She was influential in advocacy for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which sought to give women the right to vote.

As a teenager in Newburyport, Massachusetts, she fell in love with Aaron Augustus Sargent, 1 year her junior, an aspiring journalist and politician.

He built a four-room house on Broad Street and in early 1852 returned to Newburyport, where he and Ellen were married on March 15.

[3] In 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, to advocate for a constitutional amendment granted women the right to vote.

[5] After Aaron died in 1887, she returned to San Francisco, where the Sargents had bought a home before he was elected to the Senate.

[1] The City of San Francisco held its first public memorial for a woman, and state flags were flown at half-mast.