The English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had begun taking morphine for pain relief at age fifteen (which she will takes for four decades until her death in 1861), although this seems not to impede her ability to write “poetical paragraphs”.

In 1857, the American writer Julia Ward Howe suggests that her genius is attributable to her use of the drug, provoking Robert Browning to enter into a heated literary argument defending his wife’s talent.

Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic is published for the first time in the Atlantic Monthly on February 1, 1862

Stanton's position has led to a major schism in the women's rights movement itself by the time the Fifteenth Amendment is making its way through Congress.

Many leaders in the women's rights movement, including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, strongly argue against Stanton's "all or nothing" position.

By 1869, disagreement over ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment has given birth to two separate women's suffrage organizations.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) had been founded in May 1869 by Anthony and Stanton, who will serve as its president for twenty-one years.

The NWSA opposes passage of the Fifteenth Amendment without changes to include female suffrage and, under Stanton's influence in particular, champions a number of women's issues that are deemed too radical by more conservative members of the suffrage movement.

The better-funded, larger, and more representative woman suffragist vehicle American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded the following November and led by Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, supports the Fifteenth Amendment as written.

Following passage of that Amendment, the AWSA prefers to focus only on female suffrage rather than advocate for the broader women's rights espoused by Stanton: gender-neutral divorce laws, a woman's right to refuse her husband sexually, increased economic opportunities for women, and the right of women to serve on juries.