Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

“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”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“From "Not For Ourselves Alone:"

In Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s time:


Women were barred by custom from the pulpit and professions

Those who spoke in public were thought indecent

Married women were prohibited from owning or inheriting property: in fact, wives were the property of their husbands, who were entitled by law to her wages and her body.

Women were prohibited from signing contracts

Women had no right to their children or even their clothing in a divorce

Women were not allowed to serve on juries and most were considered incompetent to testify.

Women were not allowed to VOTE.”
― ken burns

“I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them," is how [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton described their [hers and Susan B. Anthony's] work together.”
― Elaine Weiss, The Woman's Hour

“In Stanton, Mott won a devoted convert. Elizabeth recalled: 'It seemed to me like meeting a being from some larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinions of Popes, Kings, Synods, Parliaments, with the same freedom she would criticize an editorial in the London Times, recognizing no higher authority than the judgment of a pure-minded, educated woman. 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, I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom; it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America