Susan B. Anthony Quotes
Women’s Rights Activist
No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.
Failure is impossible.
Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men.
I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.
Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.
Independence is happiness.
Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.
She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.
I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters.
Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.
It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government: the ballot.
I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.
There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.
The worst enemy women have is in the pulpit.
No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.
The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball - the further I am rolled the more I gain.
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform.
Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!
The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
Here, in this very first paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can 'the consent of the governed' be given if the right to vote be denied?
Suffrage is the pivotal right.
I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.
If women will not accept marriage with subjection, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The women who will not be ruled must live without marriage. And during this transition period... single women make comfortable and attractive homes for themselves.
The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states, and the organic laws of the territories all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.
The day may be approaching when the whole world will recognize woman as the equal of man.
I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.
There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence.
I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men's rights are nothing more. Women's rights are nothing less.
Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.
Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.
I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.
I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.
White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then they owned both their wives and their wages.
Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities.
If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
For every betrayed woman, there is always the betrayer, man.
Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.
Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals.
What you should do is to say to outsiders that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our association than an atheist.
We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.
To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.
Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people? We draw out from other people our own thought. If, when you go out to organize, you go with a broad spirit, you will create and call out breadth and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry.
This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.
I have given my life and all I am to it, and now I want my last act to be to give it all I have, to the last cent.
You would better educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles than to organize a thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry.
Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.
I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.
The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.
It is poor rule that won't work more ways than one.
No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.
Woman must have a purse of her own, and how can this be so long as the law denies to the wife all right to both the individual and the joint earnings?