Women S Rights Activists

"I have been suffering for the last two days on account of [my brother] Henry’s boy [slave] having run away, because he was threatened with a whipping … and yet … I am constantly told that the situation of slaves is very good, much better than that of their owners … No wonder poor John ran away at the threat of a flogging, when he has told me more than once that when Henry last whipped him he was in pain for a week afterwards. I don’t know how the boy must have felt, but I know that the night was one of agony for me; for it was dreadful not only to hear the blows, but the oaths and curses Henry uttered went like daggers to my heart. And this was done too, in the house of one who is regarded as a light in the church.... I was directed to go to Henry and tenderly remonstrate with him ...I said that would be treating him worse than he would treat his horse.He now became excited, and replied that he considered his horse no comparison better than John, and would not treat it so … I felt so much overcome as to be compelled to seat myself or rather to fall into a chair before him, but I don’t think he observed this ..."

"The time to assert a right is the time when that right is denied."

"Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights."

"I know you do not make the laws but I also know that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do."

"I received an email for a casting call from Aeromexico specifying that they don't want anyone dark-skinned. Tsss."

"I broke Mexican internet."

"Trolls did what they do. All kinds of harassment: death threats, rape threats, everything.But after terrorist attacks from then on, they would post my picture. Whenever anything happens in Europe, they do it.The first time it happened, it was disturbing but now I feel bulletproof. It was something new, something I didn’t know they did. Luckily nobody who knows me thought it was real."

"Every time there is an attack I am sure there will be a few pictures of me around. The last time it happened I knew that a picture was being shared before I knew about the attack. I think there's a few people controlling a lot of accounts. Their attacks are coordinated and sometimes they make sense and you might get a feeling about how they're connected to the political situation in Mexico. Sometimes it's just hate."

"thanks to @plaqueta [De Anda’s Twitter handle] a lot of women are now aware of Article 23 of the Civic Culture Law"

"In Mexico, a striking majority of station guardians and policemen are men and they dissuade you from reporting harassment.If you go and tell them, many would tell you "think twice, are you sure that was harassment?", "do you really want to spend half a day at a police station to report it?""

"Whatever content there is in feminist , it has been put there by the efforts of the middle strata, especially the less well off, to move up socially. To do this, however, they sought merely to expand the existing , and never went so far as to challenge the status quo. Thus, while petty-bourgeois feminism may always have aimed at establishing between the sexes, the consciousness it represented has remained utopian in its desire for and struggle to bring about a partial this it believed could be done without disturbing the foundations on which it rested .. .In this sense, petty-bourgeois feminism is not feminism at all; indeed it has helped to consolidate class society by giving camouflage to its internal contradictions."

"NAWSA now redoubled its efforts for the legislative battles in the respective states where ratification required a three-fourths majority. After the final victory in August 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt summarized the meaning of their labor and the suffrage victory: "It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean before the end was allowed in America. How much of time and patience, how much work, energy and aspiration, how much faith, how much hope, how much despair went into it. It leaves its mark on one, such a struggle. It fills the days and rides the nights. Working, eating, drinking, sleeping it is there. Not all women in all the States of the Union were in the struggle. There were some women in every State of the Union who knew nothing about it. But most women in all the States were at least on the periphery of its effort and interest when they were not in the heart of it. To them all its success became a monumental thing.""

"However badgered by political winds, the suffrage women in NAWSA were committed to winning a federal amendment. Under the presiding genius of Carrie Chapman Catt, an extraordinary campaign to secure congressional approval of the Nineteenth Amendment and its state-by-state ratification was started in 1913 with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Catt's "winning plan," as it was called, was a precise strategy with specific goals and dates, legislative details on individual men and their voting patterns in Congress and in every state. Catt and NAWSA also launched a drive to build an extensive network of state and local suffrage organizations. Coincident with Wilson's inauguration, thousands of women massed in Washington, D.C., for an impressive march up Pennsylvania Avenue. Although attacked by a mob of white men, the women proceeded undaunted."

"Without getting scientific or psychological or historical about it, it's long been my judgment that women have been at the forefront of social change. When we first got the vote, we used it to clean up the sweat shops, to clean up the horrors of child labor, and so on. Then we got sidetracked. Instead of carrying forth Carrie Chapman Catt's notion that women should organize as a political movement, the movement became nonpartisan and followed the League of Women Voters route."

"we may ask what have women done? Again I may say that New York is a fair example because it is the largest of the States in population and has the second city in size in the world and occupies perhaps the most important position in any land in which a suffrage referendum has been taken. Women held during the six months prior to the election in 1915, 10,300 meetings. They printed and circulated 7,500,000 leaflets or three-and-a-half for every voter. These leaflets weighed more than twenty tons. They had 770 treasuries in the State among the different groups doing suffrage work and every bookkeeper except two was a volunteer. Women by the thousands contributed to the funds of that campaign, in one group 12,000 public school teachers. On election day 6,330 women watched at the polls from 5:45 in the morning until after the vote was counted. I was on duty myself from 5:30 until midnight. There were 2,500 campaign officers in the State who gave their time without pay. The publicity features were more numerous and unique than any campaign of men or women had ever had. They culminated in a parade in New York City which was organized without any effort to secure women outside the city to participate in it, yet 20,000 marched through Fifth Avenue to give some idea of the size of their demand for the vote."

"So those of us who want to learn how to obtain the vote have naturally asked ourselves over and over again what kind of a demand can be made. We get nothing by "watchful waiting" and if we are turbulent we are pronounced unfit to vote."

"Evidently the logic that these American men followed was: Since some turbulent women in another land are unfit to vote, no American woman shall vote. There was no reasoning that could change the attitude of those men. On the other hand the great majority of the men who voted against us, as well as the great majority of the members of Legislatures and Congress who oppose this movement, hold that women have given no signal that they want the vote. Between the horns of this amazing dilemma the Federal amendment and State suffrage seem to be caught fast."

"We met a curious dilemma. On the one hand a great many men voted in the negative because women in Great Britain had made too emphatic a demand for the vote. Since they made that demand it is reported that 10,000,000 men have been killed, wounded or are missing through militant action, but all of that is held as naught compared with the burning of a few vacant buildings."

"When a just cause reaches its flood-tide, as ours has done in that country, whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power."

"This world taught woman nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public, and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools, and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility & then called her weak."

"In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less."

"Roll up your sleeves, set your mind to making history, and wage such a fight for liberty that the whole world will respect our sex."

"To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves."

"The American feminist leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, tried to publicise the persecution of Jewish feminists in 1937. But when Rosa Manus was deported to a death camp by the Nazis in 1942, Catt circulated a letter to friends and acquaintances in the movement claiming that she was the first of us all to suffer and to die for our cause', ignoring her fate as a Jewess entirely."

"In 1940, at the World's Fair held in New York City, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, addressing a receptive audience, declared that it is woman's main task to stop war. The goal could not be reached immediately, she admitted, but she expressed confidence that women could abolish war, for the reason that they are devoid of the war spirit. More than this, she maintained that "men have made all the wars in history," thus in eight words clearing women of all war guilt. With that innocence it appeared logical that women, historic and present, were inclined to peace by their very make-up and were under no necessity to cleanse their hearts and minds of a propensity to violence. Being pacific by nature and devoid of all war guilt, they could and should lead the way to peace. Though more militant than Mrs. Catt as a leader in the suffrage movement, Alice Paul was no less certain that war sprang from men's nature and that women were under obligation to put a stop to wars."

"My feminism is the feminism of Puerto Rican writer Clotilde Betances Jaeger, who, in 1929 responded to the racist comment of Carrie Chapman Catt that Latin American women were not helping to build peace, by stating that while peace was a central principle for Latin American and Caribbean women, it was based on freedom from US imperialism."

"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. They organized the Women's Party in 1916, which planned to mobilize the women's vote in all suffrage states only for parties and candidates who would support national suffrage. That year a group of wealthy suffragists financed and toured in a Suffrage Special. They did not campaign directly for the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, but their slogan was anti-Wilson: "Vote against Wilson! He Kept Us Out of Suffrage!" Many voted for Eugene V. Debs, then in prison."

"there was considerable anti-Semitic sentiment among Protestant suffrage leaders...Carrie Chapman Catt on the strange, “un-American” practices and behavior of immigrant Jews in her home state of New York."

"Change is possible, and I know, hope is very difficult to hold on to. But hope in this time, is actually, an act of defiance, it's an act of resistance. I refuse to dehumnaize those people who dehumanize me. Because, otherwise there is really no difference between us and people like them."

"If their own blood relatives discarded, betrayed, forgot and harmed them, then they are our children, our sisters our mothers that we will mourn, we will remember, we will honour their memory and we will not forget!""

"Some anti-fascist protesters, the so-called "Antifa," use pepper spray against the marchers, including me."

"If I were black and young, no steamer could revolve its wheels fast enough to convey me to the dark continent. I should go where my color was the correct thing, and leave these pale faces to work out their own destiny."

"An early example of the now familiar pattern of the white liberal, accused of racism by black friends, grew out of this anti-lynching campaign and involved Frances Willard, the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, whose earlier abolitionist convictions and interracial work were a matter of record. Mrs. Willard was hesitant and equivocal on the issue of lynching and defended the Southern record against accusations made by Ida B. Wells on her English speaking-tour. Severe attacks on her in the women's press and a protracted public controversy helped to move Mrs. Willard to a cautious stand in opposition to lynching. Black women continued to agitate this issue and to confront white women with a moral challenge to their professed Christianity."

"The feminist compilers were no less present-minded. The most ambitious work from their ranks was published in 1893 by Frances L Willard, president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Mary A. Livermore, a reformer and woman's rights leader…The editors considered the 19th century to be the century of opportunities for women and set out to compile "this rosary of nineteenth century achievement... the self-conscious celebratory tone of the essays and the selection of persons to be included reveal the authors' didactic intent. This volume celebrates women active in religious, welfare and educational work, the kind of women honored in the cultural programs of the women's clubs then springing up in every community in the United States. The omissions are equally telling: there is not one African-American woman listed, and all the famous women to whom any touch of "scandal," such as a divorce, adhered were excluded. Frances Wright, Ernestine Rose, Frances Kemble, Margaret Fuller did not pass the "respectability" test and were omitted."

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, Carrie Nation, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and the later suffragists of whom she [her mother] was one. These courageous women set a pattern not understood yet, standing in their prim strength, in their sweetness and sobriety against cruel ridicule, moral censure, charges of insanity; for there is no cruelty like that of the oppressor who feels his loss of the bit on those it has been his gain to oppress. "Pine knots as we are," Susan Anthony said. They used the only means open to them - they became orators when it was considered immoral for a woman to speak in public; if she went to meetings she was only to listen and learn. But they could use their constitutional right of petition, and they could tramp up and down, getting signatures for the right to work, to get a divorce, to speak in public, to vote."

"It's (socialism) is God’s way out of the wilderness and into the promised land. It is the very marrow of Christ’s gospel. It is Christianity applied."

"I believe that competition is doomed. The trust, whose single object is to abolish competition, has proved that we are better without tan with it and the moment corporations control the supply of any product, they combine. What the Socialist desires is that the corporation of humanity should control all production. Beloved comrades, this is the frictionless way; it is the higher way; it eliminates the motives for a selfish life; it enacts into our everyday living thee this of Christ’s gospel. Nothing else will do it; nothing else can bring the glad day of universal brotherhood."

"I would take, not by force, by by the slow process of lawful acquisition, through a better legislation, as the outcome of a wiser ballot in the hands of men and women, the entire plant that we call civilization, all the has been achieved on this continent in the four hundred years since Columbus wended his way hither, and make it the common property of all the people, requiring all to work with their hands to give them the finest physical development, but not to become burdensome in any case, and permitting all to share alike in the advantages of education and refinement. I believe this to be perfectly practical, and, indeed, that any other method is simply a relic of barbarism."

"Look about you: the products of labor are on every hand; you could not maintain for a moment a well-ordered life without them; every object in your room has in it, for discerning eyes, the marks of ingenious tools and the pressure of labor’s hands. But is it not the cruelest injustice for the wealthy, whose lies are surrounded and embellished by labor’s work to have a superabundance of the money which represents, the aggregate of labor in ay country, while the laborer is kept so steadily at work that he has no time to acquire the education, and refinements of life that would make him and his family agreeable companions to the rich and cultured. The reason why I am a Socialist comes in just here."

"A girl of seven or ten years old is held to be the equal partner in a crime where another and a stronger is the principal; because she is in so many ways hampered and harmed by laws and customs pertaining to the past, we reach out hands of help especially to her that she may overtake the swift-marching procession of progress, for its sake that it may not slacken its speed on her account as much as for hers that she be not left behind. I brought to the last Council our petition to Congress for the protection of women, which was responded to by raising the age of consent from .......... to sixteen years."

"In 1880 Butler turned her attention to child prostitution, and was instrumental in the campaign to raise the age of consent from 12 to 16 to protect girls from sexual abuse."

"She won enormous support over the years from individual politicians, radicals and medical people, but also became the target of violent hatred. There were several lucrative brothels in Liverpool and those who profited did not take kindly to Butler's interference in their trade. She was once pelted with cow dung by pimps at a rally she was addressing. Another time, a group of men smashed the windows of a hotel where she was staying, trying to get to her and threatening to set it on fire."

"I saw the whole intent and purpose of our grand Constitution was to assure to each man, and equally to each woman, the full recognition of individual rights... I used to pass whole nights without sleep, thinking and mourning over the whole question."

"This one object and work of my life (the promotion of purity) is now sought to be be discredited for the first time by well-known leaders of women's movements. It is openly opposed by Lady Henry Somerset, who has, as you are aware, put forward a scheme for the regulation of male and female irregularity which goes beyond the Contagious Diseases Act formerly in force in England in immorality and indelicacy. [...] There is war now between women and women, and we are coming into searching and sifting times — times in which our personal likings and even strong friendships may have to give way before the winnowing blast which shall separate the wavering from the steadfast in this righteous work."

"I was in Ireland during that famine year. As a young girl I had no conception of the full meaning of the misery I saw around me, yet it printed itself upon my brain and memory. I can recollect being awakened in the early morning by a strange sound like the croaking or chattering of many birds. Some of the voices were hoarse and almost extinguished by the faintness of famine; and on looking out of my window I recollect seeing the garden and fields in front of the house completely darkened with a population of men, women, and children squatting, in rags; uncovered skeleton limbs protruding everywhere from their wretched clothing, and clamorous, though faint voices uplifted for food..."

"It is a fact, that numbers even of moral and religious people have permitted themselves to accept and condone in man what is fiercely condemned in woman."

"Mr. Justice Lopes: Why did you refuse information to the police? Butler: I always refuse information to the police. (Laughter) Lopes: That quite answers my question, I admit. (Laughter) I hope if you always refuse information to the police, you do not refuse it to the law. Butler: No, I do not. (Laughter)"

"Those who have read the Pall Mall Gazette are aware that a "Secret Commission" was formed of persons who had sufficient courage and Christian charity to "descend into hell" for the salvation of the victims of organized vice, and for the exposure and rebuke of the crimes perpetuated in that "Inferno." ... In the course of our terrible researches, we came daily across immoral agents who were offering innocent little girls for sale. We intercepted some such, and in the good purpose and motive of proving the facility of with which such children can be bought for diabolical purposes, we ourselves bought children."

"We all feel now that the time is come when we must appeal to the judgement of the public, so as to bring the condemnation of public opinion to bear upon these men, seeing that our laws give us no hold whatever upon them, and are not likely to do, so long as our legislators continue to refuse us the small boon we ask — legal protection for the young up to the age of 16."

"Hearing, one day, that a poor young girl of her acquaintance had been enticed to a fashionable house of ill-fame, she ran to the place, entered the house, and claimed the girl. She found there several gentlemen of the Court, whom she rebuked with a severity, the justice of which they confessed by sudden and precipitate flight; she then took the young girl by the hand and led her from the abode of shame."