You may consider me presumptuous, gentlemen, but I claim to be a citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age.
ATTRIBUTION:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1816–1902), U.S. suffragist, social reformer, and author. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, ch. 23, by Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and herself (1882).
Speaking before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate on January 10, 1872; Stanton was in her fifty-sixth year and had been a leading suffragist for 24 years, having been a convener of the first suffrage convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
