Politics & Power Quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton’s line opens with a velvet-gloved shove. “Come, come” sounds like a hostess coaxing a timid guest onto the dance floor, but it’s really a brisk reprimand: stop clutching the furniture and look up. By calling him “my conservative friend,” she pretends intimacy to disarm him, then uses that closeness as leverage. It’s a rhetorical judo move common to movement leaders who’ve spent years being patronized: she refuses the posture of supplicant and instead adopts the tone of the adult in the room.

The image is the punch. “Wipe the dew off your spectacles” makes conservatism feel less like reasoned caution and more like a physical obstruction - condensation from staying indoors too long, peering at the world through fogged glass. Dew suggests morning, sleep, and lag; it implies he’s waking up late to history. It also gently mocks the idea that his vision is clear. He isn’t seeing reality; he’s seeing his own climate-controlled assumptions.

“And see that the world is moving” is not an argument so much as a verdict. Stanton frames social change as motion with or without permission, reducing her opponent’s position to a failure of perception rather than a viable philosophy. In the context of 19th-century women’s rights organizing - where “conservatives” defended tradition as moral law - she counters with a modernizing premise: legitimacy comes from aligning with the direction of history. Subtext: you can either adjust your lenses or be left behind looking respectable and irrelevant.