Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle - that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.

Stanton’s remark belongs to mid-19th-century U.S. women’s-rights and labor-reform debates about the “sewing trades” and the economic vulnerability of women confined to poorly paid needlework. Reformers frequently pointed to the health damage and early deaths associated with long hours of stitching in cramped, badly ventilated rooms, as well as the way “respectable” employment options for women were narrowed to sewing, teaching, or domestic service. In this setting, Stanton used deliberately vivid language (“one-eyed demon”) to argue that dependence on the needle as women’s default means of support was both physically destructive and socially limiting, and that women needed access to broader education and remunerative occupations.

Stanton denounces the narrow range of “respectable” paid work available to women in the nineteenth century—especially sewing and piecework—by casting the needle as a predatory force that impoverishes and physically destroys. The phrase “one-eyed demon” evokes both the literal eye-strain of constant stitching and the moral blindness of an economy that channels women into underpaid, unhealthy labor while denying them education and access to better professions. Her larger argument is that devotion to traditional female work will not yield independence (“support”), prosperity (“wealthy”), or intellectual development (“wise”); women’s emancipation requires broader vocational opportunities and structural reform, not mere diligence within a constrained system.