Whether arrogance or ignorance caused that amazement is beside the point. What follows is a section of Stanton's remarks to the committee. The source for the following speech is History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., eds., Vol. IV, New York, 1902, pp. 189-191.

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul--our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment--our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government.

Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same--individual happiness and development.

Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to woman's sphere, such men as Herbert Spencer, Frederick Harrison and Grant Allen uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations, some of which a large class of women never assume. In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man, by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother or a son, some of which he may never undertake. Moreover he would be better fitted for these very relations, and whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread, by the complete development of all his faculties as an individual. Just so with woman. The education which will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness, will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do.

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. . . . .

To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect, of credit in the market place, of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare's play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman's position in the nineteenth century--"Rude men seized the king's daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands." What a picture of woman's position! Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection. . . . .

How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible!

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded--a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position. Conceding then that the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer. . . . .

In music women speak again the language of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and are worthy interpreters of their great thoughts. The poetry and novels of the century are theirs, and they have touched the keynote of reform in religion, politics and social life. They fill the editor's and professor's chair, plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the hospital, speak from the pulpit and the platform. Such is the type of womanhood that an enlightened public sentiment welcomes to-day, and such the triumph of the facts of life over the false theories of the past.

Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needle occupied in the past? No, no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed.

We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human beings for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self-dependence of every human soul, we see the need of courage, judgment and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man. . . . .

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image. after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, andover the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

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HERE is the sacred historian's first account of the advent of woman; a simultaneous creation of both sexes, in the image of God. It is evident from the language that there was consultation in the Godhead, and that the masculine and feminine elements were equally represented…

But instead of three male personages, as generally represented, a Heavenly Father, Mother, and Son would seem more rational.

The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position, as an equal factor in human progress, is the cultivation of the religious sentiment in regard to her dignity and equality, the recognition by the rising generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prayers should be addressed, as well as to a Father.

If language has any meaning, we have in these texts a plain declaration of the existence of the feminine element in the Godhead, equal in power and glory with the masculine…

Thus Scripture, as well as science and philosophy, declares the eternity and equality of sex the philosophical fact, without which there could have been no perpetuation of creation, no growth or development in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms, no awakening nor progressing in the world of thought.

The masculine and feminine elements, exactly equal and balancing each other, are as essential to the maintenance of the equilibrium of the universe as positive and negative electricity, the centripetal and centrifugal forces, the laws of attraction which bind together all we know of this planet whereon we dwell and of the system in which we revolve.

In the great work of creation the crowning glory was realized, when man and woman were evolved on the sixth day, the masculine and feminine forces in the image of God, that must have existed eternally, in all forms of matter and mind…

The above texts plainly show the simultaneous creation of man and woman, and their equal importance in the development of the race. All those theories based on the assumption that man was prior in the creation, have no foundation in Scripture.

As to woman s subjection, on which both the canon and the civil law delight to dwell, it is important to note that equal dominion is given to woman over every living thing, but not one word is said giving man dominion over woman.

Here is the first title deed to this green earth giving alike to the sons and daughters of God. No lesson of woman's subjection can be fairly drawn from the first chapter of the Old Testament.

For three years now with this church, and for nearly seven years before that, I have been preaching something that may be old by now: Our time is plagued by politics dressed up as religion. In fact, the politically obsessed, civically based understandings of our world so predominate that churches are consumed by politics. The right and left, originally political directions, now designate religion. We talk politics and social issues and disguise it as religion. We quote Molly Ivins and George Will, and listen to Air America or Rush Limbaugh for our view of the world. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, our thinker for today, once said, in addressing the New York State legislature, “There is a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless, grinding collision of the New with the Old." Today we would read that sentence as a comment on party politics and national policy. Yet, while deeply embroiled in abolition and women’s suffrage, the two major political and social causes of her day, hers is a religious reading of the world and not a political one. It is not, however, a classical, doctrinal, orthodox Christian reading of the world, but it is religious and not political nonetheless. They are not the same, and the inability to distinguish between the religion and politics is part of our “liberal” contribution to the disorder, disunity, and divisiveness of this world. We cannot conceive that religion could be anything other than the classical orthodoxy we rightfully reject, and so we contribute to the political swallowing up the religious by not offering something new in religion! We flee away from what we have rejected and do not longer believe, but not towards something we do believe and embrace. Liberals of all kinds need a reawakening to the spiritual. Today complaints that the world is not right, if not emanating from a religiously rooted reading of the world, are heard only by those with whom we have partisan agreement and dismissed by those of partisan disagreement.

We can probe and disclose the way the fundamentalists of the world wed their religion to their politics, with fascist-like results. But, can any liberal religionist be awakened to something spiritual in the events of this world, distinct from just complaining about fundamentalism’s politics or offering up a bankrupted political liberalism? This is our challenge as inheritors of a free faith tradition: to make relevant the spiritual connotation of liberalis, liberal, to our time. This has been the underlying intent of this sermon series all along: a spiritual reawakening in order to read the modern world through liberal religious eyes, a reading whose foundation is the idea that whatever God is, whatever is ultimate in human existence, it is the saving Spirit of liberalis, working on and through us as freedom, generosity, and broadmindedness. God works in this world through the freedom we exercise and extend to others, the generosity we liberate and invigorate in others, and the broadmindedness we cultivate in ourselves and others.

But to see this we have had to trace the intellectual narrative of the crumbling old order of classical, Western religious orthodoxy. So, we first stood upon the shoulders of Thomas Jefferson and Robert Ingersoll. From Jefferson’s broad shoulders we saw the landscape shaped by his declaration that “all men are created equal” as a condition “endowed by their Creator.” We took that political truth and traced it to a theological truth: Equality is a characteristic of human creation. In the Creator’s design every soul is equal, not a case of “believers are favored and unbelievers punished.” And from Ingersoll’s powerful shoulders we saw that the terrain of orthodox religion has always been marked by fear, terror, and punishment, a way for some to control the mind and stifle reason and critical thinking of others. From this philosophical analysis a theological truth took shape: the freedom of the mind to reason liberates the human spirit towards a greater understanding of itself and its world.

Next, we stood upon the shoulders of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. This was the last pair of shoulders we stood upon to see how the past, the former religious readings of the world called classical Western orthodoxy, no longer could be held. Darwin deflated classical religion’s conception of the natural world and the universe. Evolution through natural – not supernatural - selection accounted better for the changes observed in Nature and, particularly, the gradual emergence of life from its smallest incarnation through its most complex, human being. From this revelation hatched by nature came a theological one: the natural world evidences increased mutuality and interconnection over time. And lastly we stood upon the shoulders of Freud and saw how old religion viewed human being as an entity. Classical Western religious orthodoxy contrived a Master Metaphysical Plan of all things; a Creator Deity enacting a grand Plan of Salvation, with human being plopped down as an actor in this cosmic plot of the Father sacrificing the Son for our sake. Freud uncovered the inner turmoil of the mind that would project this outward and call it “truth” and “the way things really are planned out and structured.” From this psychology came this: All truths are human products, containing our own projections, partially or wholly, revealing human nature more than God’s truth, the internal landscape of the mind and its emotions more than the external landscape of the universe!

Old, classical, Western religious orthodoxy is not only tired, but also dying. And today we stand upon the shoulders of one who aims us forward, towards constructing a liberal religious faith, a liberal religious reading of human nature and the human condition.

It is an historical exaggeration, but not a spiritual one, to say that without the contribution of this life, women voting here and in Iraq and South Africa, women entering all kinds of professional life, women clergy, woman’s health, women owning property and getting out of abusive marriages would not be possible! At an early age Elizabeth Cady Stanton learned of the inequities human beings perpetuate by encountering fugitive slaves hidden in the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith. She met Henry Stanton in that same house, married him in 1840, removing the word “obey” from the marriage vow a woman of her time would promise to the groom. Shortly after her wedding she accompanied her husband to an Anti-Slavery Convention in London where she was denied a seat at the convention because of her gender.

All of the women’s suffrage and women’s rights movements in the United States can be traced to a tea Stanton attended with four other women in 1848, where they planned the first Women’s Convention ever in history. Three years later she met Susan B. Anthony, a latecomer to the cause, and with Anthony the speaker and Stanton the writer and philosopher, they tirelessly advocated first for black emancipation and later for women’s right to vote. In 1878 Stanton convinced a U.S. Senator to sponsor a woman’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution, which was introduced every year until it became the 19^{th Amendment in 1920, 18 years after Stanton’s death.}

What happened inside of Elizabeth Cady Stanton that led her to hold as a conviction and proclaim as a belief what few in her time thought, yea, what few in millennia past held as true? Why should anyone in her time or before hold that women had political rights? They weren’t full citizens, and historically there are few, if any, societies where women stood equally alongside of men in the eyes of culture or religion. When she authored, “all men and women are created equal” in her Declaration of Sentiments, it was more than just the addition of those two words, “and women.” It was a new thing she declared. And a century and a half later we may consider it an old thing, and the way things have always been in our lifetime, or the lifetime of most people in attendance today. But it was new and few others believed it true. What justification is there for an individual holding a new thing to be true?

She composed The Women’s Bible and was criticized for this by both opponents and supporters. How could she counter the religious assertion that women were secondary creations to men and were to obey men in the household? Even most women believed that. How could she dismiss Christianity’s implicit assertion that in Jesus, God purposefully chose the male gender to take the form of? How could she disregard the authority of the Hebrew daily prayer of males, “Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who did not make me a woman.”?

The equality of men and women was not a political truth of her day, so her declaration of it had to reside in something else. Something new. A new revelation. A new way to read the world, from a spirit that expanded freedom, considered human being and human nature more generously, thought of creation in a broader way. A newly uncovered and larger truth that formed a new faith.

The roots of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s political work had to be a Spirit that would save her age from its everyday tyrannies, its daily intolerances, and the concrete instances of narrow-mindedness. And what sealed her faith in the power and grace in this saving Spirit was its foundation, and what is the foundation of a liberal religious reading of the world: Every individual’s experience counts.

Every woman’s experience counts. Every man’s experience, and every child’s experience counts. The individual has an authority within his or her own experience that is primary. Over tradition, important as tradition is. Over past truths, as important as the past is. Over the old ways of thinking and believing, as cherished as is the old ways. Faith of this kind is a pragmatic faith rooted in an individual’s experience. In Stanton’s time the ideal of Jefferson’s declaration of human equality was bandied about but it was not made concrete and real. Gross inequities abounded! Yet, Stanton “felt” that the self she was, and could become, was stifled by these, and the traditions, the customs, the practices, the truths, the thinking, and the believing of the old ways. Her experience led her to proclaim the presence of new spirit.

Almost every person who comes into a Unitarian Universalist church has confronted this sometime in life. I experience one thing, and am told to believe and behave another way, especially by the cultural guardians of truth and virtue. To a liberal religious reading of the world this is a crisis of faith. Do you believe and act as you have been told, or lean towards a new Spirit you have experienced? Faith may sound theoretically true and plausible on the one hand, but pragmatically, in terms of your own experience, untrue!

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls,” wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This is the moment of crisis that ushers one towards to the door of a liberal religious reading of the world.

We cannot disregard Freud, as orthodoxy is want to do. Our experience as we understand it is fraught with internal turmoil projected onto the world “out there.” We cannot disregard Darwin, as orthodoxy is want to do. There are natural inclinations of female and male throughout evolving Nature, and we cannot deny our interconnections with physical creation.

But every individual is possessed of a mind, and its freedom brings new understandings. Revelation is not something that belongs to the past alone, or to certain individuals others pronounce as holy and having authority over us. The individual has an authority within his or her own experience that is primary, over tradition, past truths, and old ways of thinking and believing, as cherished as are the old ways. That is the pragmatic nature of faith. It cannot disregard an individual’s experience, though it may deviate from theological standards. Deviation does not refute experience! “The new religion,” said Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, “will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development.” An individual’s experience is the origin of sympathy and the beginning of love.

I believe this. I do not know it as fact but believe it on faith, that existence has been created thus. In is in this faith, through this pragmatic religious reading of the world that gives primacy to individual experience, that I understand freedom, generosity, and broadmindedness, the liberal Spirit, as recounted in this experience of a friend and ministerial colleague.

The church is not a body of doctrine, or of reasons, or of explanations… [but] a community of those who have known the deepest valley and who have passed through it to the other side… I shall never forget – it was early in my ministry and I was a very young man – a much older woman come to see me, several months after her divorce from a very religious husband. The minister of their church had insisted, even though her husband had physically abused her, threatened and intimated her, and their children, that it was her duty to stay with him and to ‘search her soul for the fault within her.’ After the divorce she was literally shunned by that minister and that congregation. Frantically, she consulted the clergy and counseling service of several other churches for some relief from the guilt she felt. Every place she went she heard the same things: ‘It was her duty. She should try harder. She had an obligation to her children. She should remember her solemn vows.’ Nor was it her church alone that sought to condemn her. The people in her neighborhood turned their backs on her. She was made to feel that it was all her fault. Finally, someone suggested that she talk to a Unitarian Universalist minister. And, at last, she came to see me. We talked for a long time. She told me her story, and about the guilt she was feeling. She knew she could not go back to her marriage, but everyone demanded that she must. It was the beginning of several long conversations that we had, and a referral to a good family counselor I knew. But she said to me at the end of that first session, ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I had made up my mind that if you said the same things to me that all the other ministers I have talked to have said, I was going to go home, put my car in the garage, leave the car running, and finish it all.’ And I know she meant it.

-Religion, the Church, and Our Mission in the World, John B. Wolf

A New York Senator, whose arguments against Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been vanquished by the strength of her reason and the justice of her proclamations, confided to her, “You have the argument, but custom and prejudice are against you, and they are stronger than truth and logic." I believe truth and logic are stronger than custom and prejudice. I believe in reason over superstition and magic. I believe in the primacy of individual experience over conformity to religious doctrines decided by other men in other cultures at other times in the past. I believe there are new truths to be uncovered from new experiences. It is a faith because there is no verification and, actually, many cultural trends would indicate otherwise. But this faith, our religious liberal faith, which because it is faith cannot be verified or falsified as fact, says something different. There is saving power in our midst. Each individual experiences it differently though it is available to all. It resides not in idealistic dreams but only becomes known and real through pragmatic everyday actions: There abides a unity and freedom of the spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

AMEN.