Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had broken with their abolitionist backgrounds  after the American Civil War and will lobby strongly against ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, meant to grant African American men the right to vote.

Believing that African American men, by virtue of the Thirteenth Amendment, already have the legal protections, except for suffrage, offered to white male citizens, and that so largely expanding the male franchise in the country will only increase the number of voters prepared to deny women the right to vote, both Stanton and Anthony are angry that the abolitionists, their former partners in working for both African American and women's rights, refuse to demand that the language of the amendments be changed to include women.

Eventually, Stanton's oppositional rhetoric takes on racial overtones.

Arguing on behalf of female suffrage, Stanton posits that women voters of "wealth, education, and refinement" are needed to offset the effect of former slaves and immigrants whose "pauperism, ignorance, and degradation" might negatively affect the American political system.

She declares it to be "a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom [of civil rights] first." (Kern, Kathi. Mrs. Stanton's Bible. Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY, 2001, p. 111 (directly quoting Stanton))

Stanton's position causes a significant rift between herself and many civil rights leaders, particularly Frederick Douglass, who believes that white women, already empowered by their connection to fathers, husbands, and brothers, at least vicariously have the vote.

According to Douglass, their treatment as slaves entitles the now liberated African-American men, who lack women's indirect empowerment, to voting rights before women are granted the franchise.

African-American women, he believes, would have the same degree of empowerment as white women once African-American men had the vote; hence, general female suffrage is, according to Douglass, of less concern than black male suffrage. (Foner, Philip S., editor. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Lawrence Hill Books (The Library of Black America); Chicago, IL, 1999., p.600)

Disagreeing with Douglass, and despite the racist language she sometimes resorts to, Stanton firmly believes in a universal franchise that empowers blacks and whites, men and women.

Speaking on behalf of black women, she states that not allowing them to vote condemns African American freedwomen "to a triple bondage that man never knows," that of slavery, gender, and race. (Dubois, Ellen Carol. Feminism & Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869. Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY, 1999 p.69).

She is joined in this belief by Anthony, Olympia Brown, and most especially Frances Gage, who was the first suffragist to champion voting rights for freedwomen.

Thaddeus Stevens, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and ardent abolitionist, agrees that voting rights should be universal.

In 1866, Stanton, Anthony, and several other suffragists draft a universal suffrage petition demanding that the right to vote be given without consideration of sex or race.

The petition is introduced in the United States Congress by Stevens.

Despite these efforts, the Fourteenth Amendment will be passed, without adjustment, in 1868.

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.

An international Congress for Women's Rights, organized by Susan B. Anthony in Washington, D.C.,     opens on March 25, 1888, and leads to formation of the International Council of Women, a key event in the international women's movement.