"It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another"
About this Quote
Stanton lands a deceptively blunt truth: empathy has class ceilings. The line isn’t a plea for kindness across divides; it’s an indictment of how comfort distorts moral perception. “Impossible” is doing the heavy lifting. She’s not claiming individuals can’t imagine another life in a novelistic way. She’s arguing that as a class, the privileged are structurally disqualified from fully registering harms they don’t pay for. When the costs of injustice are externalized onto someone else’s body, time, labor, or legal status, the dominant group experiences “normal” as neutral. That’s not a failure of character so much as a feature of power.
The subtext is strategic: stop waiting for permission from above. Stanton was writing and organizing in a 19th-century America where women’s political and economic identities were legally constrained and where abolitionist and women’s rights movements frequently collided, cooperated, and competed. In that ecosystem, appeals to the conscience of lawmakers and gatekeepers were necessary but insufficient. Her sentence pushes the argument toward self-advocacy and collective leverage: those who suffer a wrong must name it, narrate it, and fight it, because the people insulated from it will misread it as exaggeration, hysteria, or disorder.
Rhetorically, it works because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. The privileged like to see themselves as the arbiters of fairness; Stanton suggests they’re the least reliable judges. It’s a sharp warning about “common sense” politics: what feels reasonable to one class can be brutal to another.
The subtext is strategic: stop waiting for permission from above. Stanton was writing and organizing in a 19th-century America where women’s political and economic identities were legally constrained and where abolitionist and women’s rights movements frequently collided, cooperated, and competed. In that ecosystem, appeals to the conscience of lawmakers and gatekeepers were necessary but insufficient. Her sentence pushes the argument toward self-advocacy and collective leverage: those who suffer a wrong must name it, narrate it, and fight it, because the people insulated from it will misread it as exaggeration, hysteria, or disorder.
Rhetorically, it works because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. The privileged like to see themselves as the arbiters of fairness; Stanton suggests they’re the least reliable judges. It’s a sharp warning about “common sense” politics: what feels reasonable to one class can be brutal to another.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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