest level of historical structure rehabilitation.
See this site for more information about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House.
July 19–20, 1848