Jeannette Rankin Quotes

For me, a better democracy is a democracy where women do not only have the right to vote and to elect but to be elected.

In Tunisia, where women have long enjoyed greater rights than many of their Arab neighbors, women pushed for and won a new electoral code that guarantees women will make up half of a candidates' list for office.

The logical sequence of suffrage is office-holding. Female suffrage will never reach its full fruition until fully one-half of all public offices, legislative, judicial and executive, local and national, are filled by women. Is the public mind ready for this risky innovation?

Politics is a potent way to empower women.

After over 200 years, not even a fifth of Congress is women.

In some countries we have had the right to vote for less than 100 years, so the entry of women into political leadership has caused a tsunami.

The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.

The Labour party has done more than any other to address gender inequalities, through legislation and other means, and to increase women's representation in politics, which has led to recent increases in the number of female politicians.

I would not have a woman go to Congress merely because she is a woman.

1992 became known as the 'Year of the Woman' because so many of us were elected to public office that November, including a record six to the United States Senate.

I just read that 81 percent of Americans are ready to vote for a woman. So it sounds like America is ready.

I am really proud to be a part in whatever way of women becoming active in the political scene. I think it was the first time that people came to terms with the reality of what it meant to have a Senate made up of 98 men and two women.

When it comes to getting more women into parliament, politicians have at least started to take active measures. The British Labour Party introduced all-female shortlists in 1997.

A woman's place is in the house - the House of Representatives.

So many other countries have had female leaders, in fact the U.S. ranks 61st in female representation in government and I think it is startling and sign of a change that needs to be made.

The list of women to potentially be on a major party ticket, in both parties, is embarrassingly short.

I know that many honorable members have viewed the advent of women to the legislative halls with something approaching alarm;

Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

To-day is holden at Worcester [MA] the "Woman's Convention." I think that as long as they have not equal rights of property and right of voting they are not on the right footing.

A woman running for President. There is not a thing in the Constitution to prohibit it. I cannot vote but I can be voted for.

Would America ever elect a woman President? We won’t know until we try.

We reasoned that the men would find it difficult to vote against the women in their home states when a woman was sitting with them making laws.

You can't snap your fingers, and suddenly half of Congress is women.

A Hillary Clinton presidency would have represented an important step away from the country's lagging acceptance of women as powerful, full participants in our democracy.

Much of the responsibility to get more women elected is down to political parties. I am proud that a third of Lib Dem MPs are women, and I know we must work harder still to spot and nurture talented women at all levels in our party.