Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes - Page 2

Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.

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.

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.

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.

The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty.

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.

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.

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.

Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.

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.*

Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.

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.

Every truth we see is one to give to the world, not to keep to ourselves alone.

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

Men as a general rule have very little reverence for trees.

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.

Words cannot describe the indignation a proud woman feels for her sex in disfranchisement.

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.

The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.

The bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire...Here is the bible position of woman briefly summed up.

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.

[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.

Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens.

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