19th-century Feminist Quotes

Emmeline Pankhurst

Frederika Bremer

Christabel Pankhurst

Lucretia Mott

Miles Franklin

Voltairine de Cleyre

Ernestine Rose

I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice.

Emmeline Pankhurst

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.

Voltairine de Cleyre

A child's eyes, those clear, wells of undefiled thought - what on earth can be more beautiful? Full of hope, love and curiosity, they meet your own. In prayer, how earnest; in joy, how sparkling; in sympathy, how tender! The man who never tried the companionship of a little child has carelessly passed by one of the great pleasures of life, as one passes a rare flower without plucking it or knowing its value

Caroline Norton

A fly is a very light burden; but if it were perpetually to return and settle on one's nose, it might weary us of our very lives.

Frederika Bremer

Women have suffered too much from the Conspiracy of Silence to allow that conspiracy to last one minute longer. It has been an established and admitted rule in the medical profession to keep a wife in ignorance of the fact that she has become the victim of venereal disease.

Christabel Pankhurst

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

A perfect marriage is like a pure heart... those who have it are fit to see God.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Women's property has been taxed, equally with that of men's, to sustain colleges endowed by the states; but they have not been permitted to enter those high seminaries of learning.

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.

We are tired of having a 'sphere' doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is 'unwomanly'. We want to be natural just for a change … we must be ourselves at all risks.

Our opinion of people depends less upon what we see in them, than upon what they make us see in ourselves

With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.

Crystal Eastman

There is, between the sexes, a law of incessant reciprocal action, of which God avails himself in the constitution of the family, when He permits brothers and sisters to nestle about the same hearthstone. Its ministration is essential to the best educational results. Our own educational institutions should rest upon this divine basis.

Caroline Healey Dall

Attempted modifications of an essential evil always fail.

Josephine Butler

If it is right to be legally married, it is right to be legally divorced... To be deprived of a Divorce is like being shut up in prison because someone attempted to kill you. It is just as honorable to get out of matrimonial trouble legally, as to be freed from any other wrong.

Mary Edwards Walker

Prostitution is the most hideous of the afflictions produced by the unequal distribution of the world's goods; this infamy stigmatizes the human species and bears witness against the social organization far more than does crime.