Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes
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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.
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If all those magnificent cathedrals with their valuable lands in Boston, Philadelphia and New York were taxed as they should be, the taxes of women who hold property would be proportionately lightened....I cannot see any good reason why wealthy churches and a certain amount of property of the clergy should be exempt from taxation, while every poor widow in the land, struggling to feed, clothe, and educate a family of children, must be taxed on the narrow lot and humble home.
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The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.
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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.
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The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty.
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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.
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We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Progress is the victory of a new thought over old superstitions.
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You may consider me presumptuous, gentlemen, but I claim to be a citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age.
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You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.
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I do believe that half a dozen commonplace attorneys could so mystify and misconstrue the Ten Commandments, and so confuse Moses' surroundings on Mount Sinai, that the great law-giver, if he returned to this planet, would doubt his own identity, abjure every one of his deliverances, yea, even commend the very sins he so clearly forbade his people.
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Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.
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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.
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The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.
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On women's role in the home. Every wife, mother and housekeeper feels at present that there is some screw loose in the household situation.
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To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.
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... women learned one important lesson--namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement.... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder.
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Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her.
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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.
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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.
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Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.