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
I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.
Interpretation
Women should view themselves as whole individuals rather than being defined by their relationships or roles.
This quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton emphasizes the importance of women recognizing their intrinsic value and identity. By urging girls to see themselves as nouns, she advocates for a perspective where they are seen as complete persons with their own strengths and potential, rather than simply modifiers in relation to others, which often diminishes their self-worth and agency.
In practice
In a speech at a women's rights rally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.
Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.
It's more important to represent women as complete, whole, complicated humans as opposed to saintly, perfect women. The point isn't that they have to be good people. It's that they have to be people.
I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.
Women will be no longer made the slaves of, or dependent upon men ... They will be equal in education, rights, privileges and personal liberty.
This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.
I don't know why women aren't allowed to have the same sort of breadth and scope and flaws of men.
Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
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