Vered’s Blog

October 26 should be marked on all women’s calendar as an important date to remember.

On October 26 1902 Elizabeth Cady Stanton passed away from this world. You might not have heard about her, but most women in the western world and especially in the United States are enjoying the freedom and respect due to this woman’s life work.

Elizabeth Stanton stands for me for the leadership quality of free thinking. Most of her life she has fought for equal rights for all humanity. From abolishing slavery to women’s rights, from rights to vote to property rights for married women, Stanton was the pioneer for the road to becoming equal in a society the took women for granted and tried to limit them to 2nd rate citizens. Stanton was the founding genius of the women’s rights movement, brilliant, insightful and eloquent. While Stanton is best known for her long contribution to the woman suffrage struggle, she was also active and effective in winning property rights for married women, equal guardianship of children, and liberalized divorce laws so that women could leave marriages that were often abusive of the wife, the children, and the economic health of the family.

Stanton had the leadership quality of freethinking. She was able to see beyond her own cultural conditions and recognize the injustice in any part of society that was suffering from abuse and restrictions. Her main goal was to liberate women, however in the way she did it she was also showing men a new way of thinking, a new paradigm for life and for that she was definitely a leader.

A leader has to be able to see beyond his or her own limitations of cultural and society conditions. Leadership qualities are many but one that stand above all – is the ability to be free in thinking and think “beyond the box�, beyond the normal way of doing things. Stanton is definitely a woman that was thinking outside the box.

For me she is a woman of bravery and vision in times that women were supposed to be silent and obedient, she was brave enough to challenge her generation and show them another way. Not only show them but carve that way for freedom for women. She used to say: “To me, there was no question so important as the emancipation of women from the dogmas of the past, political, religious, and social. It struck me as very remarkable that abolitionists, who felt so keenly the wrongs of the slave, should be so oblivious to the equal wrongs of their own mothers, wives, and sisters, when, according to the common law, both classes occupied a similar legal status.�

Let us remember this amazing powerful woman on October 26, let her legacy of free thinking and courage be a lighthouse to all of us. Think how can you develop your leadership quality of free thinking? Where can you contribute your leadership quality to bring more free thinking to your own community?

Have a wonderful day!