“They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.”

—  Howard Zinn , book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisibl…" by Howard Zinn?
Howard Zinn photo
Howard Zinn 69
author and historian 1922–2010

Related quotes

Archibald Macleish photo

“Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls.”

Archibald Macleish (1892–1982) American poet and Librarian of Congress

"The American Cause", address delivered at Faneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts (November 20, 1940); reported in MacLeish, A Time to Act; Selected Addresses (1943), p. 115

“Very early, I understood that women were required to be other than what they were.”

Andre Dubus (1936–1999) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

Of Robin Hood and Womanhood.
Broken Vessels (1991)

Harry V. Jaffa photo

“Now, there were many reasons why the south did not appeal to the right of revolution. One reason was that there were no abuses that they had been subject to, comparable to the ones enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, said that there was not a single constitutional right which anybody could point to, to say that that had been violated. They were exercising this right as something that was to their pleasure, for their own purposes, but that had nothing to do with the Constitution, and yet they were claiming it as a Constitutional right to withdraw from the Union.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Charles Bukowski photo

“Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love”

Charles Bukowski book Post Office

Post Office (1971)
Context: Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.

Lewis H. Lapham photo

“The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a "turbulence and a folly" that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Sacred Scroll, p. 73
Waiting For The Barbarians (1997)

Nancy Bird Walton photo

“Other women who flew were women of independent means. But I had to do something with it.”

Nancy Bird Walton (1915–2009) Australian aviatrix

Nancy Bird Walton in March 2004 http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/aviation/aviatrices/

“The growing openness to members of all the world's races was always possible under the terms of the Declaration of Independence, which, as Lincoln noted, made a transracial principle, the equal natural rights of all men, the basis of citizenship. For that reason, America from the beginning was always a multinational and multiracial society. As early as 1776, as we saw in the first chapter, some blacks were citizens, as were many non-British Europeans.”

Thomas G. West (1945) American academic

Source: 2000s, Vindicating the Founders (2001), p. 167

“African independence was greeted with pomp, ceremony, and a resurgence of traditional African music and dance. “A new day has dawned,” “we are on the threshold of a new era,” “we have now entered into the political kingdom”—those were the phrases of the day, and they were repeated until they became clichés.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 446.

Howard Zinn photo

“It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Ch. 6 http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnint6.html
A People's History of the United States (1980)

Harry V. Jaffa photo

“The American Revolution and the Civil War were not merely discrete events. They constitute the first and last acts of a single drama. The fourscore and seven years between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address comprehended the action of a tremendous world-historical tragedy.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

How to Think about the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration https://books.google.com/books?id=iKGGAAAAMAAJ (1978) p. 53
Also quoted in Vindicating the Founders https://books.google.com/books?id=DjlpSl-x1gMC, by Thomas G. West, p. 32
1970s

Related topics