Elizabeth Cady Stanton Cons

One Giant Step for Womankind Timelessly, the United States has been disappointing in truly being the land of the free, especially in the respect and recognition of women’s rights. As recent as forty years ago, a woman had to be accompanied by a man just to go shopping. Elizabeth Cady Stanton maintained a scolding attitude throughout the speech in order to create a powerful exposé of the harsh truth that women are denied natural rights claim. Cady Stanton does so by the use of enumerations of male actions and the contrasting of the pros and cons that could result with the use of antithesis. Recurringly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton played the victim card to male oppression, and she had every right to because these white men in power were regarded

As Elizabeth Cady Stanton explained it, women were placed lower than felons as long as they were men and I could not imagine facing such humiliation. If you were a white man in America, social mobility was just like going up on an escalator, it's a given. On the contrary, for a woman to make it in America she must either be married to a wealthy man or be born into a wealthy family. That means a woman cannot be self-sufficient and in turn must be a housewife and obey orders of their husbands, keeping women oppressed in society. Stanton attempts to rebuke this ideal, “We should not feel so sorely grieved if no man who had not attained the full stature of a Webster, Clay...but to have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rum-selling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of women to be longer quietly submitted to.” [Cady Stanton 2]. Stanton brings up some great points, a male immigrant could theoretically waltz into the United States and be given all the rights women deserve. Although it is not practical due to the strong sense of nativism, foreigners can be more liberated than the women that have comforted, assisted, and cared for men for eons. More importantly, I feel like Stanton’s use of enumerations here was well planned, but not carefully executed. For example, she lists out all of these bureaucrats and says she would not feel oppressed if these were the only type of men with rights. Little does she realize the underlying factor that the Women’s Rights Movement is not just for women, it is to put a permanent end to discrimination and inequality in the nation. She even gives alludes slavery and even calls it an abomination to mankind. I am just perplexed on why she thinks these