IN FEBRUARY of 1892, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragist and woman’s rights advocate, spoke before the U.S. Senate Committee on Women Suffrage. Her speech that day, “The Solitude of Self” is a chilling forecast of the world of the modern liberated woman. First and foremost, she has herself and herself alone. Stanton proclaimed:

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear-is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self -sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.

This “self-sovereignty” Stanton advocated required the freedom to divorce. More than 20 years earlier, in 1871, Stanton advocated liberal divorce laws:

When husbands and wives do not own each other as property, but are bound together only by affection, marriage will be a life-long friendship, and not a heavy yoke from which both may sometimes long for deliverance.

The freer the relations between human beings, the happier.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of men who have been unwillingly divorced and what percentage of women who have raised their children alone agree that the freer the relations between human beings, the happier.

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