Votes For Women

One Hundred Years toward Suffrage: Overview  click here

Man's intellectual superiority cannot be a question until woman has had a fair trial. When we shall have freedom to find our own sphere, when we shall have had our colleges, our professions, our trades, for a century, a comparison then may be justly instituted.
 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If God had assigned a sphere to man and one to woman, we claim the right ourselves to judge His design in reference to us...We think that a man has quite enough to do to find out his own individual calling, without being taxed to find out also where every woman belongs.
 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Strange as it may seem to many, we now demand our right to vote according to the declaration of the government under which we live. We should not feel so sorely grieved if no man who had not attained the full stature of a Webster, Clay, Van Buren or Gerrit Smith could claim the right of elective franchise. But to have drunkards, idiots, horseracing rum-selling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, is too grossly insulting to... be longer quietly submitted to. The right is ours. Have it we must. Use it we win. The pens, the tongues, the fortunes, the indomitable wills of many women are already pledged to secure this right.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

There would be more sense in insisting on man's limitations because he cannot be a mother, than on a woman's because she can be. Surely maternity is an added power and development of some of the most tender sentiments of the human heart and not a "limitation"...
"But it unfits her for much of the world's work."
Yes, and it fits her for much of (it); a large share of human legislation would be better done by her because of this deep experience...If one half the effort had been expended to exalt the feminine element that has been made to degrade it, we should have reached the natural equilibrium long ago. Either sex, in isolation, is robbed of one-half its power for the accomplishment of any given work.
 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Woman must have a purse of her own, and how can this be so long as the law denies to the wife all right to both the individual and the joint earnings? . (T)here is no true freedom for woman without the possession of equal property rights, and these can be obtained only through legislation. If this is so, then the sooner the demand is made, the sooner it will be granted. It must be done by petition and this, too, of the next legislature. How can the work be started? We must hold a convention and adopt some plan of united action.

Susan B. Anthony