Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view.

The "Otherizing" of women is the oldest oppression known to our species, and it's the model, the template, for all other oppressions.

Since the foundation of the world man has had nearly all the forces on his side, working with him and for him; his intellect has been stimulated, while that of woman has been abased; he has had the run of the world and all quickening and brightening things, while she has sat in the cinders, and until of late been illumined only by his reflected light.

A woman is known as a sack, made to endure as long as she lives in her husband's house

The history of women has been a history of silence.

In the '50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

Writing a novel about feminism can be a thankless task.

Women in the post-Fifties world were appendages. They existed to serve men. Their lives and concerns didn't matter, except insofar as they impinged on Important Male Things.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

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.

Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape.

Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.

I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.

I'm glad that we have a history at all and that we can talk about feminist history. But I do think that it doesn't really pay attention to the complexity and the nuance that is feminist thought.

There were a lot of different things [in The Women's Room ]. I don't really want to summarize it in this way. It's about a woman's awakening, a woman who came of age in the '50s and is a teenager - actually, she's a little bit older - in the '60s and part of the women's movement and how she ends up there.

[The married woman is] is a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, and serves her master's passion; [and] who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation.

... so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.

Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.

Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire.

What a misfortune it isto be bornawoman!? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show usthenew limits, the Gothic structure, theimpenetrable barriers of our prison.

Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.