Women's Suffrage Quotes

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union.” —Susan B. Anthony

Besides, when I look around me at the men, I feel that God never meant us women to be too particular.

Seems to me they're the same thing, more of less. Witching and women's rights. Suffrage and spells. They're both...They're both a kind of power, aren't they? The kind we aren't allowed to have.

That we have the vote means nothing. That we use it in the right way means everything.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half." ~ Emmeline Pankhurst

I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it.

The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will maker her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women. from Woman Suffrage- 1910

First of all, nobody gave us anything. It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me? It took 72 years of unrelenting, unbroken organizing grassroots effort to get women's suffrage. It took 113 years to get rid of child labor by law. It took similarly long periods of organized effort to accomplish any advance in social policy.

I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.

Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage.

It comes down to this. Some one must wash the dishes. Now, would you expect man, man made in the image of God, to roll up his sleeves and wash the dishes? Why, it would be blasphemy. I know that I am but a rib and so I wash the dishes.

What are?” Juniper’s eyes reflect the bronze shine of Saint George’s standing in the square. “Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.” The kind I want, says the hungry shine of her eyes.

Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87

RBG looked the justices in the eye and quoted Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and advocate for women’s suffrage. “She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity,” RBG said. “She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

Witching and women's rights. Suffrage and spells. They're both..." She gestures in midair again. "They're both a kind of power, aren't they? The kind we aren't allowed to have.

Wittgenstein was very much against women's suffrage for no particular reason except that 'all women he knows are such idiots'.

So firm did Nivea's determination become that she wrote in her diary that she would give up marriage in order to devote herself completely to the struggle for women's suffrage. She was not aware that such a sacrifice would not be necessary, and that she would marry a man for love who would back her up in her political goals.

Once the question of women’s political suffrage has been dealt with, less obvious inequalities will need to be exposed. Without realising it, you are already working for this cause. As grandfather said, it will be a long game. Play a position you are good at, and let others play theirs.

It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime When you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.

For example, although we are taught that women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it. Not until the 1960s, through the Voting Rights Act, were all women—regardless of race—granted full access to suffrage. Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging injustice.

[Belva] Lockwood sought more than suffrage. She urged full political and civil rights for all women. Though she could not vote for president, she twice ran for the office herself, pointing out that nothing in the Constitution barred a woman's candidacy. (She took that bold step 124 years before Hillary Rodham Clinton first became a contender for the Democratic Party's nomination.) Explaining why she entered the race, she wrote in a letter to her future running mate, Marietta Stow: 'We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor equal respect until we command it.

Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.

To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes AND The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others. AND We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

So then the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which personally I think is rather a mouthful,' Adelaide said as she set down her wineglass. 'I'm sure others have much shorter terms,' the doctor said, sawing into his steak with more vigor than necessary. 'Such as?' Grace asked. 'There are plenty who just call us bitches, dear.

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).

We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too, But very human beings, human just as much as you. It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime When you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.

And Mother, I love her dearly, but she flies into a panic whenever I mention women’s rights. As she sees it, it will be so much more difficult to marry me off if I am not only of a weak constitution but of a progressive mind as well.

There has been a recent rash of authors and individuals fudging evidence in an attempt to argue that women have a higher sex drive than men. We find it bizarre that someone would want to misrepresent data merely to assert that women are hornier than men. Do those concerned with this difference equate low sex drives with disempowerment? Are their missions to somehow prove that women are super frisky carried out in an effort to empower women? This would be odd, as the belief that women’s sex drives were higher than men’s sex drives used to be a mainstream opinion in Western society—during the Victorian period, an age in which women were clearly disempowered. At this time, women were seen as dominated by their sexuality as they were supposedly more irrational and sensitive—this was such a mainstream opinion that when Freud suggested a core drive behind female self-identity, he settled on a desire to have a penis, and that somehow seemed reasonable to people. (See Sex and Suffrage in Britain by Susan Kent for more information on this.) If the data doesn’t suggest that women have a higher sex drive, and if arguing that women have a higher sex drive doesn’t serve an ideological agenda, why are people so dead set on this idea that women are just as keen on sex—if not more—as male counterparts? In the abovementioned study, female variability in sex drive was found to be much greater than male variability. Hidden by the claim, “men have higher sex drives in general” is the fun reality that, in general, those with the very highest sex drives are women. We suppose we can understand this sentiment. It would be very hard to live in a world in which few people believe that someone like you exists and people always prefer to assume that everyone is secretly like them rather than think that they are atypical.

There has been a recent rash of authors and individuals fudging evidence in an attempt to argue that women have a higher sex drive than men. We find it bizarre that someone would want to misrepresent data merely to assert that women are hornier than men. Do those concerned with this difference equate low sex drives with disempowerment? Are their missions to somehow prove that women are super frisky carried out in an effort to empower women? This would be odd, as the belief that women’s sex drives were higher than men’s sex drives used to be a mainstream opinion in Western society—during the Victorian period, an age in which women were clearly disempowered. At this time, women were seen as dominated by their sexuality as they were supposedly more irrational and sensitive—this was such a mainstream opinion that when Freud suggested a core drive behind female self-identity, he settled on a desire to have a penis, and that somehow seemed reasonable to people. (See Sex and Suffrage in Britain by Susan Kent for more information on this.) If the data doesn’t suggest that women have a higher sex drive, and if arguing that women have a higher sex drive doesn’t serve an ideological agenda, why are people so dead set on this idea that women are just as keen on sex—if not more—as male counterparts? In the abovementioned study, female variability in sex drive was found to be much greater than male variability. Hidden by the claim, “men have higher sex drives in general” is the fun reality that, in general, those with the very highest sex drives are women. To put it simply, some studies show that while the average woman has a much lower sex drive than the average man, a woman with a high sex drive has a much higher sex drive than a man with a high sex drive. Perhaps women who exist in the outlier group on this spectrum become so incensed by the normalization of the idea that women have low sex drives they feel driven to twist the facts to argue that all women have higher sex drives than men. “If I feel this high sex drive,” we imagine them reasoning, “it must mean most women secretly feel this high sex drive as well, but are socialized to hide it—I just need the data to show this to the world so they don’t have to be ashamed anymore.” We suppose we can understand this sentiment. It would be very hard to live in a world in which few people believe that someone like you exists and people always prefer to assume that everyone is secretly like them rather than think that they are atypical.

My great-aunt, and other people's great-aunts, won all the rights that women need ages ago. All that's been lacking since then is the social courage to use them. My great-aunt and the rest thought that by technically defeating male privilege they'd scored a great victory. What they didn't realize is that the greatest enemies of women aren't men at all, they are women: silly women, lazy women, and smug women.

One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. "No advanced step take by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public," Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. "For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized." Or as Mary Beard put it last year, "We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.

Women are just as intelligent, just as capable, as men. Constant pregnancies keep us from achieving our own lofty goals. Men have no such impediment, do they?

There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it." - Alice Paul

Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all.

You know," he added reflectively, "we've got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we'd had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral legislature, proportional representation, women's suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the press, referendums . . ." "What is all that?" asked the Emperor. "Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.

What she goes on to say next is so remarkable that it was being quoted at suffrage meetings more than 2,300 years after it was written. Of all living creatures, she says, we women are the most wretched. Her first complaint is that women have to buy a husband: she means with a dowry. Then he becomes the ruler (the word is despotēn – owner or master.

Before the suffragettes came along, women were treated like dogs... They were dolls, with no thoughts, or opinions, or voices of their own. Then the suffragettes marched in, full of loud, in-your-face ideas. They got arrested and thrown in jail, but nothing shut them up. They fought and fought until they earned the rights they should've had all along.

In the end, then, suffrage for women came down to the vote of one young man, influenced by his mom. It was rumored that “the anti-suffragists were so angry at his decision that they chased him from the chamber, forced him to climb out a window of the Capitol and inch along a ledge to safety.”15 Thus suffrage arrived in the United States, kicking and screaming.

Black women suffered greatly with the failure of Reconstruction, victims of both racism and sexism. Suffrage leaders who had worked toward the idea of universal suffrage antebellum began turning their backs on their black sisters to court the support of white Southern suffragists, whose interest in restoring white supremacy eclipsed their interest in enfranchising women.

Desperately trying to remember her manners, she curtseyed and murmured, "Your Grace." The smile lines at his eyes deepened subtly. "You appear to be in need of rescue. Why don't you come inside with me, away from this riffraff? The duchess is eager to meet you." As Pandora hesitated, thoroughly intimidated, he assured her. "I'm quite trustworthy. In fact, I'm very nearly an angel. You'll come to love me in no time." "Take heed," Lord St. Vincent advised Pandora sardonically, fastening the loose sides of his vest. "My father is the pied piper of gullible women." "That's not true," the duke said, "The non-gullible ones follow me as well." Pandora couldn't help chuckling. She looked up into silvery-blue eyes lit with sparks of humor and playfulness. There was something reassuring about his presence, the sense of a man who truly liked women. When she and Cassandra were children, they had fantasized about a handsome father who would lavish them with affection and advice, and spoil them just a little, but not too much. A father who might have let them stand on his feet to dance. This man looked very much like the one Pandora had imagined. She moved forward and took his arm. "How was your journey, my dear?" the duke asked as he escorted her into the house. Before Pandora could reply, Lord St. Vincent spoke from behind them. "Lady Pandora doesn't like small talk, Father. She would prefer to discuss topics such as Darwin, or women's suffrage." "Naturally an intelligent young woman would wish to skip over mundane chitchat," the duke said, giving Pandora such an approving glance that she fairly glowed. "However," he continued thoughtfully, "most people need to be guided into a feeling of safety before they dare reveal their opinions to someone they've only just met. There's a beginning to everything, after all. Every opera has its prelude, every sonnet its opening quatrain. Small talk is merely a way of helping a stranger to trust you, by first finding something you can both agree on." "No one's ever explained it that way before," Pandora said with a touch of wonder. "It actually makes sense. But why must it be so often about weather? Isn't there something else we all agree on? Runcible spoons- everyone likes those, don't they? And teatime, and feeding ducks." "Blue ink," the duke added. "And a cat's purr. And summer storms- although I suppose that brings us back to weather." "I wouldn't mind talking about weather with you, Your Grace," Pandora said ingenuously. The duke laughed gently. "What a delightful girl.

Yes, I may be considered an enemy of woman; but if I can help her see the light, I shall not complain. The misfortune of woman is not that she is unable to do the work of man, but that she is wasting her life force to outdo him, with a tradition of centuries which has left her physically incapable of keeping pace with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded, but at what cost, at what terrific cost! The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women.

Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal. For example, although we are taught that women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it. Not until the 1960s, through the Voting Rights Act, were all women—regardless of race—granted full access to suffrage. Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging injustice.

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.

Chivalry: It's treating a woman politely As long as she isn't a fright: It's guarding the girls who act rightly, If you can be judge of what's right; It's being—not just, but so pleasant; It's tipping while wages are low; It's making a beautiful present, And failing to pay what you owe.

Her time was almost up. RBG looked the justices in the eye and quoted Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and advocate for women’s suffrage. “She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity,” RBG said. “She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

The contagion of rights-consciousness especially attracted women, who grew more politically engaged than they had been since the achievement of women's suffrage in 1920. Their restlessness had begun to flourish openly in 1963, thanks in part to the publication in that year of Betty Friedan's highly popular The Feminine Mystique.

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!

Just as the 19th century conflict over black male suffrage versus woman suffrage had placed black women in a difficult position, contemporary black women felt they were asked to choose between a black movement that primarily served the interests of black male patriarchs and a women’s movement which primarily served the interests of racist white women.

The righting of the wrongs imposed on womankind therefore had been started not only without the aid of the churches but in face of their determined opposition.

There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.” —Carrie Chapman Catt

In thirty or so years, this will no longer be a majority white country. It will better reflect the diversity that has always been its strength and its promise.

The National Society for Women’s Suffrage was set up in Britain in 1868, a year after Mill tried to secure their legal right to vote by arguing for an amendment to the 1867 Reform Act.

The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It wanted, — it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want.

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.

However, Elizabeth had the minister remove the words “to obey” from her wedding vows, saying, “I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation.

There, little girl, don't read, You're fond of your books, I know, But Brother might mope If he had no hope Of getting ahead of you. It's dull for a boy who cannot lead. There, little girl, don't read.

The Socialists had always stood for woman suffrage and would continue to work for the women regardless of whether or not they received a single vote from the Women's Party. I knew whom I would vote for.

[Upon the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Carrie Chapman] Catt wrote ... to the women voters of the nation: The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!

The Mirage’s entertainment director asks Klara if she’ll let Raj saw her in half—“Easy-peasy; won’t hurt a bit”—but she refuses. He thinks she’s afraid of the trick when the truth is that she could give him an hour-long tutorial on P. T. Selbit and his misogynistic inventions: Destroying a Girl, Stretching a Lady, Crushing a Woman, all of them perfectly timed to capitalize on postwar bloodthirst and women’s suffrage.

In Britain, Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–98) opposed suffrage because to involve women in politics would be, he said, ‘to trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of their nature’.

How was your journey?" he asked. "You don't have to make small talk with me," she said. "I don't like it, and I'm not very good at it." They paused at the shade of portico, beside a sweet-scented bower of roses. Casually Lord St. Vincent leaned a shoulder against a cream-painted column. A lazy smile curved his lips as he looked down at her. "Didn't Lady Berwick teach you?" "She tried. But I hate trying to make conversation about weather. Who cares what the temperature is? I want to talk about things like... like..." "Yes?" he prompted as she hesitated. "Darwin. Women's suffrage. Workhouses, war, why we're alive, if you believe in séances or spirits, if music has ever made you cry, or what vegetable you hate most..." Pandora shrugged and glanced up at him, expecting the familiar frozen expression of a man who was about to run for his life. Instead she found herself caught by his arrested stare, while the silence seemed to wrap around them. After a moment, Lord St. Vincent said softly, "Carrots." Bemused, Pandora tried to gather her wits. "That's the vegetable you hate most? Do you mean cooked ones?" "Any kind of carrots." "Out of all vegetables?" At his nod, she persisted, "What about carrot cake?" "No." But it's cake." A smile flickered across his lips. "Still carrots." Pandora wanted to argue the superiority of carrots over some truly atrocious vegetable, such as Brussels sprouts, but heir conversation was interrupted by a silky masculine voice. "Ah, there you are. I've been sent out to fetch you." Pandora shrank back as she saw a tall msn approach in a graceful stride. She knew instantly that he must be Lord Sy. Vincent's father- the resemblance was striking. His complexion was tanned and lightly time-weathered, with laugh-lines at the outer corners of his blue eyes. He had a full head of tawny-golden hair, handsomely silvered at the sides and temples. Having heard of his reputation as a former libertine, Pandora had expected an aging roué with coarse features and a leer... not this rather gorgeous specimen who wore his formidable presence like an elegant suit of clothes. "My son, what can you be thinking, keeping this enchanting creature out in the heat of midday?

When men in Congress come to blows at somemthing someone said, I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red; But if two women disagree, with very little noise, It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise.

Take women’s suffrage. If being a woman denies you the right to vote, you ipso facto cannot grant it to yourself. And you certainly cannot vote for your right to vote. If men control all the mechanisms that exclude women from voting as well as the mechanisms that can reverse that exclusion, women must call on men for justice. You could not have had a conversation about women’s right to vote and men’s need to grant it without naming women and men. Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal. For example, although we are taught that women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it. Not until the 1960s, through the Voting Rights Act, were all women—regardless of race—granted full access to suffrage. Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging injustice.

Black women had been more than willing to contribute those "clear powers of observation and judgement" towards the creation of a multi-racial movement for women's political rights. But at every turn, they were betrayed, spurned and rejected by the leaders of the lily-white woman suffrage movement. For suffragists and clubwomen alike, Black women were simply expendable entities when it came time to woo Southern support with a white complexion. As for the woman suffrage campaign, it appears that all those concessions to Southern women made very little difference in the end. When the votes on the Nineteenth Amendment were tallied, the Southern states were still lined up in the opposition camp--and, in fact, almost managed to defeat the amendment.

Hundreds of thousands of working women who labour with their brains are just as much exploited by the action of capitalists and middle-men as the millions of women who work with their hands, because the whole capitalist class hangs together, and defends its interests.

When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian Jean Baker observes. As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.

If I were to give up on fighting for women's right to vote, do you think I could live with myself when lawmakers drop the issue altogether? Do you think I could tell the generation of women after me that the reason their voice isn't heard is because I gave up? No. When you fight, you fight until the end.

Women opposed women’s suffrage in surprisingly large numbers and for a variety of reasons, often to do with concerns that votes for women would lead to votes for everyone. In other words, it was better to go without a vote than to open the doors to mass democracy and an end to the dominance of a white, landed elite.

Early suffragists saw the vote as key to all women’s personal as well as political autonomy. But a hundred years of women’s suffrage has shown that gaining the right to vote or run for office will not be enough as long as we’re threatened with emotional, physical, economic or sexual abuse af work, at school or in our own homes.

Howells’s account of the necessary reforms amounted to a manifesto for Gilded Age liberalism: abolition of the tariff, civil service reform, return to the gold standard, curbing of democracy through limitations on suffrage, replacement of elected officials with appointed officials, and prevention of any extension of suffrage to women.95

Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian Jean Baker observes. As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.

At first glance, you’d think it was because of the women's suffrage movement, but that wasn’t it. This society was moving into late-stage capitalism. In the past, one man’s wage would feed and clothe an entire family of six, and buy a house, with money left over for holidays and trips to the movies once and a while. As the cost of living went skyrocketing, and wages limped lethargically behind it, men weren’t bringing home enough money for the family to survive anymore. So, the wives went out to work as well. But the reorganization of domestic labor didn’t go with it. Women were told that they could have it all — a career, a family, a fulfilling life. It just meant they were doing it all, while a lot of men were reveling in their weaponized incompetence, just like Terry, here.

The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively.

No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged

The most revolutionary change that hit the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the liberation of women. The Bible and the Qur’an came from societies controlled by men. No surprise there. That’s how the world everywhere was run until fairly recently. And there is something worth noting before we go deeper into the issue. History shows that the men in charge never volunteer to give up their privileges. They don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve suddenly realised that the way I control and dominate others is wrong. I must change my ways. So I’ll share my power with them. I’ll give them the vote!’ That’s never how it works. History shows that power always has to be wrested from those who have it. The suffragettes who fought for the vote or suffrage for women learned that lesson. Men didn’t volunteer to give women the vote. Women had to fight them for it.

Whether the criticism of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments expressed by the leaders of the women’s rights movement was justifiable or not is still being debated. But one thing seems clear: their defense of their own interests as white middle-class women—in a frequently egotistical and elitist fashion—exposed the tenuous and superficial nature of their relationship to the postwar campaign for Black equality. Granted, the two Amendments excluded women from the new process of enfranchisement and were thus interpreted by them as detrimental to their political aims. Granted, they felt they had as powerful a case for suffrage as Black men. Yet in articulating their opposition with arguments invoking the privileges of white supremacy, they revealed how defenseless they remained—even after years of involvement in progressive causes—to the pernicious ideological influence of racism.

These new friends had fought for suffrage, they had won, and now they were determined to use the vote to advance women’s interests. They did not define themselves by their achievements as wives. Their zeal, their brains, their integrity, the inspiring vision they brought to politics—all of it was thrilling to Eleanor. The activists she met in the 1920s became her tribe. •   •   • They were also her teachers—indeed, it’s possible to say they invented her.

My friend Virginia, who helped cofound the Alpha Suffrage Club, came to my side and took my arm. “But it is entirely undemocratic,” she said. “We have come all the way here to march for equal rights. It would be autocratic to exclude her. I think that we should allow Mrs. Barnett to walk in our delegation. If the women of other states lack moral courage, we should show them that we are not afraid of public opinion. We should stand by our principles. If we do not, the parade will be a farce.

We don’t just need a progressive politics or a conservative politics; we need a more deeply human politics. We need a politics of love. Love is the angel of our better nature, just as fear is the demon of the lower self. And it is love, not fear, that has made us great. When politics is used for loveless purposes, love and love alone can override it. It was love that abolished slavery, it was love that gave women suffrage, it was love that established civil rights, and it is love that we need now.

Saying ‘Kill All Men’ might have been an over-zealous way to call for female suffrage at a time when women did not have the vote. First-wave feminists campaigning for equality by saying ‘Kill All Men’ would have been a deranged way to try to get people on their side. But a century later it appeared to have become normal and indeed acceptable for women born with all the rights their forebears had fought for to react with more violent language than had been employed when the stakes were infinitely higher.

It wasn’t that long ago that society had drawn strict lines between what a man would do and what a woman would do domestically. The man would have a job, a simple nine-to-five, and the woman would keep house and make babies. Those lines had shifted and blurred. At first glance, you’d think it was because of the women's suffrage movement, but that wasn’t it. This society was moving into late-stage capitalism. In the past, one man’s wage would feed and clothe an entire family of six, and buy a house, with money left over for holidays and trips to the movies once and a while. As the cost of living went skyrocketing, and wages limped lethargically behind it, men weren’t bringing home enough money for the family to survive anymore. So, the wives went out to work as well. But the reorganization of domestic labor didn’t go with it. Women were told that they could have it all - a career, a family, a fulfilling life. It just meant they were doing it all, while a lot of men were reveling in their weaponized incompetence,

One admits that the arguments against the suffrage ARE extraordinarily strong,” said a girl opposite, leaning forward and crumbling her bread. “Are they? I never follow any arguments. I am only too thankful not to have a vote myself.” “We didn’t mean the vote, though, did we?” supplied Margaret. “Aren’t we differing on something much wider, Mrs. Wilcox? Whether women are to remain what they have been since the dawn of history; or whether, since men have moved forward so far, they too may move forward a little now. I say they may. I would even admit a biological change.

As far as Black people in the postwar South were concerned, a state of emergency prevailed. Frederick Douglass’ argument for Black suffrage was based on his insistence that the ballot was an emergency measure. However naïve he may have been about the potential power of the vote within the confines of the Republican party, he did not treat the issue of Black suffrage as a political game. For Douglass, the ballot was not a means of ensuring Republican party hegemony in the South. It was basically a survival measure—a means of guaranteeing the survival of the masses of his people.

He would come to insist as corner stone of his legal philosophy that law is fundamentally a statement of society’s willingness to use force, every law means I will sooner kill than not have my way, as he put it, It was because he did not want the men who threw ideas around ever again to escape responsibility for where those ideas led, it was the same reason he lost the enthusiastic belief he once had in the cause of women suffrage, political decisions had better come from those who do the killing… In war time there’s more justification for limiting speech since the danger is proportionately greater.

It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about women in trucks, it's about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf...! I suppose ohf...! reflects as poorly on my character as wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. [...] The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck. Hay bales and a coon dog crate. Ohf...!

they were all just as ignorant as Blackstone was of the chancery law system that had long tempered the inequities of Blackstone’s beloved Common Law in both England and the American colonies. Under the old doctrine of the femme covert, which Blackstone almost single-handedly revived, married women legally died; they lost their property rights, their rights to contract and sue, and even the right to custody of their own children and possession of their own bodies. At the same time, the states, one by one, acted to correct an “oversight” in their constitutions; in 1798 New York inserted the word male in the section dealing with suffrage.

We can make stricter laws, Harriet, but people will just figure out a way around them if their hearts are hardened. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, but it couldn’t make people accept the negros. They’re still hated and treated unfairly and given only the poorest paying jobs. When the suffrage amendment passes and women are allowed to vote, there will still be many more battles to win. Men who are biased against women are not going to treat us equally overnight. No, there aren’t enough laws in the world to change human nature. We’ve had the Ten Commandments since Moses’ time and people still murder and steal every day. Only God can change people.

Only in Maryland could black men born free vote (until 1802, when the state’s constitution was amended to exclude them); only in New Jersey could white women vote (until 1807, when the state legislature closed this loophole). Of the sixteen states in the Union, all but three—Kentucky, Vermont, and Delaware—limited suffrage to property holders or taxpayers, who made up 60–70 percent of the adult white male population. Only in Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia did voters choose their state’s delegates to the Electoral College. In no state did voters cast ballots for presidential candidates: instead, they voted for legislators, or they voted for delegates.

Possessing an undeniable charisma and powerful oratorical abilities, Sojourner Truth tore down the claims that female weakness was incompatible with suffrage—and she did this with irrefutable logic. The leader of the provocateurs had argued that it was ridiculous for women to desire the vote, since they could not even walk over a puddle or get into a carriage without the help of a man. Sojourner Truth pointed out with compelling simplicity that she herself had never been helped over mud puddles or into carriages. “And ain’t I a woman?” With a voice like “rolling thunder,”44 she said, “Look at me! Look at my arm,” and rolled up her sleeve to reveal the “tremendous muscular power” of her arm.45

With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its bicameral legislature (members of one branch being elected at fixed intervals), and its denial of suffrage to women, slaves, and the unpropertied, the Constitution as originally enacted was sharply different from the Great Law. In addition, the Constitution’s emphasis on protecting private property runs contrary to Haudenosaunee traditions of communal ownership. But in a larger sense, it seems to me, the claim is correct. The Framers of the Constitution, like most North American colonists, lived at a time when Indians were large presences in their lives—ones that naturally influenced their ideas and actions.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, explains, “Racism is a structure, not an event.”13 American women’s struggle for suffrage illustrates how institutional power transforms prejudice and discrimination into structures of oppression. Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals. While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all the institutions. Therefore, the only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them; women could not grant suffrage to themselves.

when the United States and Britain denied their non-propertied classes and their female citizens suffrage, or when the US operated a colonial system of slavery, genocide, and racial apartheid, no culturalist arguments were advanced to explain this grave democratic deficit among white Euro-American property-owning Protestant Christian men either (the only exception was the use by antebellum Northern white abolitionists of culturalist arguments against Southern whites as sexually excessive and libertine—on account of having learned such traits from their Black slaves and from living in a warmer climate—and confining of women, but no arguments were offered to explain the racism of Northern whites against Blacks and Native Americans, let alone Northern intolerance of Catholics and Mormons or discrimination against women).

Sir, — Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that at least they are animals?… Many hon. members may object to the proposed Bill enacting that, in statutes respecting the suffrage, 'wherever words occur which import the masculine gender they shall be held to include women;' but could any object to the insertion of a clause in another Act that 'whenever the word "animal" occur it shall be held to include women?' Suffer me, thorough your columns, to appeal to our 650 [parliamentary] representatives, and ask — Is there not one among you then who will introduce such a motion? There would then be at least an equal interdict on wanton barbarity to cat, dog, or woman… Yours respectfully, AN EARNEST ENGLISHWOMAN

Instead of one bad king we’ve got Parliament, which is a heap of bad kings. Men that care no more for the people than I care for that fly. Men that will grind you, and tax you, and make merchandise of you, and neglect your interest and tread you down to the ground. Many is the cheat they’ve passed upon you. At this moment you cheer me when I say down with the kings, but you look at one another and you raise your eyebrows when I say down with the parliament. You’ve got the suffrage and you think that’s all right. The suffrage! what does the suffrage do for you? It’s another sham, a little stronger than all the rest. They’ll give more of you, and more of you the suffrage, till they let in the women (I don’t say a word against that. Some of the women have more sense than you have, and the rest you can always whop them) and the babies next for anything I can tell. And it will all be rotten, rotten, rotten to the core. And then a great cry will rise out of this poor country, and it will be Hamlet again,” cried the orator,

in their struggle to be heard and in the reluctance of their communities to listen. Across cultures, the opposition to contraceptives shares an underlying hostility to women. The judge who convicted Margaret Sanger said that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” Really? Why? That judge, who sentenced Sanger to thirty days in a workhouse, was expressing the widespread view that a woman’s sexual activity was immoral if it was separated from her function of bearing children. If a woman acquired contraceptives to avoid bearing children, that was illegal in the United States, thanks to the work of Anthony Comstock. Comstock, who was born in Connecticut and served for the Union in the Civil War, was the creator, in 1873, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and pushed for the laws, later named for him, that made it illegal—among other things—to send information or advertisements on contraceptives, or contraceptives themselves, through the mail. The Comstock Laws also established the new position of Special Agent of the Post Office, who was authorized to carry handcuffs and a gun and arrest violators of the law—a position created for Comstock, who relished his role. He rented a post office box and sent phony appeals to people he suspected. When he got an answer, he would descend on the sender and make an arrest. Some women caught in his trap committed suicide, preferring death to the shame of a public trial. Comstock was a creation of his times and his views were amplified by people in power. The member of Congress who introduced the legislation said during the congressional debate, “The good men of this country … will act with determined energy to protect what they hold most precious in life—the holiness and purity of their firesides.” The bill passed easily, and state legislatures passed their own versions, which were often more stringent. In New York, it was illegal to talk about contraceptives, even for doctors. Of course, no women voted for this legislation, and no women voted for the men who voted for it. Women’s suffrage was decades away.

[MINERVA appears.] MIN. Whither, whither sendest thou this troop to follow [the fugitives,] king Thoas? List to the words of me, Minerva. Cease pursuing, and stirring on the onset of your host. For by the destined oracles of Loxias Orestes came hither, fleeing the wrath of the Erinnyes, and in order to conduct his sister's person to Argos, and to bear the sacred image into my land, by way of respite from his present troubles. Thus are our words for thee, but as to him, Orestes, whom you wish to slay, having caught him in a tempest at sea, Neptune has already, for my sake, rendered the surface of the sea waveless, piloting him along in the ship. But do thou, Orestes, learning my commands, (for thou hearest the voice of a Goddess, although not present,) go, taking the image and thy sister. And when thou art come to heaven-built Athens, there is a certain sacred district in the farthest bounds of Atthis, near the Carystian rock, which my people call Alœ—here, having built a temple, do thou enshrine the image named after the Tauric land and thy toils, which thou hast labored through, wandering over Greece, under the goad of the Erinnyes. But mortals hereafter shall celebrate her as the Tauric Goddess Diana. And do thou ordain this law, that, when the people celebrate a feast in grateful commemoration of thy release from slaughter, [188] let them apply the sword to the neck of a man, and let blood flow on account of the holy Goddess, that she may have honor. But, O Iphigenia, thou must needs be guardian of the temple of this Goddess at the hallowed ascent of Brauron; [189] where also thou shalt be buried at thy death, and they shall offer to you the honor of rich woven vestments, which women, dying in childbed, may leave in their houses. But I command thee to let these Grecian women depart from the land on account of their disinterested disposition, [190] I, having saved thee also on a former occasion, by determining the equal votes in the Field of Mars, Orestes, and that, according to the same law, he should conquer, whoever receive equal suffrages. But, O son of Agamemnon, do thou remove thy sister from this land, nor be thou angered, Thoas.

The misfortune of woman is not that she is unable to do the work of man, but that she is wasting her life force to outdo him, with a tradition of centuries which has left her physically incapable of keeping pace with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded, but at what cost, at what terrific cost! The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women.

And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the intersection of race and gender in the example of suffrage; white men granted suffrage to women, but only granted full access to white women. Women of color were denied full access until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it. Not until the 1960s, through the Voting Rights Act, were all women—regardless of race—granted full access to suffrage. Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging injustice.

American women’s struggle for suffrage illustrates how institutional power transforms prejudice and discrimination into structures of oppression. Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals. While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all the institutions. Therefore, the only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them; women could not grant suffrage to themselves. Similarly, racism—like sexism and other forms of oppression—occurs when a racial group’s prejudice is backed by legal authority and institutional control. This authority and control transforms individual prejudices into a far-reaching system that no longer depends on the good intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of the society and is reproduced automatically. Racism is a system.

Take women’s suffrage. If being a woman denies you the right to vote, you ipso facto cannot grant it to yourself. And you certainly cannot vote for your right to vote. If men control all the mechanisms that exclude women from voting as well as the mechanisms that can reverse that exclusion, women must call on men for justice.

Similarly, racism—like sexism and other forms of oppression—occurs when a racial group’s prejudice is backed by legal authority and institutional control. This authority and control transforms individual prejudices into a far-reaching system that no longer depends on the good intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of the society and is reproduced automatically. Racism is a system. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the intersection of race and gender in the example of suffrage; white men granted suffrage to women, but only granted full access to white women. Women of color were denied full access until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

American women’s struggle for suffrage illustrates how institutional power transforms prejudice and discrimination into structures of oppression.

Habit can so familiarise men with violations of their natural rights that those who have lost them neither think of protesting nor believe they are unjustly treated.

Lincoln found the clearest statement of that spirit in the Declaration of Independence, with its claim for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln’s interpretation of the phrase became the centerpiece of his narrative about the nation. The Founders, Lincoln said, in adopting the Declaration, did not declare that all people were at that time living in a state of equality. To say so would have been absurd, given not only the widespread bondage of black people but the restricted suffrage of many whites and the legal inequality of women. Nor did the Founders declare that they intended to secure complete equality in their lifetimes. The spirit of the Declaration, Lincoln said, was meant to be realized—to the greatest extent possible—by each succeeding generation. The Founders cast off despotism and created the framework for a free republic, invoking, as they did, not arguments of mere self-interest but the ideal of natural, universal, God-given rights. “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society,” Lincoln said, “which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for . . . even though never perfectly attained.

purpose of the memorial was to show their devotion to those rebel vets both dead and still living and to teach their increasingly irreverent sons the true meaning of the Lost Cause. This gave them, many of whom were college graduates, a sense of purpose; they were the teachers and it was in the schoolroom and the Sunday school room that the most important work of indoctrination took place. In addition, the women’s suffrage movement was making itself felt throughout the country and the men reckoned on Lost Cause activity keeping their women safe from that. At 10 a.m. the brass band blared Dixie and a bevy of white-gloved ladies pulled the velvet cord that removed the white satin cloak from the gleaming statue. A gasp ran through the crowd. Hamilton had no public

Under the state’s simple blue flag are gathered today some of the most flamboyant cranks, conspiracists, and calamity howlers the Republic has ever seen. The Kansas school board draws the guffaws of the world for purging state science standards of references to evolution. Cities large and small across the state still hold out against water fluoridation, while one tiny hamlet takes the additional step of requiring firearms in every home. A prominent female politician expresses public doubts about the wisdom of women’s suffrage, while another pol proposes that the state sell off the Kansas Turnpike in order to solve its budget crisis.

People think I cannot sing and cook, and now imagine that I cannot believe in women’s suffrage and at the same time know anything about the kitchen. I am an ardent suffragette and yet I think it would be hard to find a woman more interested in her home than I am… Anyone who knows the world knows that the woman’s way to obtain her end is not by violence. I, for instance, employ my butler. Yet my butler has more to say about the taxes I pay than I have. That does not seem to me to be right. I hope that in time a way will he found to change this injustice, but it won’t be via the militant suffragette.

Dressed in her plain black silks, Sara Spencer walked determinedly to the speakers’ platform. A scattering of gallant Republican males applauded her courage, and then she faced a silent and skeptical audience. “In 1872,” she began, “the Republican party declared that it had emancipated 4,000,000 of human beings and established universal suffrage.” Pausing dramatically, she then unleashed two stinging questions: “Where were the 10,000,000 of women citizens of this Republic? When will you make this high-sounding declaration true? “We ask you for a plank that will place that mighty emblem of power, the ballot, in the hands of 10,000,000 American citizens—the wives and daughters of this fair Republic … We ask you to open this new century with a declaration that will place the Republican party higher in the scroll of fame than all the deeds of the past, that will give new force and meaning to all your former pledges; that will win to your sides as peers and co-workers the wives and mothers and daughters of this fair Republic.

Phoebe Couzins’ bold leap-year proposal, she presented them with a plank for their platform: Whereas the Democratic party was the first to abolish the property qualifications and extend the right of suffrage to all white men in some of the older States, and whereas it was a Democratic legislature that extended the right of suffrage to the women of Wyoming, therefore resolved that we pledge ourselves to secure the right of suffrage to the women of the United States on equal terms with

After writing so bitterly about the clothes of my youth, I must now be just, and admit that they had one great advantage over the clothes we wear nowadays. We had Pockets. What lovely hoards I kept in them: always pencils and india-rubbers and as mall sketch-book and a very large pocket-knife; beside string, nails, horse-chestnuts, lumps of sugar, bits of bread-and-butter, a pair of scissors, and many other useful objects. Sometimes even a handkerchief. For a year or two I also carried about a small book of Rembrandt’s etchings, for purposes of worship. Why mayn’t we have Pockets? Who forbids it? We have got Woman’s Suffrage, but why must we still always be inferior to Men?

To this faith, the world owes the modern institutional versions of orphanages, hospitals, and higher education, along with the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment. Renaissance painting and architecture, classical music, and the abolition movement, as well as the modern movements for workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, and civil rights, were all by-products, directly or indirectly, of Christian beliefs and actions. Despite Christianity’s positive influences in many areas, Christians were also responsible for the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, the genocide of native civilizations in the Americas, the Salem witch trials, American slavery and the slave trade, the Third Reich in Germany, “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, the Rwandan genocide, and other atrocities. Clearly, Christianity has been both a positive and negative force in the world.

Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National Women Suffrage Association, argued, “You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!”47 In

is widely accepted that the first wave of feminism was the one which began in the eighteenth century and continued, in some estimations, up to the franchise and by others right up to the 1960s. It was precise in its ambitions and deep in its claims. From Mary Wollstonecraft to the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, the claims of first-wave feminism were defined by the demand for equal legal rights. Not different rights, but equal rights. The right to vote, obviously. But also the right to petition for divorce, to have equal guardianship over children and the equal inheritance of property. The fight for these rights was long, but it was achieved. The wave of feminism which began in the 1960s addressed the priorities that remained unresolved underneath those basic rights. Issues such as the rights of women to pursue their desired careers and to be supported in those aims.

Mr. Lloyd-George said that he agreed with everything Mr. Churchill had said "both relevant and irrelevant." He made the amazing assertion that the Conciliation Committee that had drafted the bill was a "committee of women meeting outside the House." And that this committee said to the House of Commons not only that they must vote for a women's suffrage bill but "You must vote for the particular form upon which we agree, and we will not even allow you to deliberate upon any other form.

I believed then (and still believe today) that we are dealing with a larger question—not just one man’s effort to subvert our Constitutional republic but the commitment of all Americans to the rule of law and the premises of our Constitution. As we ended, I tried to put the issues we’d been tackling in a larger historical context: In this room in 1918, the Committee on Women’s Suffrage convened to discuss and debate whether women should be granted the right to vote. This room is full of history, and we on this committee know we have a solemn obligation not to idly squander what so many Americans have fought and died for. Ronald Reagan’s great ally, Margaret Thatcher, said this: “Let it never be said that the dedication of those who love freedom is less than the determination of those who would destroy it.” Let me assure every one of you of this: Our Committee understands the gravity of this moment, the consequences for our nation.

The “southern strategy” deployed by suffragists later on entailed an appeal to southern women at the cost of black people’s rights, who were largely excluded from suffrage conventions.

Most abolitionist feminists, including Stone, Mott, Phillips, and Garrison, naturally recoiled at using racist arguments for women’s suffrage, and from the idea that white women should be enfranchised before black men to safeguard white supremacy.

The staunchest opponents of women’s suffrage in Congress were conservative, states’ rights, racist Democrats.

The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberalism, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War, and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning.

An original inscription,” I continued, “reads, ‘Woman first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declaring herself an entity to be reckoned.

Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.

Seems to me they’re the same thing, more or less.” “What are?” Juniper’s eyes reflect the bronze shine of Saint George’s standing in the square. “Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.

If you’re a pregnant woman living in a malaria-prone country, you have a very different relationship to risk. Pregnant women with malaria are three to four times more likely to suffer from the most severe forms of the disease, and of those who do, 50 percent will die. Ever wonder why the Centers for Disease Control is located in Atlanta? Malaria. The entire reason the United States built the CDC is that malaria was rampant throughout the American South. Malaria was finally eradicated in the United States in 1951. That wasn’t very long ago. Some argue that getting rid of malaria did more good for American women than universal suffrage. Some say it had a bigger effect than Roe v. Wade. Nowadays, in the United States, only 0.65 out of every 100,000 legal abortions will result in the woman’s death, while 26.4 American women still die for every 100,000 live births. Before Roe v. Wade, 17–18 percent of all maternal deaths in the United States were due to illegal abortions—that stat was as true in 1930 as it was in 1967. Meanwhile, as many as one in four maternal deaths in today’s malarial countries are directly tied to the disease. During our worst outbreaks, the same was true in the United States.

There is nothing in this list that Emerson had not learned firsthand. These are not abstractions but practical rules for everyday life. The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberalism, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War, and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning. On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet and Fuller began her history of the Roman revolution of 1848.

...the suffrage movement could not be the province of wealthy white women alone, or the achievements they made—ostensibly on behalf of all women—might benefit only themselves.

It was an unfortunate truth that working women could not devote themselves exclusively to the suffrage movement the way that women with independent fortunes, generous parents, or indulgent husbands did. Ironically, those who had to schedule their work for the cause around their work for wages needed the ballot even more urgently because their circumstances were more precarious.

To be fair, many ladies of the leisure class fought for equal suffrage precisely because they knew that increased political power would benefit the less fortunate, but far too many considered only how the vote would help women like themselves.

What has he [Mr. Wilson] done? He continues to dodge the question when asked to express an opinion about woman suffrage, and historically, his misogyny has been thinly veiled at best. He’s filling his cabinet with avowed segregationists. Worse yet, he believes that slavery was a beneficial, civilizing influence on Africans and their American descendants.

...although Ida freely shared her views, she was troubled by the implicit suggestion that she spoke for all Black women, or indeed for the entire race. No white person would accept the notion that one person out of millions represented them all, but they seemed to assume that was true for people of color.

It particularly irked Maud that the culprits were reportedly privileged women who haughtily insisted that they did not need the vote and didn’t want any other woman to have it either. If they didn’t want to exercise an inherent right of citizenship, that was their business, but why must they prevent Maud from doing so?

Isn’t it bad enough that men oppose us, without having to endure this betrayal by other women?

Miss Bronson did express bewilderment about why we find it necessary to adopt the methods, manners, and attributes of men,” Elizabeth acknowledged, “and she made quite a passionate case for why it is impossible for women to work for the betterment of mankind and to vote as well. We can do one or the other, but not both.

Suffrage women would never be taken seriously if they obsessed over petty personal quarrels. Men and Antis loved to contend that women were too jealous and competitive to work together to any common purpose, which was one more reason why they should not be entrusted with the vote.

She [Ida] would march as an equal or not at all. If she accepted segregation now, if she accepted second-class status now, if she settled for less than she deserved or agreed to relinquish any of her inalienable rights now, what would white suffragists expect her to sacrifice tomorrow? ...If her ostensible allies refused to acknowledge her right to march with them as an equal, how could she expect them to recognize her as an equal at the polls?

Votes for Women” meant “Votes for Black Women.” It had to, or Ida and her daughters and her people would find themselves drawn ever backward into the injustices of the past—if not into slavery itself, then into something barely distinguishable from it.

Republicans proposed women’s suffrage as early as 1878, but it was voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Republicans

There’s no denying women are doing better than they ever have, but is that really saying much? When you consider what life was like for women before suffrage, before Title IX, before the Equal Pay Act, before Roe v. Wade, before any number of changes that made life merely tolerable, most any success women encountered would seem like a rise in circumstance. Rosin

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 evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.

Mary agreed with Harry. She had grown fond of Auburn and progressed in school, from second to eleventh grade within four years. Just as important, women in America—with their flapper dresses, lipstick, rouge, and perms—were kicking up their heels, far more liberated than their geta-clopping counterparts in Japan. Having won suffrage in 1920, American women voiced their opinions. Japanese women may have been wearing bolder kimonos, but they were still denied the vote and prevented from living full lives.

Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment. Women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and Alaska before 1920, while women in the more urban, established Eastern states (save for New York) had to wait for the Constitution to change.

Anthony and Stanton viewed Stone’s support of voting rights for black men as a betrayal of the women’s cause. They reneged on their commitment to a joint organization and announced the formation of their own national women’s suffrage organization the following week, in May 1869. Stone and

If the day hadn’t yet convinced him of the merits of women’s suffrage, it had certainly convinced him of the justness of the movement for Rational Dress.

During observance of the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, Justice Thurgood Marshall made a public attack upon the celebration in which he disparaged the achievements of the Constitutional Convention and said that he did not "find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound." According to Marshall, the original Constitution was defective because it excluded women and Negroes from the right of suffrage, and, most egregiously, it perpetuated and reinforced the institution of slavery. The men of 1787 actually contributed little, he maintained, to the modern American constitutional system, with its "respect for individual freedoms and human rights."sl

For if freethinkers did not have a political platform, they nevertheless agreed on a wide range of social, cultural, and artistic concerns, which generated such fierce debate in the decades after the Civil War that they would form a template for the nation’s “culture wars” a century later. These included free political speech; freedom of artistic expression; expanded legal and economic rights for women that went well beyond the narrow political goal of suffrage; the necessity of ending domestic violence against women and children; dissemination of birth control information (a major target of the punitive postal laws, defining birth control information as obscene, that bore the name of Anthony Comstock); opposition to capital punishment and to inhumane conditions in prisons and insane asylums; and, above all, the expansion of public education. American

She stood staring out into the void. 'One woman's mishap - what is that? A thing as trivial to the great world as it's sordid in most eyes. But the time has come when a woman may look about her and say, What general significance has my secret pain? Does it "join on" to anything? And I find it *does*. I'm no longer simply a woman who has stumbled on the way.' With difficulty she controlled the shake in her voice. 'I'm one who has got up bruised and bleeding, wiped the dust from her hands and the tears from her face - and said to herself not merely: Here's one luckless woman! but - here is a stone of stumbling to many. Let's see if it can't be moved out of other women's way. And she calls people to come and help.

I was deluged with telegrams, editorials, letters, denouncing me. Firm-faced females lay in wait for me and waved umbrellas in my eyes. Even my wife turned from me, saying that while she did not ask me to hold her views on the question of suffrage, she thought I might at least refrain from publicly commending a type of woman found chiefly in musical comedy choruses. I received a note from the president of the university, asking me to be more circumspect in my remarks. Me–Thadeus Bolton–the most conservative man on earth by instinct! “And still the denunciations of me poured in; still women’s clubs held meetings resolving against me; still a steady stream of reporters flowed through my life, urging me to state my views further, to name the ten greatest blondes in history, to–heaven knows what. Yesterday I resolved I Could stand it no longer. I determined to go away until the whole thing was forgotten.

Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, in the last years of the eighteenth century, Sojourner Truth escaped from bondage and became a stirring advocate for abolition and for the rights of women. Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

Most people know the Nineteenth Amendment granting women’s suffrage was passed in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year. What few people know is there was a forty-year struggle over that amendment, with Republicans pushing for it and Democrats opposing it, until the Republicans finally had the votes to get it through. Republicans proposed women’s suffrage as early as 1878, but it was voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Republicans re-introduced the issue each year, but for many years the Democrats tied it up in committees. It only got to the floor in 1887 when the Democrats again defeated it.

For European colonialists like Alfred, Lord Cromer, the British consul general to Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century, the veil was a symbol of the “degradation of women” and definitive proof that “Islam as a social system has been a complete failure.” Never mind that Cromer was the founder of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England. As the quintessential colonialist, Cromer had no interest in the plight of Muslim women; the veil was, for him, an icon of the “backwardness of Islam,” and the most visible justification for Europe’s “civilizing mission” in the Middle East.

Is it true that the English government is calling on women to do work abandoned by men? Yes, it is true. Is not a woman's place the home? No, not when men need her services outside the home. Will she never be told again that her place is the home? Oh, yes, indeed. When? As soon as men want their jobs back again.

Mother, what is a Feminist?" "A feminist, my daughter, Is any woman now who cares To think about her own affairs As men don't think she oughter.

Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment.

Stone was committed to campaigning at the state level; Anthony and Stanton wanted a federal constitutional amendment. Stone involved men in her organization; Anthony and Stanton favored an exclusively female membership. Stone sought to inspire change through speaking and meetings; Anthony and Stanton were more confrontational, with Anthony voting illegally and encouraging other women to follow suit. The suffragists who formed alliances with the temperance activists were more moderate in their methods, which helped the two groups find common ground. At the same time that women were organizing local WCTU clubs, Lucy Stone introduced suffrage clubs. Both groups had extensive histories with lobbying and publishing. They began to work together to lobby and speak in front of state legislatures, publish articles and distribute literature, and hold public suffrage meetings, rallies, and debates.* Together, suffragists and temperance activists persuaded several states to allow women to vote.

she was known as an intellectual force for women’s suffrage. She was a strong believer that women’s rights and the abolition of slavery should be approached as one issue, a controversial proposition at the time. “Emancipation from every kind of human bondage is my principle,” she said.

The political establishment was caught off guard because words like “despair,” “anger,” and “anxiety” refer to emotions, and the establishment mind-set sees emotions as “soft” rather than “hard” political factors. Its worldview is transactional rather than relational, treating the exchange of money far more seriously than the exchange of love. But a healthy political order does not leave our deep humanity out of the equation; it values the workings of the heart as well as the workings of the economy. Government is here to serve its people, and people are not just job numbers or cogs in a corporate machine. We are living, breathing, divinely created beings on this earth for a high and mighty purpose. No politics, and no political establishment, that fails to see us that way or treat us that way is worthy. We don’t just need a progressive politics or a conservative politics; we need a more deeply human politics. We need a politics of love. Love is the angel of our better nature, just as fear is the demon of the lower self. And it is love, not fear, that has made us great. When politics is used for loveless purposes, love and love alone can override it. It was love that abolished slavery, it was love that gave women suffrage, it was love that established civil rights, and it is love that we need now.

So, when my attention was called to these [offensive] laws, I would mark them with a pencil, and I resolved to cut every one of them out of the books. However, this mutilation of my father’s volumes was never accomplished, for the housekeeper warned him of what I proposed to do.” —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.” —Carrie Chapman Catt

You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.” —Emmaline Pankhurst

Women did not yet have the vote, but suffrage was clearly in the wind

Spiritualism, born out of the same discontent with social restrictions and punitive theologies as the suffrage movement, ended up even sharing the same table. The subsequent meeting, at the Seneca Falls Universalist Wesleyan Church on July 19-20 would ignite the woman's suffrage movement, setting the stage for a seventy-two year battle that resulted in the 1920 passage of the Twenty-First Amendment.

The most dramatic consequence of the new constitution [of 1901] was the one most desired by its drafters, the sudden and dramatic decline in voting. [...] What makes the 1901 suffrage provisions even more significant is comparison with the state's first constitution. Otherwise one might assume that the operative principle in Alabama public policy had always been anti-democratic. Actually, the opposite was true. The 1819 constitution, which ushered Alabama into the Union, was a projection of the towering presence of Thomas Jefferson and the democratic aspirations of the American Revolution. Delegates to that convention had pointedly refused to restrict suffrage based on literacy, ownership of property, or even church affiliation. Any white male 21 years of age or older could vote, whether or not he could read, write, owned property, belonged to a church or even believed in God. But the democratic assumptions of that first gathering of founding fathers at Huntsville in July 1819 were not shared by their successors in Montgomery in the summer of 1901. Nor was the democratic assumption of Alabama's own past the only principle violated in 1901. So was the dominant democratic thrust of the 20th century both in America and throughout the world. It was the federal government and not the state of Alabama that enfranchised women in 1919. It was the Supreme Court that demanded that every vote count the same by compelling reapportionment after the Alabama legislature refused to do so for six decades. It was Congress in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally enfranchised Alabama blacks. And it was the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 that ensured the right to vote for all the state's poor of whatever color when it struck down the poll tax. If the century-long wail for states' rights by Alabama's white elite struck many Americans as hollow and hypocritical, perhaps it was because that otherwise noble ideal for restricting tyranny was so often employed in Alabama on behalf of tyranny. For in Alabama, the constitution did not empower the people; it empowered the legislature. Without recall, initiative, referendum, or home rule, power was vested was vested in government, not in citizens. Democracy was forfeited to the federal Congress and to federal courts.

Women fought for suffrage around the world. First to win it were New Zealanders, in 1893—but no New Zealand woman held a high-level political position until 1947. Women in South Australia won the vote in 1894, and it was the first state to allow them to stand for parliament, but other Australian women had to wait until 1947. Finnish women voted in 1904 after only twenty years of agitation; Russian women in 1917, after the revolution. Sometimes women won suffrage but remained barred from highlevel political life. In Norway, women won the vote in 1913, but did not begin to stand for high political office until 1945; Sweden, 1919 and 1947; the Netherlands, 1919 and 1956; Germany, 1919 and 1956; Brazil, 1932 and 1982; and Turkey, 1934 and 1971. In Egypt, men adamantly opposed woman suffrage until 1956. Other countries surrendered even later. But women won. And they won with only themselves—without weapons, political rights, or much wealth, they had only their minds, bodies, spirits, voices, influence, charm, rage, tenderness, and strength to turn the world around. And they did.

Oh, be quiet,’ cried Mrs Harewood. I was really getting to like her. I could just see her in a green and purple sash campaigning for women’s suffrage in the decades to come. But back to the plot.

She began life as a Dutch slave. English is not her first language, but to hear the movement’s leaders tell it, she speaks like an unschooled Deep South slave. And why they refuse to allow Colored women in their ranks says a lot about who they are. Especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This phrase they’re beginning to use—intelligent suffrage—is designed to leave women of our race on the side of the road. As if they’re the only ones with enough smarts to read a ballot.

While implicit bias is always at play because all humans have bias, inequity can occur simply through homogeneity; if I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they provide an advantage to which I feel entitled. All progress we have made in the realm of civil rights has been accomplished through identity politics: women’s suffrage, the American with Disabilities Act, Title 9, federal recognition of same-sex marriage. A key issue in the 2016 presidential election was the white working class. These are all manifestations of identity politics.

It was assumed that the admission of new states to the Union could be orderly and need not disturb issues that the Constitution had either suppressed or postponed, such as slavery, women’s suffrage, and the status of native Americans.

Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal. For example, although we are taught that women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it.

To him a free woman was nonetheless subordinate to a man, but she was subordinate in the right—white—way. Even for Western women, higher education (as well as suffrage) was so vehemently opposed by so many white men for so long because any attempts to transgress the man/woman binary was considered not only a threat to white patriarchy but to Western civilization.

Perveen exhaled, thinking of Alice’s many controversial causes. “The Communist meetings or the marches for women’s suffrage?

Ironically, this argument, designed to persuade white Southerners that woman suffrage held great advantages for white supremacy, was initially proposed by Henry Blackwell when he announced his support for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Already in 1867 he had addressed an appeal to “the legislatures of the Southern States” urging them to take note of the fact that female enfranchisement could potentially eliminate the Black population’s impending political power.

Anthony’s and Stanton’s postures during this episode were astonishingly similar to the suffragists’ anti-Black position within the Equal Rights Association. As Anthony and Stanton attacked Black men when they realized that the ex-slaves might receive the vote before white women, so they lashed out in a parallel fashion against the men of the working class. Stanton insisted that the exclusion from the NLU proved “… what the Revolution has said again and again, that the worst enemies of Woman Suffrage will ever be the laboring classes of men.”11

Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage. Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton persuaded several female labor leaders to protest the disfranchisement of women, the masses of working women were far too concerned about their immediate problems—wages, hours, working conditions—to fight for a cause that seemed terribly abstract.

While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all the institutions. Therefore, the only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them; women could not grant suffrage to themselves.

Margaret Brown was already miffed that she had not been asked to testify before the Senate inquiry given her prominence on the Survivors’ Committee and the acclaim she was enjoying as a heroine of the Titanic. And as a supporter of women’s suffrage, Margaret was not shy about using her newfound fame to wade into the debate over gender equality swirling around the disaster. (One newspaper poet noted how the cry of “Votes for women” had become “Boats for women/When the brave/Were come to die.”) Margaret Brown stated in an interview that while “ ‘Women first’ is a principle as deep-rooted in man’s being as the sea … to me it is all wrong. Women demand equal rights on land—why not on sea?

of course there are a certain number of men who pretend to admire your clever women - men who are in favour of the emancipation of the sex, the giving of women votes and the like - but as a rule you will find that these men are not clever men, and that although they pretend to ability they are really lacking in sense and are transcendent only in weakness and foolishness.

Still. It seems to me they’re the same thing, more or less.” “What are?” Juniper’s eyes reflect the bronze shine of Saint George’s standing in the square. “Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we’re not allowed to have.” The kind I want, says the hungry shine of her eyes. “They’re both children’s stories, June.” Beatrice doesn’t know if she’s telling her sister or herself. Juniper shrugs without looking away from the square. “They’re better than the story we were given.” Beatrice thinks about their story and doesn’t disagree. Juniper’s eyes slide to hers, flashing green. “Maybe we can change it, if we try. Skip into some better story.” And Beatrice sees that she means it, that beneath all Juniper’s bitter rage there’s still a little girl who believes in happy endings. It makes Beatrice want to slap her or hold her, to send Juniper home before New Salem teaches her different. But she can tell from the iron shape of Juniper’s jaw that she wouldn’t go, that she’s charted a course toward trouble and means to find it.

The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.

If the nineteenth century was a time of education for women, it was no less a time of education for men.

I asked Michael about Tony Benn, wondering if he would dilate on the figure who had given him so much trouble in his brief tenure as party leader. Benn’s wife, Caroline, had died just a few months before. She had got on with Jill. The two women shared an interest in women’s rights, and Caroline had authored a biography of Keir Hardie, one of the male heroes in the fight for women’s suffrage. Michael attended Caroline’s memorial service, an act Tony appreciated. “We’ve had a kind of reconciliation,” Michael said, “In this week’s Tribune, however, he’s written ... the same old stuff about Yugoslavia, which is all wrong and cock-eyed. So I’m going to write to him. He took the easy ways. He wouldn’t face the difficulties. But he’s got many virtues as well.

Until women are made a balance of power—to be consulted, catered to, and bargained with, if you please—My one article of party creed—shall be that of woman suffrage—All other articles of party creeds shall be with me as a drop in the bucket—as compared with this vital one—hence I make it my whole party

Now there are almost as many fallacies in this sentence as there are words.

However benevolent men may be in their intentions, they cannot know what women want and what suits the necessities of women's lives as well as women know these things themselves.

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I’ve spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expected. The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of déjà vu. Déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems. Without a vuja de event, Warby Parker wouldn’t have existed. When the founders were sitting in the computer lab on the night they conjured up the company, they had spent a combined sixty years wearing glasses. The product had always been unreasonably expensive. But until that moment, they had taken the status quo for granted, never questioning the default price. “The thought had never crossed my mind,” cofounder Dave Gilboa says. “I had always considered them a medical purchase. I naturally assumed that if a doctor was selling it to me, there was some justification for the price.” Having recently waited in line at the Apple Store to buy an iPhone, he found himself comparing the two products. Glasses had been a staple of human life for nearly a thousand years, and they’d hardly changed since his grandfather wore them. For the first time, Dave wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone? Anyone could have asked those questions and arrived at the same answer that the Warby Parker squad did. Once they became curious about why the price was so steep, they began doing some research on the eyewear industry. That’s when they learned that it was dominated by Luxottica, a European company that had raked in over $7 billion the previous year. “Understanding that the same company owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames and sunglasses—all of a sudden, it made sense to me why glasses were so expensive,” Dave says. “Nothing in the cost of goods justified the price.” Taking advantage of its monopoly status, Luxottica was charging twenty times the cost. The default wasn’t inherently legitimate; it was a choice made by a group of people at a given company. And this meant that another group of people could make an alternative choice. “We could do things differently,” Dave suddenly understood. “It was a realization that we could control our own destiny, that we could control our own prices.” When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian Jean Baker observes. As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.

Yet she admitted that the majority of ordinary women had declined to throw away their corsets. According to Phelps, "the average woman" was tolerably content with her style of dress. Another reason for the failure of dress reform was its association with controversial ideas, such as "atheism and... free love", female suffrage, "an opium-fed baby, and a dinnerless and buttonless husband. Some dress reformers, of course, were associated with radical political movements for women's rights, temperance, and abolitionism.

Unlike conservatives and cautious liberals, fascists never wanted to keep the masses out of politics. They wanted to enlist, discipline, and energize them. In any event, by the end of World War I, there was no possible turning back to a narrow suffrage. Young men almost everywhere had been summoned to die for their countries, and one could hardly deny the full rights of citizenship to any of them. Women, too, whose economic and social roles the war had expanded enormously, received the vote in many northern European countries (though not yet in France, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland). While fascists sought to restore patriarchy in the family and the workplace, they preferred to mobilize sympathetic women rather than disfranchise them, at least until they could abolish voting altogether.

Anti-suffrage politicians came up with increasingly complicated strategies for avoiding female enfranchisement. Why not appoint a minister for women, backed by an advisory council which could actually include a number of ladies? That way their interests could be represented and debated while keeping them safely out of the way of 'real' government. Or we could build a separate chamber for ladies in Westminster where they could (essentially) pretend to be parliamentarians and even pass Bills among themselves. They could confine themselves to feminine matters like the Shops Act, the white slave trade, housing and so on. In the meantime the other two Houses would get on with important issues involving the armed forces, foreign affairs and the budget.

Suffragist Susan B. Anthony introduced her as a living legend at the twenty-eighth annual convention of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association, held in 1904.

There were “prostitutes” whom the sisters did despise, but not those mentioned in The Gentleman’s Companion: they were scathing about the underlying hypocrisy of high-society women who sold themselves for profitable marriages. “What a commentary upon the divinity of marriage are the watering places during the summer seasons!” scoffed Victoria. “The mercenary ‘mammas’ trot out their daughters on exhibition, as though they were so many stud of horses, to be hawked to the highest bidder. It’s the man who can pay the most money who is sought; it makes no difference how he got it, nor what are his antecedents… To him who bids highest… the article is knocked down… this is the ruling spirit, not at watering places only but in so-called best society everywhere. Marriages of love become rarer year after year, while those of convenience are proportionately on the increase… and we prate of the holy marriage covenant!

Every era breeds some rebellion with the past, and Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838 amid a backlash against an “age of debauchery,” when upper-class males routinely kept mistresses. In the Victorian era, the image of the happy family, chaste couples amid the “respectability” of polite society, was acclaimed. And by 1870, reformers were once again fighting crime, obscenity, debauchery, and prostitution as the post–Civil War period mocked much of the Victorian myth. Yet hypocrisy hadn’t faded. Despite fashion that paraded plumped-up breasts, women were supposed to be horrified at naked statues in art museums, legs were never to be seen, and the lower half of the body was called the “nether regions.

Fashionable women, on the other hand, went to “enameling studios,” where the face and bust were coated with dangerous enamel, a semi-paste composed of arsenic or white lead. For $10 to $15, a woman could get a coating that lasted a few days. A shellacking that lasted six months cost between $400 and $600—more than most laborers’ annual salary—to retain the dangerous ethereal whiteness. It was not explained how, or if, they’d wash their face after application.

Monarchist leaders of the Republic fled Paris, and workers and socialists elected the Paris Commune as an independent government. The Communards called for labor reforms, separation of church and state, and free education for all, with emphasis on girls’ schools, since women had been so deprived of education.

It has become commonplace since 1917 to contrast democratic with revolutionary socialism. This contrast – misleading even today – would have made no sense in the nineteenth century. Until relatively late in Marx’s life, manhood suffrage existed only in some American states (not all – slaves could not vote, and some non-slave-owning states had a property qualification for voting). It existed also briefly in France from the revolution of 1848 to May 1850. Nowhere could women vote. The first fully sovereign state with genuinely universal suffrage (women as well as men) was Australia in 1901, eighteen years after Marx’s death.

I am really pleased that we managed to go a little beyond the white, middle class view on suffrage and women’s rights, although not far enough.

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user….I believe in suffrage for women in America, because I think they are fit for it. I believe for women, as for men, more in the duty of fitting one’s self to do well and wisely with the ballot than in the naked right to cast the ballot.

Anthony and Stanton viewed Stone’s support of voting rights for black men as a betrayal of the women’s cause. They reneged on their commitment to a joint organization and announced the formation of their own national women’s suffrage organization the following week, in May 1869. Stone and a group of colleagues published a letter calling for a more comprehensive organization, but it was to no avail. By the fall, they had little choice but to form their own group. For more than two decades, they maintained their distance, working independently