Mark Twain Quotes
… no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Mark Twain, Writer, Founder, Anti-Imperialist League, Mark Twain’s Notebook
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is one of the most positive statements about women and women’s rights to emanate from a leader of a Muslim Middle Eastern nation.
This quotation illustrates the statement of a reform principle to appease international interests in basic human rights. This type of statement provides the “fig leaf” for the UN and other organizations to pretend that international standards of human rights are being maintained. Nasser did not implement this principle. By the beginning of the 21st century, Egypt was finally making some progress on women’s equality issues. The prohibition on female members of Parliament—{586723}—had been reversed but women were still not allowed to be judges in a criminal trial, laws against infant female circumcision, and other elements of female equality were still not in existence.
She was overly optimistic. She would be dead for 30 years before women got the vote and some would argue that full equality has not been reached yet.
This relatively radical viewpoint regarding equal rights for women was expressed by Roosevelt as his Senior thesis at Harvard in 1880. In those days, the kind of scrutiny of everything a candidate ever wrote or said that is characteristic of modern politics, did not exist. It is very doubtful that if the Republican Party officials had ever known that he had espoused these views—even as a young student, that he ever would have risen so high in the party, much less get nominated at the Vice Presidential candidate which was his entree to the Presidency. When in office however, there is no record of him reviving his youthful proposal that women who marry retain their maiden names.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
This remarkable statement was written in about 1840 and there was probably then few people of either gender who would think such a thing possible.
Given the time, this was an amazing demand. Fuller preceded all the more famous American feminists and was an inspiration to them.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
