Wednesday, June 25, 2025 at 4 pm
Smithfield Community Center
5255 Pleasant Valley Road Peterboro NY 13134
Norman K Dann PhD closes the final program in series of eight two hour sessions on Wednesday, June 25, 2025 at 4 pm. The series has concentrated on the people affiliated with the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark in Peterboro NY.
Cousins of Reform: Smith and Stanton describes the special relationship between Gerrit Smith and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Gerrit Smith’s mother Elizabeth Livingston Smith and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s mother Margaret Livingston Cady were sisters. Born eighteen years apart, Gerrit Smith and Elizabeth Cady Stanton shared a passion for social justice and were two powerful leaders of the two most important social movements for human rights in American history. Their close loving bond did not deter their strong political debates by letters and during Stanton’s long stays in Peterboro of which she wrote with affection. Indeed, it was in Peterboro that young Elizabeth met Henry Brewster Stanton and where he proposed to her!
Dann will discuss the philosophical and political connections between first cousins Gerrit and Elizabeth as they pooled their resources and ideas in the 19th century battles to pursue equity of treatment for both black people and women. He will examine the intensity of prejudice against people who were not male and white, and the counteracting forces that mobilized large segments of the American public in support of social movements for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.
The presenter, Norman K. Dann PhD, is the author of COUSINS OF REFORM: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Gerrit Smith (2013) as well as author of biographies on each of the members of the Ann and Gerrit Smith family.
The public is invited to partake of one, a few, or all of the eight sessions