Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Women Quotes

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Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible. I would fain teach women that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education; the more people know,--the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience, and observation,--the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought and action.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
While women were tortured, drowned and burned by the thousands, scarce one wizard to a hundred was ever condemned... The same distinction of sex appears in our own day. One code of morals for men, another for women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Religious superstitions more than all other influences put together cripple & enslave woman, but so long as women themselves do not see it & hug their chains, we have a great educational work to do.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion that has breathed upon this earth, has degraded women. There is not one that has not always made her subject to man.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Women and negroes, being seven-twelfths of the people, are a majority; and according to our republican theory, are the rightful rulers of the nation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Our scholarships should be bestowed on those whose ability and earnestness in the primary department have been proved, and whose capacity for a higher education is fully shown. This is the best work women of wealth can do, and I hope in the future they will endow scholarships for their own sex instead of giving millions of dollars to institutions for boys, as they have done in the past.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Resolved, That all laws which prevent women from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I have such an intense pride of sex that the triumphs of women in art, literature, oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women's affairs!

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
For fifty years the women of this nation have tried to dam up this deadly stream that poisons all their lives, but thus far they have lacked the insight or courage to follow it back to its source and there strike the blow at the fountain of all tyranny, religious superstition, priestly power and the canon law.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Our "pathway" is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning... We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In the criminal code we find no feminine pronouns, as "He," "His," "Him," we are arrested, tried and hung, but singularly enough, we are denied the highest privileges of citizens, because the pronouns "She," "Hers" and "Her," are not found in the constitutions. It is a pertinent question, if women can pay the penalties of their crimes as "He," why may they not enjoy the privileges of citizens as "He"?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Thus far women have been the mere echoes of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and the customs of social life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future. A just government, a humane religion, a pure social life await her coming.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I have endeavored to dissipate these religious superstitions from the minds of women, and base their faith on science and reason, where I found for myself at last that peace and comfort I could never find in the Bible and the church.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Who can sum up all the ills the women of a nation suffer from war? They have all of the misery and none of the glory; nothing to mitigate their weary waiting and watching for the loved ones who return no more.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
But so long as women are slaves, men will be knaves.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other.... If this present woman [Victoria Woodhull] must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton