"Feeling as I did, I could not fight for suffrage, although I did not fight against it. Moreover, I believed that it would come because in the minds of most people democracy is a piece of machinery, its motive power the ballot. The majority of the advocates for women's suffrage saw regeneration, a new world through laws and systems; but I saw democracy as a spiritual faith. I did not deny that it must be interpreted in laws and systems, but their work deepens, broadens, only as the spirit grows. What I feared in women was that they would substitute the letter for the spirit, weaken the strategic place Nature and society had given them for keeping the spirit alive in the democracy, elevating it to the head of the procession of life, training youth for its place. But what chance had such ideas beside the practical program of the suffragist?"
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Journalists from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesBiographers from the United StatesWomen born in the 19th centuryPeople from Pennsylvania
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Ida Tarbell
Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was an American writer, investigative journalist, biographer and lecturer. She was one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and pioneered investigative journalism.
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