Eliza Wright Osborne

Eliza Wright Osborne (September 3, 1829 – July 19, 1911) was an American suffragist and feminist, who became vice president of the New York Woman Suffrage Association. The niece and daughter, respectively, of prominent women's rights activists Lucretia Mott and Martha Coffin Wright, she was also a colleague of suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, and was credited by her contemporaries with having helped to expand the women's suffrage movement across the nation and with the founding of the Women's Education and Industrial Union in Auburn, New York. Formative years and family Born as Eliza Wright in Aurora, Erie County, New York on September 3, 1829, Eliza Wright Osborne was a daughter of David Wright and Martha Coffin Wright and the eldest sister of Tallman, Ellen, William, and Francis Wright. In 1848, her mother and her maternal aunt, Lucretia Mott, played key roles in organizing the Seneca Falls Convention, which was the first women's rights convention ever held in the United States. Under their influence and the influence of the other suffragists with whom they regularly interacted, Eliza Wright grew up fighting to expand the rights of women in New York and nationwide. In 1851, Eliza Wright married David Munson Osborne, a farm machinery manufacturer. They had four children named Emily, Florence, Thomas, and Helen. Her son, Thomas Mott Osborne, became a prison reformer and a forest, fish and game commissioner; her grandson, Lithgow Osborne, became a diplomat and environmentalist.