Quotes by Suffragists

I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone and then you get a great mosaic at the end.
Alice Paul
Work ... has always been my favorite form of recreation.
Anna Howard Shaw
Social science affirms that a woman's place in society marks the level of civilization.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Nature never repeats herself and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.
Lucy Stone
Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I think God rarely gives to one man or one set of men more than one great moral victory to win.
Lucy Stone
When a just cause reaches its flood-tide as ours has done ... whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power.
Carrie Chapman Catt
I expect some new phases of life this summer and shall try to get the honey from each moment.
Lucy Stone
When you put your hand to the plow you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row.
Alice Paul
I think God rarely gives to one man or one set of men more than one great moral victory to win.
Lucy Stone
When a just cause reaches its flood-tide as ours has done ... whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power.
Carrie Chapman Catt
I expect some new phases of life this summer and shall try to get the honey from each moment.
Lucy Stone
When you put your hand to the plow you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row.
Alice Paul
Make the world better.
Lucy Stone
To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Our victory is sure to come and I can endure anything but recreancy to principle.
Lucy Stone
The best protection any woman can have ... is courage.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Woman's discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
If and when our civilization comes to ruin, the destructive agent will be Science; man's knowledge of science, applied to warfare, meaning slaughter not only of human bodies, but of human institutions, of all we have created through the centuries.
Cicely Hamilton
To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Think of the inconvenience of vanishing as it were from your friends and, correspondents three times in one's natural life.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing...
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.
Matilda Joslyn Gage
That which caused the many failures I had in learning the bicycle had caused me failures in life; namely, a certain fearful looking for of judgment; a too vivid realization of the uncertainty of everything about me; an underlying doubt--at once, however (and this is all that saved me), matched and overcome by the determination not to give in to it.
Frances E. Willard
So it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, in the long, weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity, to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
If women patronize the wheel the number of buyers will be twice as large. If women ride they must, when riding, dress more rationally than they have been wont to do. If they do this many prejudices as to what they may be allowed to wear will melt away. Reason will gain upon precedent and ere long the comfortable, sensible, and artistic wardrobe of the rider will make the conventional style of woman's dress absurd to the eye and unenduring to the understanding. A reform often advances most rapidly by indirection. An ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory; and the graceful and becoming costume of woman on the bicycle will convince the world that has brushed aside the theories, no matter how well constructed, and the arguments, no matter how logical, of dress-reformers.
Frances E. Willard
Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The opacity of the mind, its inability to project itself into the realm of another's personality, goes a long way to explain the friction of life. If we would set down other people's errors to this rather than to malice prepense we should not only get more good out of life and feel more kindly toward our fellows, but doubtless the rectitude of our intellects would increase, and the justice of our judgments...we are so shut away from one another that none tells those about him what he considers ideal treatment on their part toward him...nothing will probe to the core of this greatest disadvantage under which we labor--that is, mutual noncomprehension--except a basis of society and government which would make it easy for each to put himself in another's place because his place is so much like another's...we [would] need less imagination in order to do that which is just and kind to every one about us.
Frances E. Willard
self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Actually he looks like a nice young man, and perhaps can't be blamed for his crass conception of women since all men think that way. I've met only one who appreciated me as a human being and even he didn't really.
Elin Wägner
We should give to our rulers, our sires and sons no rest until all our rights— social, civil and political— are fully accorded. How are men to know what we want unless we tell them? They have no idea that our wants, material and spiritual, are the same as theirs; that we love justice, liberty and equality as well as they do; that we believe in the principles of self-government, in individual rights, individual conscience and judgment, the fundamental ideas of the Protestant religion and republican government.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
If Eve was inferior to Adam because she was created after him, then Adam was inferior to the fishes, because they preceded him.
Lillie Devereux Blake
One would think that potential motherhood should make women as a class as sacred as the priesthood. In common parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as then, men claim to be guided by the will of God.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Our civil and criminal codes reflect at many points the spirit of the Mosaic. In the criminal code we find no feminine pronouns, as "He," "His," "Him," we are arrested, tried and hung, but singularly enough, we are denied the highest privileges of citizens, because the pronouns "She," "Hers" and "Her," are not found in the constitutions. It is a pertinent question, if women can pay the penalties of their crimes as "He," why may they not enjoy the privileges of citizens as "He"?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman... I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion/ Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage...Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a 
broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest
 ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest 
triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine 
heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or 
saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or 
criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs
of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts
and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment
 seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the 
awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Did I not feel that the time has come for the questions of women's wrongs to be laid before the public? Did I not believe that women herself must do this work, for women alone understand the height, the depth, the breadth of her degradation. - Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It comes down to this. Some one must wash the dishes. Now, would you expect man, man made in the image of God, to roll up his sleeves and wash the dishes? Why, it would be blasphemy. I know that I am but a rib and so I wash the dishes.
Marie Jenney Howe
Besides, when I look around me at the men, I feel that God never meant us women to be too particular.
Marie Jenney Howe
Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.
Frances E. Willard