Lucy Stone Quotes

Women were once considered chattel, and slavery was regarded as sanctioned in the Bible. However, western society grew to recognize that neither was just.

The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.

The very same people who 40 years ago were saying that feminism was unnatural and unnecessary are now saying “Well, it used to be necessary, but it’s not any more.”

… the male abolitionists encouraged women to participate, not as equals, but to participate by creating resources, having sewing circles, bazaars, raising money so that the men could go out and lecture and create newspapers. And women accepted this for a while and then gradually they began to speak out. Women formed their own antislavery societies and within these societies they voiced their opinion about abolition.

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.

Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights, and governments need to learn from that, listen to the movement and respond.

We Abolition Women are turning the world upside down.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

I believe the equal rights amendment is a necessity of life for all citizens. The cabinet sometimes felt that I shouldn't be so outspoken.

Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists.

I want to organize so that women see ourselves as people who are entitled to power, entitled to leadership.

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, --the earliest association in this country founded upon the principle that the institution of slavery is, under all circumstances, a sin against God, and there to be immediately and unconditionally abolished

A few more years of persistent, faithful work and the women of the United States will he recognized as the legal equals of men.

During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects.

We [women] seek equality. We don't seek sameness.

Equal justice to the South, it is said, requires us to consent to the extension of slavery to new countries [states]. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to your taking your slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes.

Once women got the right to vote, the kind of relaxed about everything. It was not until after World War II that women discovered that they did not have equal opportunity in the workplace.... The result was almost a revolution.

Slavery will everywhere be abolished or everywhere reinstated.

In the early days of Islam, women were much more socially and politically active than they are today.

If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after that ... What then can women do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?

It scares the Church hierarchy to have educated women form thoughtful opinions and engage in dialogue.

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries. At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime.

Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies…Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years…Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?

The thing I have learned this year is that any improvement in the great mass of women is only possible through socialism…

We demand that, in the strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and new relations, that in this new world we also have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Women. We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. That is our ‘Woman’s Right’.