In 1892, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a suffragette, abolitionist and pioneer in the fight for women's rights, wrote a deeply feminist and existentialist speech in which she defended the full autonomy of women based precisely on the immeasurable and radical loneliness of all human beings. To deny women a good preparation and a full development of their faculties would be to attack half of humanity, since we are all condemned and forced to depend on our own resources in the face of life's challenges. In a simple and incontestable way, Stanton offered devastating arguments in favor of female independence and freedom. This memorable speech, which beautifully and suggestively combined political urgency and philosophical depth, was entitled The Loneliness of Being and is now part of American feminism's history.