Edward G. Ryan Quotes

Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power.

The past subjection of women has so chastened women, so trained her to think of others rather than of herself, that after all it may have acted more as a blessing rather than a curse to the world? May it not bring her to the problems of the future with a purer aim and a keener insight than is possible for a man?

Both the Army and the Navy are closed to our sex. Nor, again, are we allowed to be members of the Stock Exchange. Thus we cannot use either the pressure of force or the pressure of money. We cannot preach sermons or negotiate treaties. Then again, although it is true that we can write articles or send letters to the press, the control of the press … is entirely in the hands of your sex …

The position of women in SNCC is prone!

Could it be that women in the United States have become too independent – that they have followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for career?.

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

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.

There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.

A man without honour is one who steals or deceives people, but he remains an honourable man even if he has sexual relations with three-quarters of the earth's women. As for a woman, she may kill or steal, but she will be considered honourable so long as she preserves her hymen, without which she loses all honour

Suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.

Rail as they will about “discrimination,” women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.

I recognize most thoroughly the right of woman to choose her own sphere of activity and usefulness, and to evoke its proper limitations. If she sees fit to navigate vessels, print newspapers, frame laws, select rulers—any or all of these—I know of no principle that justifies man in interposing any impediment to her doing so.

The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement

a nation would not profit under a woman as its leader

For 150 years a woman was regarded as some kind of prostitute if she wanted to go into business….Young girls were supposed to have their focus on motherhood and babies.

In the 1950s, men were the bread winners and women worried about the price of bread.

I don’t have any respect to men who send women out to do their fighting for them.

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.

What difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.

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.

A second cause of our present apathy is the terrible position of Moslem women. There is absolutely nothing in Islam, or the Koran, or the example of the first two centuries, to justify this terrible and cancerous growth that has for nearly a thousand, years eaten into the very vitals of Islamic society…. the present system … means the permanent imprisonment and enslavement of half the nation. How can we expect progress from the children of mothers who have never shared, or even seen, the free social intercourse of modern mankind? This terrible cancer that has grown since the 3rd and 4th century of the Hijra must either be cut out, or the body of Moslem society will be poisoned to death by the permanent waste of all the women of the nation.

Half a century ago women were at an infinite disadvantage in regard to their occupations. The idea that their sphere was at home, and only at home, was like a band of steel on society.