Quote collection
40 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Christianity ... that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried... A wall of Bible, brimstone, church and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness."
"If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar."
"I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex."
"Oh, I wish it were in my power to put men in the place of fashionable women for one six months! They should curl their hair, consult the milliner, make spongecake, do a little embroidery, wear long skirts, and dress so tightly that they could scarcely breathe."
"You may talk about Free Love, if you please, but we are to have the right to vote. Today we are fined, imprisoned, and hanged, without a jury trial by our peers. You shall not cheat us by getting us off to talk about something else. When we get the suffrage, then you may taunt us with anything you please, and we will then talk about it as long as you please."
"The widening of woman's sphere is to improve her lot. Let us do it, and if the world scoff, let it scoff if it sneer, let it sneer."
"We want rights. The flour merchant, the house-builder, and the postman charge us no less on account of our sex; but when we endeavor to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the interest."
"Henceforth the leaves of the tree of knowledge were for women, and for the healing of the nations."
"But I do believe that a woman's truest place is in a home, with a husband and with children, and with large freedom, pecuniary freedom, personal freedom, and the right to vote"
"It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it."
"Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?"
"I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body"
"Leave women to find their sphere."
"I think God rarely gives to one man, or one set of men, more than one great moral victory to win."
"I expect some new phases of life this summer, and shall try to get the honey from each moment."
"The idea of equal rights was in the air."
"I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for the women."
"Our victory is sure to come, and I can endure anything but recreancy to principle."
"Every new truth has its birth-place in a manger, lives thirty years, is crucified, and then deified."
"The politician is the creature of the public sentiment -- never goes ahead of it because he depends on it . . ."