Eighty Years and More, published in 1898, was the autobiography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton - a woman whose life was inextricably interwoven with the history of the American women's suffrage movement. In 1840, Stanton's experiences in London at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, at which women were barred from speaking, along with "all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences. It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impell me to some onward step." Eight years later Stanton and Lucretia Mott, a fellow anti slavery campaigner who had been in London with Stanton in 1840, organised the first Women's Right's Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. It marked a turning point in the fight for women's emancipation. Stanton and Mott drafted the Declaration of Sentiments for the Convention. "The history of mankind", they wrote, "is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman. Stanton proposed a motion, to much opposition (including that of Lucretia Mott), that women should campaign for the vote. Seconded by Frederick Douglass, America's leading abolitionist and, as a black man, also disenfranchised, Stanton's resolution was narrowly passed. In 1869 there was a split in the suffrage campaign and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and close friend, Susan B. Anthony, founded the more radical National Woman's Suffrage Association. Stanton, who had seven children, complained to Anthony, "I seldom have one hour undisturbed in which I can sit down and write. Men who can shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production." So Anthony stayed with Stanton at her home at Seneca Falls and there they worked to improve women's lot. In 1890 the suffrage campaigners reconciled and Stanton became the first president of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association.
