Woman Suffrage Quotes

All men would be tyrants if they could.

The woman suffrage movement in the United States was a movement of the spirit of the Revolution which was striving to hold the nation to the ideals which won independence.

It is too late in the century for women who have received the benefits of co-education in schools and colleges, and who bear theirfull share in the world's work, not to care who make the laws, who expound and who administer them.

American suffragist, speech "Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?" at Stockholm, Sweden Radicalism is a label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom.

... even if the right to vote brought to women no better work, no better pay, no better conditions in any way, she should have itfor her own self-respect and to compel man's respect for her.

... non-use of rights does not destroy them.

... a large portion of those who demand woman suffrage are persons who have not been trained to reason, and are chiefly guided by their generous sensibilities.

I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.

To-day women constitute the only class of sane people excluded from the franchise.

Just as the world war is no white man's war, but every man's war, so is the struggle for woman suffrage no white woman's struggle, but every woman's struggle.

Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.

Parliaments have stopped laughing at woman suffrage, and politicians have begun to dodge! It is the inevitable premonition of coming victory.

... [woman suffrage] has made little difference beyond doubling the number of voters. There is no woman's vote as such. They divide up just about as men do.

Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.

... pure and intelligent women can be deceived and misled by the baser sort, their very innocence and experience making them credulous and the helpless tools of the guilty and bold.

I expect to do more work for woman suffrage in the next decade than ever before.

... woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power. Man haslong overcome the superstitions that still engulf women.

... no community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.

... while one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freestcountry on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.

So long as State constitutions say that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those others disfranchised.

The anti-suffragist talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is a lot of cant. I have no patience with it. These storms beat on woman just as fiercely as they do on man, and she is not trained to defend herself against them.

They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.

No matter how well-born, how intelligent, how highly educated, how virtuous, how rich, how refined, the women of to-day constitutea political class below that of every man, no matter how base-born, how stupid, how ignorant, how vicious, how poverty-stricken, how brutal. The pauper in the almshouse may vote; the lady who devotes her philanthropic thought to making that almshouse habitable, may not. The tramp who begs cold victuals in the kitchen may vote; the heiress who feeds him and endows universities may not.

... women learned one important lesson--namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement.... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder.

There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.

The best protection any woman can have... is courage.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform.

We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of justice--that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men--because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand.... Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.

Do not stand in the way of the next step in human progress. No one living who reads the signs of the times but realizes that woman suffrage must come. We are working for the ballot as a matter of justice and as a step for human betterment.

Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.

Had I represented twenty thousand voters in Michigan, that political editor would not have known nor cared whether I was the oldest or the youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether my bonnet came from the Ark or from Worth's.

All over this land women have no political existence. Laws pass over our heads that we can not unmake. Our property is taken from us without our consent. The babes we bear in anguish and carry in our arms are not ours.

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.

Perhaps the fact that I am not a Radical or a believer in the all powerful ballot for women to right her wrongs and that I do notscorn womanly duties, but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things, etc., is winning me stronger allies than anything else.

Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.

As the saffron tints and crimson flushes of morn herald the coming day, so the social and political advancement which woman has already gained bears the promise of the rising of the full-orbed sun of emancipation. The result will be not to make home less happy, but society more holy.

As women are taking an active part in pressing on the consideration of Congress many narrow sectarian measures, such as more rigid Sunday laws, the stopping of travel, the distribution of the mail on that day, and the introduction of the name of God into the Constitution; and as this action on the part of some women is used as an argument for the disfranchisement of all, I hope this convention will declare that the Woman Suffrage Association is opposed to all union of Church and State, and pledges itself as far as possible to maintain the secular nature of our Government.

Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.

Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government.

I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.