There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence.
Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people? We draw out from other people our own thought. If, when you go out to organize, you go with a broad spirit, you will create and call out breadth and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry.
I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters.
An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform.
I have given my life and all I am to it, and now I want my last act to be to give it all I have, to the last cent.
The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.
White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then they owned both their wives and their wages.
There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.
No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.
No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.
Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals.
To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.
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.
Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.
I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.
Woman must have a purse of her own, and how can this be so long as the law denies to the wife all right to both the individual and the joint earnings?
We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.
Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.
I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.
