The Church is a terrible engine of oppression, especially as concerns woman.
Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.
Social science affirms that a woman’s place in society marks the level of civilization.
The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided.
God, in His wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length.
The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.
Women of all classes are awakening to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which they are fitted.
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.
I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous. So I decided to study Greek and learn to manage a horse.
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
I shall not grow conservative with age.
A mind always in contact with children and servants, whose aspirations and ambitions rise no higher than the roof that shelters it, is necessarily dwarfed in its proportions.
Eve tasted the apple in the Garden of Eden in order to slake that intense thirst for knowledge that the simple pleasure of picking flowers and talking to Adam could not satisfy.
How long will the heathens rage?
Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.
Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman’s position.
Well, another female child is born into the world! Last Sunday afternoon, Harriot Eaton Stanton – oh! the little heretic thus to desecrate that holy holiday – opened her soft blue eyes on this mundane sphere.
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.
To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.
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.
I poured out the torrent of my long-standing discontent and I challenged them to do and dare anything.