Women S Rights Activists

"It is said we can conquer without emancipation. The rebellion is almost crushed — our armies are pressing southward — the end approaches, when all things will be restored as of old. The South, having been deceived in regard to Mr. Lincoln and the aims of the Republican party, went to war to protect slavery. Now, perhaps, they are beginning to see that Mr. Lincoln is not so far from a slave-catcher, after all. The loyalty of the South is a myth. It will of course grow, as our armies advance, because between hanging and loyalty the advocates of a sinking cause can have but one choice"

"We may beat their armies everywhere, take every city and seaport: what then? Subjugated, are they subdued? They would rise in sixty days again, should the military arm be withdrawn. Success cannot gild our banners while the shadow of the blacks obscures it."

"Kentucky, which fished the halter for liberty in the person of John Brown (abolitionist), has strangled her again, through her representative in the Presidential chair!"

"They should hold workshops on the constitution in all the townships - people are not aware of our rights and needs."

"It is personal issues that makes me do what I do, for I have been raped more than 50 times by just listening to what women who have confessed and confirmed their love for other women have been through."

"But the fact that we have one of the most advanced constitutions has had little impact on mindsets in townships. Members of our community are celebrating the constitution, but it is very different in the society."

"It is being both black and gay which is problematic."

"In the field, Gen. Mitchell rejects the bondmen who flee to him for protection. everywhere those who bring us the most important intelligence are liable to be thrust back into slavery, there to be whipped, tortured, burned to death."

"What are our sufferings to those of the slave girl, or the slave mother, lashed from the embrace of her children? Has your purity no feeling for purity outraged? — your parental affections no sympathy for the lacerated love of the slaves? Can you hesitate to speak the word — Be free? God has put slavery into our hands to choke it. He alone should be able to take it out again alive. Let us storm the slave system, as Smith took Fort Donelson. If the President will not give us the order, let us go ourselves."

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language. Among these translators we may mention Alice Stone Blackwell, Isaac Goldberg, the late Thomas Walsh..."

"For seventy years, the women leaders of this country have been asking the government to recognize this possibility. Every great woman who stands out in our history-Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, Mary Livermore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, Alice Stone Blackwell, Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt-all have asked the government to permit women to serve more effectively the national welfare. All have felt that the energy, the thought, and the suffering that was spent in trying to obtain permission to serve directly should as quickly as possible be turned to the actual service."

"Alice Blackwell was an exception to me. I saw during my personal acquaintance with her that she was apt to embrace the whole world with her beautiful heart, her strong soul; to press it to her bosom, and never be tired of working for it. But she did too much for her human strength, and now she must rest a while."

"Today, at eighty-three, she is still a vigorous champion of human rights. Just last year I had a wonderful visit with her at her home in Boston, discussing our precious heritage of great American women."

"Except where there is some very strong reason to the contrary, it is generally admitted that every man has a right to be consulted in regard to his own concerns. The laws which he has to obey and the taxes he has to pay are things that do most intimately concern him, and the only way of being directly consulted in regard to them, under our form of government, is through the ballot. Is there any very good reason why women should not be free to be consulted in this direct manner?"

"I have no doubt that if women alone had made the laws, those laws would be just as one-sided as they are to-day, only in the opposite direction."

"it is said that this movement is making no progress; that while the movements along other lines are largely succeeding, there has been no advance along this line. Twenty-five years ago, with insignificant exceptions, women could not vote anywhere. To-day they have school suffrage in twenty-three States, full suffrage in Wyoming, municipal suffrage in Kansas, and municipal suffrage for single women and widows in England, Scotland and most of the British provinces. The common sense of the world is slowly but surely working toward the enfranchisement of women."

"Brave women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been the early pioneers, facing abuse and ridicule, violence and even arrests for attempting to vote. Later, women like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt headed the National American Women's Suffrage Association, which struggled against "the lethargy of women and the opposition of men." But by 1916 a younger, bolder and more militant group emerged, which was dissatisfied with the slower process of winning suffrage, state by state, and fought for a constitutional amendment."

"Interestingly, Anna Howard Shaw, a much more conservative woman's rights leader than Stanton and a Protestant minister, echoed Elizabeth Cady Stanton's attack on interpreting the Bible as literal truth."

"as Dr. Anna Howard Shaw said of Sacagawea at the National American Woman's Suffrage Association in 1905: "Forerunner of civilization, great leader of men, patient and motherly woman, we bow our hearts to do you honor!... May we the daughters of an alien race... learn the lessons of calm endurance, of patient persistence and unfaltering courage exemplified in your life, in our efforts to lead men through the Pass of justice, which goes over the mountains of prejudice and conservatism to the broad land of the perfect freedom of a true republic; one in which men and women together shall in perfect equality solve the problems of a nation that knows no caste, no race, no sex in opportunity, in responsibility or in justice! May 'the eternal womanly' ever lead us on!"

"(Was it true, as some historians of the movement maintain, that the National American’s president, Dr. Anna Shaw, was “suspicious” of unusual activity in the ranks?) AP: No, I don’t think she was. She came down to Washington frequently and spoke at our meetings, and she walked at the head of our 1913 procession. But I think we did make the mistake perhaps of spending too much time and energy just on the campaign. We didn’t take enough time, probably, to go and explain to all the leaders why we thought [the federal amendment] was something that could be accomplished. You see, the National American took the position—not Miss Anthony, but the later people—that suffrage was something that didn’t exist anywhere in the world, and therefore we would have to go more slowly and have endless state referendums to indoctrinate the men of the country."

"She was so able, so zealous, so utterly given to her cause that I had always had genuine admiration for her. Now I found her a most warm-hearted and human person, as well as delightfully salty in her bristling against men and their ways."

"I have been to many women’s conventions in my day but I never saw a woman leap up on a chair and take off her bonnet and toss it up in the air and shout: “What’s the matter with” somebody. I never saw a woman knock another woman’s bonnet off her head as she screamed: “She’s all right!” I never heard a body of women whooping and yelling for five minutes when somebody’s name was mentioned in the convention. But we are willing to admit that we are emotional. I have actually seen women stand up and wave their handkerchiefs. I have even seen them take hold of hands and sing, “Blest be the tie that binds.” Nobody denies that women are excitable. Still, when I hear how emotional and how excitable we are, I cannot help seeing in my mind’s eye the fine repose and dignity of this Baltimore and other political conventions I have attended!"

"For seventy years, the women leaders of this country have been asking the government to recognize this possibility. Every great woman who stands out in our history-Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, Mary Livermore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, Alice Stone Blackwell, Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt-all have asked the government to permit women to serve more effectively the national welfare. All have felt that the energy, the thought, and the suffering that was spent in trying to obtain permission to serve directly should as quickly as possible be turned to the actual service."

"To the frequent objection that women are not fitted for the suffrage, I answer that they are better fitted for it than any class of men in this country have been at the time that the suffrage was given to them. The negro, the laboring man, the Revolutionary soldiers at the time of their enfranchisement showed only a small proportion who could read and write."

"A democracy does not rest on force. It never did and it never will. Rather does it rest on the education of its people for righteousness, which Carlyle declared was a democracy’s only hope."

"The value of the movement does not depend upon whether it is voted up or voted down; its importance depends on whether it is fundamentally right or not, and the heart of the human race is bound to be ultimately fundamentally right."

"Democracy stands for three things: the right of every human being to earn an honest living, the right of the individual to reach his highest development, and the right of the individual to serve the community in citizenship. Woman should have her chance at each one of these aspects of democracy, and the ballot will gain the chance for her. If a thousand years without the ballot has made her only the “lovely, incapable” creature that she is declared to be, then by all means let us see what the ballot can do for her. Doing creates fitness."

"While Luisa Moreno took the lead in organizing the 1939 national meeting of El Congreso, Josefina Fierro de Bright proved instrumental in buoying the day-to-day operations of the fragile southern California chapters…Moreno and Fierro de Bright believed in the dignity of the common person and the importance of grass-roots networks, reciprocity, and self-help...The two women also shared an awareness of the positionality of women in U.S. Latino communities. El Congreso created a woman's committee and a woman's platform, a platform that expressly recognized the "double discrimination" facing Mexican women."

"Time was when woman worked in the home, with her weaving, her sewing, her candle making. All that has been changed, and she can no longer regulate her own conditions and her own hours of labor. She has been driven in o the market, with no voice in the laws, and powerless to defend herself."

"If a democracy is a government by the people, and if a republic is a representative democracy, then there is no such thing in our country except in the four states where both men and women elect their representatives. In all the other states government is by an aristocracy of sex, for there can be neither republic nor democracy where one fraction of the people governs another fraction."

"The ideals of democracy of to-morrow will apply the principles of democracy of to-day, and to-morrow there is bound to come the true representative democracy wherein every member of society has his and her part."

"The words of the great American socialist, Debs, comes to my mind: “THE COURT OF FINAL RESORT IS THE PEOPLE, AND THAT COURT WILL BE HEARD FROM IN DUE TIME . . .”"

"Luisa Moreno spent her storied career advocating for Latino workers' rights, organizing thousands of Louisiana sugarcane workers, Texas pecan shellers, Colorado sugarbeet workers, and a multiethnic union of thirteen thousand cigar makers in Florida."

"As the union's official representative, Moreno organized the strikers into a united, disciplined force that employers could no longer ignore."

""I hate a lukewarm person," she declared when I persisted in balancing arguments. She did; she had never known for a moment in her life the frustration, the perplexities of lukewarmness."

"Public political leadership among Spanish-speaking women was not limited to an aspiring middle class or an elite gentry. Organized by Luisa Moreno, El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (the Spanish-speaking Peoples Congress) represented the hopes and dreams of many working-class Latinos. By the late 1930s, Moreno was cognizant of both the strength of local institutions and the distance between immigrants and citizens as she endeavored to bring together community networks under the umbrella of a national civil rights congress. El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española was the first national civil rights assembly for Latinos in the United States…El Congreso brought together two dynamic women-Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright-whose life-long friendship was forged in the fire of community organizing."

"There is no death for such as she. There are no last words of love. The ages to come will revere her name. Unnumbered generations of the children of men shall rise up to call her blessed. Her words, her work, and her character will go on to brighten the pathway and bless the lives of all peoples. That which seems death to our unseeing eyes is to her translation. Her work will not be finished, nor will her last word be spoken while there remains a wrong to be righted, or a fettered life to be freed in all the earth...We have followed her leadership until we stand upon the mount of vision where she today leaves us. The promised land lies just before us. It is for us to go forward and take possession...Already the call to advance is heard along the line, and one devoted young follower writes: “There are hundreds of us now, her followers, who will try to keep up the work she so nobly began and brought so nearly to completion. We will work the harder to try to compensate the world for her loss.”"

"By some objectors women are supposed to be unfit to vote because they are hysterical and emotional and of course men would not like to have emotion enter into a political campaign. They want to cut out all emotion and so they would like to cut us out. I had heard so much about our emotionalism that I went to the last Democratic national convention, held at Baltimore, to observe the calm repose of the male politicians. I saw some men take a picture of one gentleman whom they wanted elected and it was so big they had to walk sidewise as they carried it forward; they were followed by hundreds of other men screaming and yelling, shouting and singing the “Houn’ Dawg”; then, when there was a lull, another set of men would start forward under another man’s picture, not to be outdone by the “Houn’ Dawg” melody, whooping and howling still louder. I saw men jump up on the seats and throw their hats in the air and shout: “What’s the matter with Champ Clark?” Then, when those hats came down, other men would kick them back into the air, shouting at the top of their voices: “He’s all right!!” Then I heard others howling for “Underwood, Underwood, first, last and all the time!!” No hysteria about it — just patriotic loyalty, splendid manly devotion to principle. And so they went on and on until 5 o’clock in the morning — the whole night long. I saw men jump up on their seats and jump down again and run around in a ring. I saw two men run towards another man to hug him both at once and they split his coat up the middle of his back and sent him spinning around like a wheel. All this with the perfect poise of the legal male mind in politics!"

"From New York to Florida, from Florida to Texas and California, in several states in many cities and towns I became a part of the struggle to strengthen old AFL locals, to build and extend CIO locals — for better working conditions, for more pay, for improvements in the deplorable conditions of women workers, Negro workers, Mexican workers. Many times we tried and failed partially; but most of the time we were successful. Sometimes the struggle was mean. We fought in the midst of KKK terror. We were jailed for daring to strike. We fought desperately for the right to organize!"

"How poor is the memory of those right wing leaders that are blind to reason — who refuse to see that the interests of labor and the people are one"

"Foreign intrigue plays too big a part in the affairs of Latin America. In most cases the people do not have a chance."

"They fail to see that the attacks against some of us will later be extended to them and their unions. They have forgotten the story of Germany, the story of Spain, the story of France. They have forgotten that united we stand — that all the bona fide union in other civilized countries were crushed, and the labor leaders of the right and left shook hands in concentration camps!"

"Strange things are happening in this land, and only when the truth is widely known, can we put a stop to them."

"I resigned in March 1947, thinking erroneously that I had the right to become a housewife and enjoy the privilege of being a grandmother. But that was a passing fantasy, for out of the blue sky, one early morning I received a summons to appear before Jack Tenney’s very un-American Committee. regardless of the Tenney Committee’s threats on my then pending citizenship, I refused to answer their $64 question on constitutional grounds. My answer was that the Constitution of the United States was more important to me than citizenship."

"Strange things are happening in this land. These threatened exiles of long time resident are conveniently cloaked with certain legalities. But it’s a rather thin coat, made out of some plastic fabric — the brand is the Smith Act of 1940. This was an omnibus bill, that if allowed to stand will eventually completely abolish the Bill of Rights and make drastic constitutional changes — changes, not amendments."

"the new Bridges case is a warning signal for all West Coast labor – that it symbolizes a desperate effort to tear down union conditions built in 15 years of struggle."

"Fear that slowly brews into terror as the Smith Act blankets the land, covering under its legal cloak, persecutions unheard of in America."

"the golden carrot that dangles, from the hands of reaction, covers a vicious rattlesnake; for no scab, stoolpigeon or renegade has ever been known to serve the interests of the people."

"In the middle class, the employment issue is social mobility, it's promotion, tenure. Women with Ph.D's don't want to be secretaries. The issue for the Chicana is just employment. "Give me a job. Give me a good-paying job. Let me have access to training." Again, pure class difference."

"Rape is an act of violent aggression, and it's something we have the right to defend ourselves against."