Suffragists Quotes

I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings, I could scarcely have been otherwise.

We woman suffragists have a great mission - the greatest mission the world has ever known. It is to free half the human race, and through that freedom to save the rest.

All men would be tyrants if they could.

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.

I would rather be a rebel than a slave.

It is unthinkable that a national government which represents women should ignore the issue of the right of all women to political freedom.

There is no power in the world like that of women ... this most potent constituency we seek to represent, and for their suffrages we sue.

VOTE!!! Remember what the suffragists said when they finally won their long hard battle to get us the right to vote, knowing that they probably would never get to exercise the right or see the results; they said, 'this is not for ourselves alone.' It was for us and every generation of women to come. If we don't vote, we are ignoring history and giving away the future.

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

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.

Do not think your single vote does not matter much. The rain that refreshes the parched ground is made up of single drops.

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

I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.

No man who respects his mother or loves his sister, can speak disparagingly of any woman; however low she may seem to have sunk, she is still a woman. I want every man to remember this. Every woman is, or, at some time, has been a sister or daughter.

During the first suffragist wave in this nation, women were possessions, like a table or a chair. So violence toward them was quite condoned. The attitude has diminished, but it's still there.

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.

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

The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.

[Asked, upon the death of her fast friend and sister suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1816-1902), which period of their association she had enjoyed the most:] The days when the struggle was the hardest and the fight the thickest; when the whole world was against us and we had to stand the closer to each other; when I would go to her home and help with the children and the housekeeping through the day and then we would sit up far into the night preparing our ammunition and getting ready to move on the enemy. The years since the rewards began to come have brought no enjoyment like that.

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.

Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America. Particularly is this true of the American woman of the middle class. She not only considers herself the equal of man, but his superior, especially in her purity, goodness, and morality. Small wonder that the American suffragist claims for her vote the most miraculous powers. In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is, not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage can not ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.

There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is liberty.

What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it’s down to us.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.

Often I have heard the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly ideal as possible in this imperfect world.

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