Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“ As I listened to what was said here, the words called to my mind the image of a woman of America, known as a religious and moral teacher, who bears a name of which this nation will one day be proud, but now slandered by a venal press, scorned by an arrogant pulpit, little appreciated by the mass of men and women, for whom the bearer of it is laboring night and day. The image of that woman rose before me. The world regards her as a public woman, as out of her sphere, and infers that she is neglectful of the cares and insensible to the loveliness of domestic life ”

“ Graceful, gentle, retiring, taking upon herself the lowliest duties as if she had been born to them, this woman, who stood up that her light might shine on all, and reveal to them the terrible atrocities of slavery, was like Jeremy Taylor's taper, which cast ever a modest shadow round itself. She had a very lofty idea of what a woman should be. ”

“ The central claim for Woman is her right to be, and to do, as well as to suffer. Allow her everywhere to represent herself and her own interests.
Custom and law both deny her this right. If she is too cowardly to contend with custom, and to overcome it, let her remain its slave. But the Jaw has bound her hand and foot. Here she can not act. The law-makers have forged her chains and riveted them upon her. They alone can take them off. Shall we not, then, at once demand of them — demand of every sovereign State in the Union — the elective franchise for woman? ”

“ Yet I hardly know which sentiment was strongest in me, contempt for such foolish opinions, or pity for a man that has so degrading an opinion of woman — of the being that gave him life, that sustained his helpless infancy with her ever-watchful care, and laid the very foundation for the little mind he may possess — of the being he took to his bosom as the partner of his joys and sorrows — the one whom, when he strove to win her affection, he courted, as all such men court woman, like some divinity. ”

“ The Church would indignantly deny that it is a marriage mart, but denial does not throttle the truth.
Truth makes her way slowly but surely, because the eternities are hers. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the greatest liberator of our time, has, with magnificent courage, pressed into humanity's Thermopylae, and turned the light on the superstitions which have visited cruelties and wrongs on woman, and this, too, under a system which claims to extend "great consideration" to the Mothers of the Race. O women of Christendom! will ye not seek the truth? ”

“ Gentlemen, such scenes as woman has witnessed at her own fireside, where no eye save Omnipotence could pity, no strong arm could help, can never be realized at the polls, never equaled elsewhere, this side the bottomless pit. No, woman has not hitherto lived in the clouds, surrounded by an atmosphere of purity and peace—but she has been the companion of man in health, in sickness, and in death, in his highest and in his lowest moments. She has worshiped him as a saint and an orator, and pitied him as madman or a fool. In Paradise, man and woman were placed together, and so they must ever be. ”

“ Lucy Stone: I plead for the right of woman to the control of her own person as a moral, intelligent, accountable being. I know a wife who has not set foot outside of her husband's house for three years, because her husband forbids her doing so when he is present, and locks her up when he is absent. That wife is gray with sorrow and despair though now in middle life, but there is no redress for her wrongs because the law makes her husband her master, and there is no proof that he beats or bruises her; there is nothing in his treatment of her that the law does not allow. ”

“ She was the first American woman who threatened rebellion unless the rights of her sex were secured. In March, 1776, she wrote to her husband, then in the Continental Congress, "I long to hear you have declared an independency, and, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. ”

“ But we desire no such undue power over man; it would be as wrong in her to exercise it as it now is in him. All we claim is an equal legal and social position. We have nothing to do with individual man, be he good or bad, but with the laws that oppress woman. We know that bad and unjust laws must in the nature of things make can so too. If he is kind, affectionate, and consistent, it is because the Kindlier feelings, instilled by a mother, kept warm by a sister, and cherished by a wife, will not allow him to carry out these barbarous laws against woman. ”

“ We believe that woman, as an accountable being, can not innocently merge her individuality in that of her brother, or accept from him the limitations of her sphere. In all life's great extremities she also is thrown upon her inward resources, and stands alone. Man can not step in between her and the "accusing angel" of her own conscience; alone in the solitude of her spirit she must wrestle with her own sorrows ”

“ The woman who but yesterday was sued on bended knee, who stood so high in the scale of being as to make an agreement on equal terms with a proud Saxon man, to-day has no civil existence, no social freedom. The wife who inherits no property holds about the same legal position that does the slave on the Southern plantation. She can own nothing, sell nothing. She has no right even to the wages she earns; her person, her time, her services are the property of another. She can not testify, in many cases, against her husband. She can get no redress for wrongs in her own name in any court of justice. ”

“ There is not a right which that Book does not recognize; and there is not a duty which man owes to woman, or woman to man, that is not there enjoined. It is my firm conviction, that there is but one thing to be done on this subject — if the women of this State want the elective franchise, they can have it. I don't believe it is in the heart of man to refuse it. Only spread the truth, adhere to Woman's Rights, and adhere to that one principle, and when the people are convinced that her claim is just, it will be allowed. ”

“ We maintain not that woman should lose any of that refinement and delicacy of spirit which, as a celestial halo, ever encircles the pure in heart. We contend not that she shall become noisy and dictatorial, and abjure the quiet graces of life. We claim not that she, any more than her brother, should engage in any vocation or appear in any situation to which her nature and abilities are not fitted. But we ask for her, as for man, equality before the law, and freedom to exercise all her powers and faculties under the direction of her own judgment and volition. ”

“ To talk of confining woman to her proper sphere by legal disabilities, is an insult to the divinity of her nature, implying, as it does, the absence of instinctive Virtue, modesty, and sense on her part. It makes her the creature of law — of our law — from which she is assumed to derive her ability to keep the path of rectitude, and the withdrawal of which would leave her to sink to the depths of folly and vice. Do we really think so badly of our mothers, wives, sister-, daughters? ”

“ She is but the echo of man. Man utters the sentiment, and woman echoes it. As I said before — for I have seen and felt it deeply — she even appears to be quite nattered with her cruel tyrant, for such he has been made to be — she is quite nattered with the destroyer of woman's character — aye, worse than that, the destroyer of woman's self-respect and peace of mind — and when she meets him, she is nattered with his attentions. ”

“ History is very silent upon their record; not a name has been preserved; but we do know that they lived, and how they died, and it is but fitting that a record of woman's work for freedom should embalm their memory in its pages. Many other women defended homes and children against the savage foe, but their deeds of heroism have been forgotten.
There is scarcely a portion of the world so far from civilization as Indiana was at that day. No railroads spanned the continent, making neighbors of people a thousand miles apart ”

“ There stood that Quaker girl, calm and self-possessed, while with hasty consultations, running to and fro, those frightened men could not decide what to do; how to receive this audacious invader of their sphere of action. At length President Davies, of West Point, in full dress, buff vest, blue coat, gilt buttons, stepped to the front, and said, in a tremulous, mocking tone, "What will the lady have?" "I wish, sir, to speak to the question under discussion," Miss Anthony replied. The Professor, more perplexed than before, said: "What is the pleasure of the Convention?" ”

“ I have never spoken from notes; and as I did not intend to publish anything about myself, for I had no other ambition except to work for the cause of humanity, irrespective of sex, sect, country, or color, and did not expect that a Susan B. Anthony would wish to do it for me, I made no memorandum of places, dates, or names; and thirty or forty years ago the press was not sufficiently educated in the rights of woman, even to notice, much less to report speeches as it does now ”

“ The degradation of the husband at this infringement of the lord spiritual and temporal upon his marital right, has been pictured by many writers, but history has been quite silent upon the despair and shame of the wife. No hope appeared for woman anywhere. The Church, which should have been the great conserver of morals, dragged her to the lowest depths, through the vileness of its priestly customs. The State, which should have defended her civil rights, followed the example of the Church in crushing her to the earth. God Himself seemed to have forsaken woman. ”

“ Whatever is given to us freely, I think, in common politeness, we should accept graciously.
While I was enjoying once more the comforts of home, on the blue hills of Jersey, Miss Anthony was lighting the fires of liberty on the mountain tops of Oregon and Washington Territory. All through the months of October, November, and December, 1871, she was jolting about in stages, over rough roads, speaking in every hamlet where a schoolhouse was to be found, and scattering our breezy leaflets to the four winds of heaven. ”

“ It is wholesome doctrine, in the opinion of The Star, to deny woman's rights and negro's rights and the right of free discussion, to maintain them is to countenance "corrupt and unwholesome doctrines."
The subject of woman's rights somehow is attracting general attention. Rev. Mr. Sunderland, of this city, in a published sermon, sought to bring the whole matter into contempt, under cover of the ridicule of the Bloomer dress. His position is, that if God made man a little lower than the angels, He made woman a little lower still. ”

“ On the subject of marriage and divorce we have some very positive opinions, and what they are is pretty generally known. But even were they less positive and fixed, we should none the less protest against the sweeping character of the resolutions introduced at the Woman's Rights Convention on Friday by Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. We can not look upon the marriage relation as of no more binding force than that which a man may make with a purchaser for the sale of dry-goods, or an engagement he may contract with a schoolmaster or governess. Such doctrine seems to us simply shocking. ”

“ If the love of frivolity and show and of empty admiration, which now so generally obtains, is an unfailing characteristic in the female sex, legislation can not help you. Encouragement, sympathy, can not help you. It is of no use to fight against the eternal laws. But if this be only a perversion or misdirection of noble and lovely powers and faculties, the result of accidental circumstances and vicious institutions, as I believe, then, when the outward pressure is removed, the elastic spring of the genuine human spirit, encased in the form of woman, shall return ”

“ However, the debates in the Convention had the effect of rousing English minds to thought on the tyranny of sex, and American minds to the importance of some definite action toward woman's emancipation.
As Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street that night, reviewing the exciting scenes of the day, they agreed to hold a woman's rights convention on their return to America, as the men to whom they had just listened had manifested their great need of some education on that question. ”

“ Elizabeth Cady Stanton was president. As secretary, Miss Anthony for several years gave her earnest efforts to the temperance cause, but she soon saw that woman was utterly powerless to change conditions without the ballot and from 1852 she became one of the leading spirits in every women's rights convention, and was acting secretary and general agent for the suffrage organization for many years. She left others to remedy individual wrongs while she devoted herself to working for the weapon by which she believed women might be able to do away with the producing causes. ”

“ Wendell Phillips says, "The best and greatest thing one is capable of doing, that is his sphere." I have confidence in the Father to believe that when He gives us the capacity to do anything He does not make a blunder. Leave women, then, to find their sphere. And do not tell us before we are born even, that our province is to cook dinners, darn stockings, and sew on buttons. We are told woman has all the rights she wants; and even women, I am ashamed to say, tell us so, They mistake the politeness of men for rights — seats while men stand in this hall to-night, and their adulations ”