Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been celebrated for her astute rhetorical contributions to woman's rights advocacy and highly criticized for her racist and elitist sentiments about citizenship and the franchise. Although there appears to be a discontinuity between Cady Stanton's commitment to (sexual) equality and her racism/elitism, this tension is reconciled through a consideration of the ways her early rhetoric embodies, revitalizes, and resists a liberal enlightenment idiom of difference. Responding to immediate exigencies of nineteenth-century politics and an enduring tension between universality and biological difference in liberal political theory, Cady Stanton articulates a view of sexual and racial difference that is extracorporeal. (Contains 95 notes.)