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Elizabeth Cady Stanton : The Need For Equality For Women In History

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Women are often overlooked in history, partly because they were chained in social expectations and had limited rights. Throughout the history of the United States, many groups of people have faced discrimination far greater than the circumstances faced by most women. However, the struggles of these fair-skinned and African American women should not be portrayed as less than what they were. In 1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the first president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, delivered her retirement speech, “The Solitude of Self” to the NAWSA convention. The speech eloquently articulated the need for equality for women and her philosophy of feminism.
The excerpt of the speech provided in the Fink’s text was from The Christian Herald’s article, “Masterpieces of American Eloquence.” While it is an abridged version of Stanton’s speech, it does not lose its message. Stanton believed in the individuality of people and their right to be in charge of their life. Her focus was women’s right to have a say in government, to have access to higher education, and to not be limited to the traditional female jobs of the past. Stanton pressed that women must be allowed to be self-dependent and emphasized that women were “robbed of their natural rights” and “handicapped by law.”
Stanton spoke of the injustice of women’s lack of suffrage, which prevented women from having a voice in their society and in their judicial system. During this same period, many Anglo-Saxon

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