Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "The Solitude of Self" is a philosophical statement of the principles underlying the nineteenth century struggle for woman's rights in the United States. Its lyric structure and tone of the speech and its tragic, existential rationale for feminism. The eloquent speech grounds rights in the chance life events and the corporeal permanence of human isolation. From the speech:
"Whatever may be said of man’s protecting power in ordinary conditions, mid all the terrible disasters by land and sea, in the supreme moments of danger, alone, woman must ever meet the horrors of the situation; the Angel of Death even makes no royal pathway for her. Man’s love and sympathy enter only into the sunshine of our lives. In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever."
