MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE

As civilization advances there is a continual change in the standard of human rights.

Do not allow the Church or the State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.

During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects.

Government has recognized woman's worth as a worker by placing her in various departments at Washington, and her service are now rendered in the general Post Office Department, the Treasury Department, and the Department of the Interior, and we have the testimony of the highest officials as to her capability and honest in these employments.

In not a single State of the Union is a married woman held to possess a right to her earnings within the family; and in not one-half of them has she a right to their control in business entered upon outside of the household. Should such a woman be successful in obtaining a patent, what then? Would she be free to do as she pleased with it? Not at all. She would hold no right, title, or power over this work of her own brain. She would possess no legal right to contract, or to license any one to use her invention. Neither, would her right be infringed, could she sue the offender.

In newspaper literature woman made her entrance at an early period and in an important manner. The first daily newspaper in the world was established and edited by a woman, Elizabeth Malet, in London, March, 1702. It was called The Daily Courant.

The inventions of a nation are closely connected with the freedom of its people … Inventors must not only possess full freedom to exercise their powers, but there must also be a certain welcome and protection to their ideas. Deprived, as woman is, of political power, she has to face contempt of her sex, open and covert scorn of womanhood, deprecatory allusions to her intellectual powers,—all tending to hamper the expression of her inventive genius.

The protection of the writ of Habeas Corpus is denied married women in every State of this Union, notwithstanding the Constitution of the United States declares it shall not be suspended except when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety demands it.

There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven; that word is Liberty

This setting of State laws above the guarantees of the National Constitution is one of the forms of 'State Rights' which has already wrought so much evil to the country. Unless the United States is held as superior to States, we have no nation; we are merely a confederation of States…

While so much is said of the inferior intellect of woman, it is by a strange absurdity conceded that very many eminent men owe their station in life to their mothers.

Women are now in the situation of the mass of mankind a few years since, when science and learning were in the hands of priests, and property was held by vassalage.

Personal liberty stands first in order of all rights. Without the control of one's own person, liberty of conscience is impossible. Without the control of one's own person, education is impossible; mental growth is impossible; without the control of one's own person, the opportunities of the world, which are only means of development, cannot be used

... non-use of rights does not destroy them.

When all humanity works for humanity, when the life-business of men and women becomes one united partnership in all matters which concern each, when neither sex, race, color, or previous condition is held as a bar to the exercise of human faculties, the world will hold in its hands the promise of a millennium which will work out its own fulfillment.

Woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself.

The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one-thousand generations back of them... Millions of women dead and gone are speaking through us today

Both church and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has assumed the right to think for woman.

From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose.

It has not been without bitter resistance by the clergy that woman's property and educational rights have advanced. Woman's anti-slavery work, her temperance work, her demand for personal rights, for political equality, for religious freedom and every step of kindred character has met with opposition from the church as a body and from the clergy as exponents of its views.

History is full of wrongs done the wife by legal robbery on the part of the husband. I hesitate not to assert that most of this crime of child murder, abortion, infanticide, lies at the door of the male sex.

The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her judgment, her own conscience, her own will.

When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.