Quote for the Day:
"When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a letter to Julia Ward Howe.
Founder of the movement for women’s suffrage, Convener of the Women’s Rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and mother of six.
Stanton, with co-laborers Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Howard Shaw (one of the first ordained women pastors in the United States), Julia Ward Howe and others spent her entire adult life working for the right of women to vote. She died without receiving this right, although she regularly attempted to vote and was physically removed or even arrested for doing so. Stanton also wrote and spoke about social justice issues affecting women, like the right to inherit or own property, the right to legal protection in cases of spousal abuse, and the right to maintain custody of one’s children when divorced. That she spoke so frankly about abortion must have been astonishing in 1873.
Here, she speaks to a core issue surrounding the politics of abortion – that it demeans women. She also wrote that abortion gave society an excuse to ignore the state and need of poor women and those abandoned by husbands or their children’s father. That is still true.
This quote was brought to my attention by the sisters from Feminists for Life – women with whom Christians committed to life have common ground and a place for relationship-building. I was delighted to find similar statements made by early leaders of the women’s movement like Susan B. Anthony.
Musing,
Julia