Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Background:
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) resigned as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association on January 18, 1892, she presented "The Solitude of Self," a speech she considered "the best thing I have ever written." According to her diary, she also presented the speech to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary on January 18 and to the United States Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage on January 20. Reaction to the speech was highly favorable, both within and outside the woman suffrage movement. By order of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 10,000 copies were reprinted from the Congressional Record for distribution throughout the country.
Although Stanton later gave occasional speeches, "The Solitude of Self" was her crowning achievement. Rhetorical critic Karlyn Kohrs Campbell writes that the speech "stands as a rhetorical masterpiece because it explores the values underlying natural rights philosophy, because it responds creatively to the problems faced by social movements as their arguments become familiar to audiences, and because it still has the capacity to speak to contemporary audiences" (19). Campbell adds that "The Solitude of Self" is also "the most finished statement of the humanistic ideology underlying feminism."
By all accounts, Stanton's "The Solitude of Self" was solely the work of her own mind and pen. Anthony called the speech "the strongest and most unanswerable argument and appeal ever made . . . for the full freedom and franchise of women." The Woman's Journal published the speech on January 23, 1892, and is the source for the text below.
Sources: Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, compiler, Man Cannot Speak for Her: Key Texts of the Early Feminists, Vol. II (New York: Praeger, 1989); Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1815-1897): Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898): Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch, eds. Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1922).
The Solitude of Self
