Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stantonwas an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls Convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women's rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States. Stanton was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1892 until 1900...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth12 November 1815
CountryUnited States of America
Elizabeth Cady Stanton quotes about
The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self- dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings.
Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.
Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self- sovereignty.
To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.
To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.
The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.
Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.
So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness--united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable.
They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.
When lions paint pictures men will not always be represented as conquerors. When women translate laws, constitutions, bibles and philosophies, man will not always be the declared heard of the church, the state, and the home.
We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.
The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided.
It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.
Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.