The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

This sentence comes from the “Declaration of Sentiments,” drafted primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the Seneca Falls Convention (Seneca Falls, New York) in July 1848, the first women’s rights convention in the United States. Modeled deliberately on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the document recasts Jefferson’s indictment of King George III as an indictment of men’s legal and social dominance over women. It introduced a list of specific grievances—covering political disenfranchisement, property and wage inequities, marriage and divorce law, education, and religious authority—meant to demonstrate that women’s subordination was systemic rather than accidental.

By echoing the cadence and logic of the Declaration of Independence (“a history of repeated injuries and usurpations…”), Stanton frames women’s inequality as a form of political tyranny rather than a private or “natural” arrangement. The phrase “absolute tyranny” emphasizes that the problem is structural: law, custom, and institutions combine to deny women autonomy and civic personhood. The line also signals a strategic rhetorical move—claiming the nation’s founding language for women’s rights—so that demands for suffrage and legal equality appear not radical but consistent with American revolutionary principles. It remains significant as an early, influential articulation of feminism as a critique of power.