Clara Barton Quotes

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

We do not know whether the present House of Commons will be prepared to do justice to women. A few months ago there can be little doubt that it would, and nothing that has since happened supplies any adequate reason for a change of purpose. The follies and excesses of a small section of women, deeply resented and regretted by the vast majority of women, ought not to be allowed to weigh in the balance against a claim which has been admitted to be just.

The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

Yes, I'm a suffragist.

All theories of chivalry and generosity and vicarious representation fall, before the fact that woman has been grossly wronged by man. That being the case, the only modest and honest thing for man to do is to say, "Henceforward have a voice in making your own laws." Till this is done, she has no sure safeguard, since otherwise the same men who made the old barbarous laws may at any time restore them.

I demanded more rights for women because I know what women had to put up with.

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.

Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.

What we suffragettes aspire to be when we are enfranchised is ambassadors of freedom to women in other parts of the world, who are not so free as we are.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

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.

In no sense of the word am I in sympathy with women’s suffrage ….I have no vote and I’ve raised hell all over this country.

Naturally I knew it was ridiculous to deprive half the people of the country of any voice in the laws they had to live under, merely on account of a trifling difference in sex, but I did not think anything I could do about it was likely to be helpful.

It is indeed wonderful when one wakes up in the morning to remember that now, at last, one is considered to be a real, complete human being! After thirty years of endeavor to make men understand they were only half the world… the price we have paid for our enfranchisement is too heavy, some of us find, to allow us to rejoice in the light-hearted, happy fashion we used to picture in old days, but we are filled with a deep and earnest thankfulness.

Women demand our immediate enfranchisement on the same terms as men because we have, by long and painful experience, proved the absolute impossibility of securing any further redress of the many legal wrongs from which we still suffer, and because we fully realize the great danger of further careless, mischievous, and unjust legislation, greatly imperiling the well-being of women.

My own adhesion to the Suffrage Cause was given largely because I saw that only through political equality may we hope to see established a true understanding and a happier relationship between the sexes.

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway. You can’t stop us, neither

Feminism is for all women and girls, not a privileged few or one ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference, ability, region or hemisphere.

Proof that they do not understand the republic is that in their fine promises for universal suffrage, they forgot women.

The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.

If you care about women's rights, you can't not vote.

If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.

We are glad and proud to think that even in so conservative a body as the Legislative Council there is a majority of men who are guided by the principles of reason and justice, who desire to see their womenkind treated as reasonable beings, and who have triumphed over prejudice, narrow-mindedness and selfishness

Is it right that your mother, your sister... should be classed with criminals and lunatics...? Is it right that while the loafer, the gambler, the drunkard, and even the wife-beater has a vote, earnest, educated and refined women are denied it?... Is it right... that a mother... should be thought unworthy of a vote that is freely given to the blasphemer, the liar, the seducer, and the profligate?

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist…. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing