It is only in marriage that she must demand her right to person, children, property, wages, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

How can we discuss all the laws and conditions of marriage, without perceiving its essential essence, end, and aim?
Now, whether the institution of marriage be human or divine, whether regarded as indissoluble by ecclesiastical courts or dissoluble by civil courts, woman, finding herself equally degraded in each and every phase of it, always the victim of the institution, it is her right and her duty to sift the relation and the compact through and through, until she finds out the true cause of her false position.

How can we go before the legislatures of our respective States and demand new laws, or no laws, on divorce, until we have some idea of what the true relation is?
"We decide the whole question of slavery by settling the sacred rights of the individual.

We assert that man cannot hold property in man, and reject the whole code of laws that conflicts with the self-evident truth of the assertion.
"Again, I ask, is it possible to discuss all the laws of a relation, and not touch the relation itself?
"Yours respectfully, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton." The discussion on the question of marriage and divorce occupied one entire session of the convention, and called down on us severe criticisms from the metropolitan and State press.

So alarming were the comments on what had been said that I began to feel that I had inadvertently taken out the underpinning from the social system.