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Wikipedia Summary for Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) was an American writer and activist who was a leader of the women's rights movement in the U.S. during the mid- to late-1800s. She was the main force behind the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first convention to be called for the sole purpose of discussing women's rights, and was the primary author of its Declaration of Sentiments. Her demand for women's right to vote generated a controversy at the convention but quickly became a central tenet of the women's movement. She was also active in other social reform activities, especially abolitionism.
In 1851, she met Susan B. Anthony and formed a decades-long partnership that was crucial to the development of the women's rights movement. During the American Civil War, they established the Women's Loyal National League to campaign for the abolition of slavery, and they led it in the largest petition drive in U.S. history up to that time. They started a newspaper called The Revolution in 1868 to work for women's rights.
After the war, Stanton and Anthony were the main organizers of the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both African Americans and women, especially the right of suffrage. When the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was introduced that would provide suffrage for black men only, they opposed it, insisting that suffrage should be extended to all African Americans and all women at the same time. Others in the movement supported the amendment, resulting in a split. During the bitter arguments that led up to the split, Stanton sometimes expressed her ideas in elitist and racially condescending language, for which her old friend Frederick Douglass reproached her.
Stanton became the president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which she and Anthony created to represent their wing of the movement. When the split was healed more than twenty years later, Stanton became the first president of the united organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association. This was largely an honorary position; Stanton continued to work on a wide range of women's rights issues despite the organization's increasingly tight focus on women's right to vote.
Stanton was the primary author of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, a massive effort to record the history of the movement, focusing largely on her wing of it. She was also the primary author of The Woman's Bible, a critical examination of the Bible that is based on the premise that its attitude toward women reflects prejudice from a less civilized age.
With age comes the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in external affairs?
With age comes the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.
Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions -- requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs -- there was no attention given to preparation for this office.
The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.
Whatever oppressions man has suffered, they have invariably fallen more heavily on woman. Whatever new liberties advancing civilization has brought to man, ever the smallest measure has been accorded to woman, as a result of church teaching. The effect of this is seen in every department of life.
How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all laws into contempt.
In her present ignorance, woman's religion, instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great principles ofright and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting, her degradation more hopeless and complete.
That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.
The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.
Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women's affairs!
Where no individual in a community is denied his rights, the mass are the more perfectly protected in theirs; for whenever any class is subject to fraud or injustice, it shows that the spirit of tyranny is at work, and no one can tell where or how or when the infection will spread.
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 must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.
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.
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.
I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.
A government is just only when the whole people share equally in its protection and advantages.
We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.
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.
It is as disastrous to true government in the state, and home, to teach all womankind to submit to the authority of man, as divinely ordained, as it is to teach all mankind to bow down to the authority of kings and Popes, as divinely ordained.
Men who can, when they wish to write a document, shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production.
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.
Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.
The women of this country ought be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance, by asserting that they have all the rights they want.
There is no such thing as a sphere for sex. Every man has a different sphere, in which he may or may not shine, and it is the same with every woman, and the same woman may have a different sphere at different times.
Did I not feel that the time has come for the questions of women's wrongs to be laid before the public? Did I not believe that women herself must do this work, for women alone understand the height, the depth, the breadth of her degradation. -- Seneca Falls Convention, 1848.
Without fear of contradiction, I can safely say that every step in progress that woman has made she has been assailed by ecclesiastics, that her most vigilant unwearied opponents have always been the clergy.
Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.
It is in vain to look for the elevation of woman so long as she is degraded in marriage.
The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.
I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals -- grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god.
When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm.
Chauncy Burr ... talks well, possibly better than he thinks. But this is a common failing.
But the love of offspring...tender and beautiful as it is, can not as sentiment rank with conjugal love.
The desire to please those we admire and respect often cripples conscience.
If the Bible teaches the equality of women, why does the church refuse to ordain women to preach the gospel, to fill the offices of deacons and elders, and to administer the Sacraments...?
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.
I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life.
Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought.
With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
Religious superstitions more than all other influences put together cripple and enslave woman, but so long as women themselves do not see it and hug their chains, we have a great educational work to do.
We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.
So long as woman labors to second man's endeavors and exalt his sex above her own, her virtues pass unquestioned; but when shedares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives, manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects for ridicule and detraction.
Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood, the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.
When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.
Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.
The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race: that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth.
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.
My religious superstition gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and in proportion as I looked at everything from a new standpoint, I grew more happy day by day.
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.
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.
Well, another female child is born into the world! Last Sunday afternoon, Harriot Eaton Stanton -- oh! the little heretic thus to desecrate that holy holiday -- opened her soft blue eyes on this mundane sphere.
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.
Eve tasted the apple in the Garden of Eden in order to slake that intense thirst for knowledge that the simple pleasure of picking flowers and talking to Adam could not satisfy.
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.
It would be ridiculous to talk of male and female atmospheres, male and female springs or rains, male and female sunshine....How much more ridiculous is it in relation to mind, to soul, to thought, where there is as undeniably no such thing as sex.
Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.
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.
God, in His wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length.
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.
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.
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.
There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.
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 cornerstone of an enduring home.
In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions, are known only to ourselves. Even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion, in every situation, we conceal.
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.
How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing.
To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.
There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this abortion. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?
To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.
I think all these reverend gentlemen who insist on the word 'obey' in the marriage service should be removed for a clear violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which says there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude within the United States.