Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Women's Rights

170 years ago one woman launched the beginning of the modern women's rights movement in America. New Generation Thinker Joanna Cohen of Queen Mary University of London looks back at her story and what lessons it has for politics now.

In the small town of Seneca Falls in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote The Declaration of Sentiments, a manifesto that took one of the nation's most revered founding documents, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and turned its condemnation of British tyranny into a blistering attack on the tyranny of American men. But why did Stanton choose to rebrand her claim for rights with the power of sentiment?

Recorded with an audience at the York Festival of Ideas.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio programmes.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.