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Daniel Cady is today perhaps best known as the father of the prominent women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was born in Johnstown in 1815.

Stanton, who later worked in partnership with Susan B. Anthony and served for many years as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association ( NWSA ), spent her childhood in Johnstown, where she studied at the Johnstown Academy.

It was one of the first schools in New York to receive a teaching certificate issued by the newly formed state education system in the later 19th century.

After leaving to continue her education in Troy, New York, Stanton returned to Johnstown with her husband Henry Brewster Stanton, a lawyer and abolitionist who studied law under her father, Daniel Cady.

Because of her role, Johnstown, together with Seneca Falls, NY, where Elizabth Cady Stanton helped organize the first Women's Rights Convention held in 1848, lays claim to being the birthplace of the Women's Rights Movement in the United States.

Stanton's speech, The Declaration of Sentiments, given at the Seneca Falls convention and modeled on the " Declaration of Independence ", is generally credited with instigating the women's suffrage movement in the United States.