8. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Image via Wikimedia Commons. 

Credited as two of the most influential women’s rights figures are New York natives and women’s suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Together, the women traveled the countryside hosting women’s rallies and events, even founding and running the independent women’s rights newspaper, The Revolution. However, it’s apparent that it was more than just a deep admiration for the cause that linked the two women together.

Another Suffragette, Anna Howard Shaw, wrote of the twosome in The Story of a Pioneer: “She [Miss Anthony] often said that Mrs. Stanton was the brains of the new association, while she herself was merely its hands and feet; but in truth the two women worked marvelously together, for Mrs. Stanton was a master of words and could write and speak to perfection of the things Susan B. Anthony saw and felt but could not herself express.”

Then, Stanton herself once professed in a letter to Anthony: “No power in heaven, hell or earth can separate us, for our hearts are eternally wedded together.” While the two women’s 50-year friendship didn’t exactly follow them to the grave, today the two women’s burial grounds can be visited relatively easily as Anthony rests in a Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, with Stanton a little closer to home in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Soon, you might also be able to visit statues of the two women in Central Park, as outcries against the lack of female representation in the park have spurred on a fund for the cause.