Daily Inspiration Quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton isn’t aiming her fire at women so much as at the most intimate technology of their containment: belief that feels like virtue. By calling women’s religiosity “superstition,” she strips it of dignity and frames it as a habit of mind that turns obedience into a moral achievement. The sting is deliberate. External barriers - laws, wages, property rights - can be named as oppression. Internalized doctrine is harder to dislodge because it recruits conscience as a guardrail. If you think God wants you smaller, you don’t need a jailer.

The subtext is a tactical warning to a movement that, even in the 19th century, had to negotiate respectability. Stanton is saying the “adverse influences” everyone can see are not the main obstacle; the deeper problem is the cultural script that women themselves repeat, teach, and defend. Religion here functions as social glue: it rewards sacrifice, sanctifies submission, and launders patriarchal power through the language of love, purity, and duty. Her phrasing “perpetuate their bondage” pins responsibility on the system without letting its targets off the hook, a rhetorical gamble meant to provoke self-recognition rather than comfort.

Context sharpens the provocation. Stanton was famously at odds with mainstream churches and later with more cautious suffragists; her critiques culminated in The Woman’s Bible, which treated scripture as a political document with fingerprints on it. This line reads like a movement memo: stop asking for freedom while worshipping the arguments against it.