Elizabeth Cady Stanton - History of Woman Suffrage (1881)

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The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe — the open sesame to every soul.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self- sovereignty.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Strike the words "white male" from all your constitutions, and then, with fair sailing, let us sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish together.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of thecompass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves the earth.

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
It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A mind always in contact with children and servants, whose aspirations and ambitions rise no higher than the roof that shelters it, is necessarily dwarfed in its proportions.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Though woman needs the protection of one man against his whole sex, in pioneer life, in threading her way through a lonely forest, on the highway, or in the streets of the metropolis on a dark night, she sometimes needs, too, the protection of all men against this one.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love — friends, counselors — a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life's struggles, must know the highest human happiness; — this is marriage; and this is the only corner-stone of an enduring home.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offe

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
You who have read the history of nations, from Moses down to our last election, where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
They had souls large enough to feel the wrongs of others.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Mothers of the race, the most important actors in the grand drama of human progress.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign supreme.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Woman's discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.

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
Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The virtue of patriotism is subordinate in most souls to individual and family aggrandizement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton