When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm.
Elizabeth Cady StantonRead
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!
Interpretation
What this quote means
Elizabeth Cady Stanton urges educated and affluent American women to demand political representation to protect their rights and values.
In this quote, Stanton passionately calls on women of privilege in America to recognize the threats posed by social and cultural inequalities. She emphasizes the importance of women's representation in government as a critical means to safeguard their interests and maintain their ideals of womanhood against the influential perspectives of marginalized groups. By awakening to their position and demanding equality, Stanton believes women can play a vital role in shaping laws that affect their lives.
Themes
Women'S RightsRepresentationPolitical VoiceSocial ChangeEquality
In practice
Example use cases
During a women's rights rally, this quote can serve as a powerful reminder of the importance of female representation in politics.
More from Elizabeth Cady Stanton
All quotes →To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up to be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.
Elizabeth Cady StantonRead
The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body... is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.
Elizabeth Cady StantonRead
Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought.
Elizabeth Cady StantonRead
We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.
Elizabeth Cady StantonRead
Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.
Elizabeth Cady StantonRead
Similar quotes
The one thing I would say is, I do think women are evaluated differently than men. How we look, what is our age? Do you see a ton of 55-year-old women in sports television? No. But there are men in their 60s and 70s across many networks who are still in sports television.
Doris BurkeRead
Today, despite all of the gains we have made, neither men nor women have real choice. Until women have supportive employers and colleagues as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they don't have real choice. And until men are fully respected for contributing inside the home, they don't have real choice either.
Sheryl SandbergRead
Women, who are a majority of the peoples of the earth, are indispensable to the accumulation of the kind of social capital that is conducive to development, peace, justice and civility.
Mahnaz AfkhamiRead
If you're one of the only women on a set - if it's you and a bunch of men - you feel like your value doesn't come from your thoughts and your talent and what you say: your value comes from how you look and how you're perceived by the men around you.
Jessica ChastainRead
I want a future where women and girls get to be the subject of their own sexuality, not the object of somebody else’s. That we are the main characters in our own play, not props in somebody else’s—which is how women’s sexuality is treated now. Whatever the outside attitudes about sexuality it’s always about somebody’s agenda for us, and I want a world where we can have our own.
Jaclyn FriedmanRead
Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.
Estelle RameyRead