Selina Copper Quotes
One reason why I am a convinced suffragist is that the mothers (even as wage earners) take the greater share of the responsibility in the upbringing of their children; therefore, they ought to have the greater means, not the less, to enable them to do justice to the rising generation.
Selina Copper, 1853-1948, British Suffragette Organizer, Letter to The Common Cause, August 1913
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The following year, women got the right to vote, the first nation to reach that level of enlightenment.
Her husband had been assassinated. It is not uncommon that after a political assassination, the widow of the slain male politician, carries on the political legacy. But otherwise there are few female politicians in the Third World in general and the Middle East in particular. Arab and other cultures so severely restrict a woman’s mobility within the society that death of a husband or father seems to be the only vehicle whereby a woman enters politics.
Although she was living proof of a woman’s ability to accomplish what most men could not, she was always publicly differential to men and their sexism. Although she opposed women voting in Parliamentary elections, she did believe that women should vote in local elections where the understood the issues much better.
The party was not yet ready for women voting. Hardie resigned as Party Leader. In 1910 he agreed to return as Party Leader and the party was then not in opposition to women’s suffrage although many members were still against women voting.
The Act allowed women and other workers who were the victims of wage discrimination to sue the discriminating employers even after the statute of limitations and run out provided that they victim had no knowledge of the discrimination. Lilly Ledbetter was a Goodyear Supervisor who was for years paid far less than the male supervisors doing the same work. But the company kept it secret and Ms. Ledbetter didn’t find out until the statute of limitations had said she could no longer sue. The Lilly Ledbetter Act corrected that injustice. President Obama observed that discrimination in pay affects not only the woman or other worker, but also the entire family which might therefor not be able to obtain health care, education, or care for elderly parents. At the time that this quotation was made, white women in America who were working full time were earning only 77 percent of what men earned. For minority women, the proportion is even less. As bad as that was, it was an improvement over the situation when the equal pay act was passed 50 years before. Then, women earned only 53 percent of what a man did.
She was the first presidential candidate's wife to admit such a radical position.
Many people, mostly men, tended to regard and label the militant suffragettes as extremists and allowed as how women who advocated their voting rights but in an acceptable way might be wrong but they were at least ladies. The same kind of attempted split occurred in the latter half of the 20th century over the Woman’s movement. The Feminists were not “ladies” and were not to be emulated by normal women even if they had sympathy for he views. Groups without power have always been acceptable to society as long as their cries for a share of power were ineffectual and did not disrupt the existing order. But when they begin to use more successful means and are heard and attended to, then they are labeled as extremists not to be emulated by “decent” people.
