Marriage Quote by Susan B. Anthony

Anthony’s line is built to scandalize politely: she takes a subject Victorian America wanted kept behind parlor doors and reframes it as an escape route. Divorce isn’t a moral failure here; it’s a border crossing. By likening it to Canada as a destination on the Underground Railroad, she yanks marriage out of the realm of sentimental “sanctity” and drops it into the hard world of power, coercion, and bodily risk. The audacity is the point. If the comparison feels extreme, it’s because Anthony is attacking the era’s default assumption that a wife’s suffering was private, inevitable, even character-building.

The subtext is a deliberate indictment of law as an accomplice. In the 19th century, coverture and lopsided divorce statutes effectively made many women legally subordinate to husbands; leaving could mean losing children, money, and reputation. Calling divorce a “refuge” flips the moral script: the shame belongs not to the woman who exits but to the system that traps her. Her word choice also refuses euphemism about domestic violence, naming “brutal men” without the period’s usual soft-focus language.

The Canada-slavery analogy does more rhetorical work than mere emphasis. It invokes a widely understood moral geography: there is the territory where abuse is authorized, and there is the territory where freedom can be claimed. Anthony ties women’s rights to the nation’s recent or ongoing reckoning with slavery, arguing that freedom isn’t abstract; it’s procedural, legal, and sometimes as simple - and as fraught - as getting across a line.