Mary Ritter Beard on Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Elizabeth Cady Stanton who, amid no little derision from American lawyers, had battled valiently against William Blackstone's dictum that woman was a favorite in English law and had lived to see many triumphs over common-law doctrines in the enactment of married women's property acts in state after state.”

“With constant reiteration, the acclaimed legalist of the woman movement in the nineteenth century, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an outstanding pleader for women's rights before law-making bodies, spoke and wrote as if William Blackstone's account of English law was in fact the law of the land-supreme law-in nearly all vital man-woman relations. It is true that Mrs. Stanton mentioned from time to time the gains which women had been making and were making in their struggle against formulas of the common law; but she repeatedly resorted to wholesale generalizations which treated Blackstone's sweeping generalizations as still binding in law, even to her day in the United States.”