Quotes About Suffrage

Mr. President how long must women wait to get their liberty? Let us have the rights we deserve.

It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government: the ballot.

Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped.

We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.

Surely these women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round. There is no harder contest than the contest for bread, let me tell you that.

Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.

Our "pathway" is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning…. We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.

Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

Oon of us two moste bowen, doutelees; And sith a man is moore resonable Than womman is, ye moste been suffrable.

Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities.

The fact that the movement was carried on by women who, for the most part, had no money of their own and were totally inexperienced in organization, and that they won their fight in about two generations, makes a story often dramatic and always worth preserving.

For fifteen years they exerted pressure, at first without violence, marching with banners, invading meetings, getting arrested, putting on hunger strikes, marching on Parliament..In 1912 more violent tactics were adopted: they burned houses, slashed pictures, trampled flowerbeds, threw stones at police, overwhelmed Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey with repeated delegations, interrupted public speeches.

After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile.

Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, experts advised men to have their kitchens painted apple-green. The experts believed that apple-green quieted nervous people, and especially wives beginning to think of suffrage, of careers beyond the home. Today the explorer of color schemes finds in old houses and apartments the apple-green paint still gracing the inside of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and the hallways of old police stations and insane asylums.

Now that the suffrage is universal, the average intellect and the average culture of the constituent bodies are excessively low; and even such mind and culture as there is has long been enslaved to authority.

But in all cases it must be remembered that a political combination of the lower classes, as such and for their own objects, is an evil of the first magnitude; that a permanent combination of them would make them (now that so many of them have the suffrage) supreme in the country; and that their supremacy, in the state they now are, means the supremacy of ignorance over instruction and of numbers over knowledge.

Some June, for instance, when the rigors of the academic year are over, I would like to invite the women's studies scholars I know to a banquet where we would cook and serve things like Emily Dickinson's bread and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's pudding (the kind she was always asking Susan B. Anthony to cook for her so that she had time to write a speech).

when they lived in Rochester, every newspaper, parlor, and street corner buzzed with talk about mesmerism and phrenology, abolition and suffrage.

tainted by the heaps of pestilent offal it must sweep away. As Lord Bacon says (in that play falsely attributed to Shakespeare)—"Ay, there's the rub!" If you were to ask me, NOW, what effect the right of suffrage, office, and all the duties of men has had upon the morals of the women of our State, I should be puzzled what

The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.