The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)
Context: Half a century ago women were at an infinite disadvantage in regard to their occupations. The idea that their sphere was at home, and only at home, was like a band of steel on society. But the spinning-wheel and the loom, which had given employment to women, had been superseded by machinery, and something else had to take their places. The taking care of the house and children, and the family sewing, and teaching the little summer school at a dollar per week, could not supply the needs nor fill the aspirations of women. But every departure from these conceded things was met with the cry, "You want to get out of your sphere," or, "To take women out of their sphere;" and that was to fly in the face of Providence, to unsex yourself in short, to be monstrous women, women who, while they orated in public, wanted men to rock the cradle and wash the dishes. We pleaded that whatever was fit to be done at all might with propriety be done by anybody who did it well; that the tools belonged to those who could use them; that the possession of a power presupposed a right to its use.
Lucy Stone: Use
Lucy Stone was American abolitionist and suffragist. Explore interesting quotes on use.Speaking at an anniversary celebration of the Equal Rights Association in New York, responding to Rev. Mrs. Hanaford, who had asked that the assembly disavow "Free Loveism," as being upsetting and alienating to "the Christian men and women of New England everywhere." (12 May 1869), quoted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (1882)
Context: You may talk about Free Love, if you please, but we are to have the right to vote. Today we are fined, imprisoned, and hanged, without a jury trial by our peers. You shall not cheat us by getting us off to talk about something else. When we get the suffrage, then you may taunt us with anything you please, and we will then talk about it as long as you please.
The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)
Speech as president of a national convention of the Woman's National Loyal League (14 May 1863)
Remark made at a National Woman's Rights Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. (1855) as quoted in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (1972) by Miriam Schnier
Variant: ...when we endeavor to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the difference.
When the husband died the law gave the widow the use of one-third of the real estate belonging to him, and it was called the "widow's encumbrance."
The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)
A letter read by her husband, suffragist Henry Blackwell, to the twenty-fifth annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1893); as quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 4 (1902) by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper