Sarah Moore Grimke Quotes

Women are from their very infancy debarred those Advantages with the want of which they are afterwards reproached.

How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”

Quebec women are treated like sows.

Under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed … firstly because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly—and this is the main thing—they remain in ‘household bondage’; they continue to be ‘household slaves’, for they are overburdened with the drudgery if the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen in the family household.

Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.

How insulting is it to suggest the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things?

I've run into more discrimination as a woman than as an Indian.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas.

I think a lot of women are underestimated.

The question of the admission of women is one that has come up often over the past 25 years and is sure to be reopened in the future …. One cannot wholly escape the rather ungenerous suspicion that many a young woman enters divinity school with the unsuspected hope that she may become a minister's wife. Whether or not women are going to be welcome and effective as parish ministers is not a problem which we can decide. That decision will have to be made by trial and error in the churches. I have no convictions and no wisdom on this matter.

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.

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.

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.

In the 18th century, most people believed that God had ordained specific and different spheres for men and women relative to their roles in life. Some people still feel that way.

Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally upon the sexes. By it, man gains all- woman loses all; tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him- meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her.

The legal profession has been built by men for men in a man’s world. Women find it distinctly uncomfortable.

You never give me more than 30 seconds to say anything but you allow the men make entire speeches on silly things.

It has been the great curse of American women that work--work for a living--was considered dishonorable, and only to be resorted to in case of necessity.

I belong to that degraded race called woman – who whether her lot be cast among Jew, or Turk, heathen or Christian is yet a slave.

It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to... Nay why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates. Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne.

It was not seen that woman’s place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change.

I got personal satisfaction from making trouble for high-placed sexists and helping less lucky women fight the establishment

Men insist that they don't mind women succeeding so long as they retain their "femininity". Yet the qualities that men consider "feminine" timidity, submissiveness, obedience, silliness, and self-debasement — are the very qualities best guaranteed to assure the defeat of even the most gifted aspirant.