Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

What we suffragettes aspire to be when we are enfranchised is ambassadors of freedom to women in other parts of the world, who are not so free as we are.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

We do not know whether the present House of Commons will be prepared to do justice to women. A few months ago there can be little doubt that it would, and nothing that has since happened supplies any adequate reason for a change of purpose. The follies and excesses of a small section of women, deeply resented and regretted by the vast majority of women, ought not to be allowed to weigh in the balance against a claim which has been admitted to be just.

Women stock is rising in the market. I shall not live to see women vote, but I'll come and rap at the ballot box.

I was a child of the women's movement. Everything I had learned was from my mother and my grandmother, who both had a very pioneering spirit. They had to, because they had to change flat tires and paint the house - because, you know, the men didn't come home from the war or whatever else, so women had to do these things.

Women are afraid. It is unpopular to question the bible. They are creatures of tradition. They fear to question their position in the testament, as they feared to advocate suffrage fifty years ago. Now they are quarreling as to which were among the first to advocate it. You see they are not used to abuse as I am. In Albany, fifty years ago, when I went before the legislature to plead for a married woman's right to her own property, the women whom I met in society crossed the street rather than speak to me.

American 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!

I worked for suffrage for years, and got it. I've worked for peace for 55 years and haven't come close.

Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.

Proof that they do not understand the republic is that in their fine promises for universal suffrage, they forgot women.

I always believed that women have rights and that there are some women that are intelligent enough to claim those rights. There are some others that are stupid enough not to.

Why are we not valuing the word 'feminism' when there is so much work to be done in terms of empowerment and emancipation of women everywhere?

In the laws of the land, she has no rights; in government she has no voice. And in spite of another principle recognized in this Republic, namely, that 'taxation without representation is tyranny,' she is taxed without being represented.

If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.

I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

I thought that we would wake up this morning and have the same rights as our husbands, grandsons and garbage men—but we are still begging to be let into our country's Constitution.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

It is indeed wonderful when one wakes up in the morning to remember that now, at last, one is considered to be a real, complete human being! After thirty years of endeavor to make men understand they were only half the world… the price we have paid for our enfranchisement is too heavy, some of us find, to allow us to rejoice in the light-hearted, happy fashion we used to picture in old days, but we are filled with a deep and earnest thankfulness.

My own adhesion to the Suffrage Cause was given largely because I saw that only through political equality may we hope to see established a true understanding and a happier relationship between the sexes.

We are not going back to where being a woman was a preexisting medical condition.

Is it right that your mother, your sister... should be classed with criminals and lunatics... ? Is it right that while the gambler, the drunkard, and even the wife-beater has a vote, earnest, educated and refined women are denied it?... Is it right... that a mother... should be thought unworthy of a vote that is freely given to the blasphemer, the liar, the seducer, and the profligate?

All theories of chivalry and generosity and vicarious representation fall, before the fact that woman has been grossly wronged by man. That being the case, the only modest and honest thing for man to do is to say, "Henceforward have a voice in making your own laws." Till this is done, she has no sure safeguard, since otherwise the same men who made the old barbarous laws may at any time restore them.

The instinct of humanity revolts against the employment of woman as a soldier on the battlefield. No civilized man would wish to lay this duty upon her; no civilized woman would wish to assume it.

I tell you that men will always respect women when they compel it by their actions; and if women today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation the men would be compelled to grant it. The women of the country have the power in their hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order.

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