... 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.
Elizabeth Cady StantonTo make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all laws into contempt.
Elizabeth Cady StantonThus 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 StantonTo think that all in me of which my father would have felt proper pride had I been a man, is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.
Elizabeth Cady StantonHow anyone, in view of the protracted sufferings of the race, can invest the laws of the universe with a tender loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is to me amazing.
Elizabeth Cady StantonMen can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.
Elizabeth Cady StantonAmerican women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!
Elizabeth Cady Stanton