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Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Age: 87 †
Born: 1815
Born: January 1
Died: 1902
Died: October 26
Abolitionist
Activist
Feminist
Suffragist
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Development
Duty
Higher
Women
Retards
Self
Retard
Thing
Capital
Letters
Sacrifice

More quotes by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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A government is just only when the whole people share equally in its protection and advantages.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Men as a general rule have very little reverence for trees.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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A woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education the more people know,--the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience, and observation,--the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought and action.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Chauncy Burr ... talks well, possibly better than he thinks. But this is a common failing.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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I had been invited to speak after the lunch. But I did not go to the table until the feast ended, as I never like to eat or talk before speaking.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Heavenly Father and Mother, make us thankful for all the blessings of this life, and make us ever mindful of the patient hands that oft in weariness spread our tables and prepare our daily food. For humanity's sake, Amen.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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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
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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.*
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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[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.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton