Kate Sheppard Quotes

Is it right that your mother, your sister... should be classed with criminals and lunatics... ? Is it right that while the gambler, the drunkard, and even the wife-beater has a vote, earnest, educated and refined women are denied it?... Is it right... that a mother... should be thought unworthy of a vote that is freely given to the blasphemer, the liar, the seducer, and the profligate?

We got the vote, which we should've been born with, in 1920. Everything we've had to struggle for - it's ridiculous.

Naturally I knew it was ridiculous to deprive half the people of the country of any voice in the laws they had to live under, merely on account of a trifling difference in sex, but I did not think anything I could do about it was likely to be helpful.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

Forever behind a woman is the mediaeval English common law which places upon her the stigma of inferiority and bondage

Women are born, living their lives, and dying without the justice which they have been waiting for since the time of the caveman.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

Women have no government.

For more than six thousand years the history of woman has been one of hopeless sadness. She moved only to the clank of chains, and her vain desire for better and higher things could not find expression, for woman was by force of circumstances inarticulate. Detraction of one sex and exaltation of the other became a habit of mind expressed in law, in religion, in literature as well as in the ordinary activities of everyday life.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

We do not know whether the present House of Commons will be prepared to do justice to women. A few months ago there can be little doubt that it would, and nothing that has since happened supplies any adequate reason for a change of purpose. The follies and excesses of a small section of women, deeply resented and regretted by the vast majority of women, ought not to be allowed to weigh in the balance against a claim which has been admitted to be just.

Women, what age soever they are of, are not considered as having a sufficient acquired discretion to exercise the franchise

Men regarded women as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it.

Convicts and lunatics have no vote for Parliament. Should all women be classed with those?

I thought that we would wake up this morning and have the same rights as our husbands, grandsons and garbage men—but we are still begging to be let into our country's Constitution.

Medieval ways of treating women are introduced into a modern society and we’re just supposed to say “Aah, that’s really interesting, how ethnic.” No, it’s wrong and we want to fight it.

Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors….This inequality has no other source but the abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms.

Quebec women are treated like sows.

Women voting is like prostitution.

The darkest page in history is the persecutions of woman.

Possibly the presence of women as voters would tend still further to promote order than has been done by the ballot …. If men choose to say that women are not their equals, women have nothing to do but to give in. Physical force, the ultimate basis of all society and all government, must be on the side of the men; and those who have the key of the position will not consent permanently to abandon it.

What rights have women? ... [they are] punished for breaking laws which they have no voice in making. All avenues to enterprise and honors are closed against them. If poor, they must drudge for a mere pittance—if of the wealthy classes, they must be dressed dolls of fashion—parlor puppets...

The only chance women have for justice in this country is to violate the law

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.