Education Quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton’s sentence doesn’t ask for a reform; it delivers an indictment. The phrase “whole tone” is doing heavy work, accusing the Church not merely of holding a few bad doctrines but of cultivating an atmosphere - a steady music of condescension - that seeps into law, custom, and the self-understanding of women. “To the last degree” intensifies the charge into something like a moral absolute: not partially harmful, not accidentally dated, but maximally corrosive. Then she lands on “contemptuous and degrading,” a pairing that targets both the institution’s attitude (contempt) and its effect (degradation). One is what power thinks; the other is what power produces.

The intent is strategic. Stanton is writing as an activist who understood that cultural authority often hides behind reverence. By naming the Church’s “tone,” she exposes the mechanism by which hierarchy disguises itself as holiness. It’s also a pivot away from polite petitioning. She’s refusing to negotiate within a framework that treats women’s inferiority as spiritual common sense.

The subtext is even sharper: religion isn’t just a private belief system; it’s a legitimizing engine. If the Church’s teachings train society to see women as lesser, then the fight for suffrage, property rights, and education can’t be won solely in legislatures. It has to confront the storymaking institutions that bless inequality.

Context matters: Stanton, a leading figure in the 19th-century women’s rights movement, repeatedly challenged Christian patriarchal interpretations, most famously in The Woman’s Bible (1895). This line distills that broader project - not to reject faith wholesale, but to strip religious language of its immunity from criticism when it functions as a tool of social control.