We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a  broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest  ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest  triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine  heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or  saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or  criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment  seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the  awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible
feminism, individuality, liberty, solitude, suffragettes, women