Marital Oppression Quotes

The vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty.

Marriage is but slavery made to appear civilized.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to the master's person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes

If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar.

You are forbidden to inherit women against their will.

[The married woman is] is a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, and serves her master's passion; [and] who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation.

Women were victims. Their husbands could beat them up when they wanted to. They couldn't work. They could be maimed and killed by their husbands.

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

The wrongs of a Husband or Master are not reproached.

Marriage is to woman a state of slavery. It takes from her the right to her own property, and makes her submissive in all things to her husband.

No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.

In marriage, a woman becomes the weaker sex, even if her husband doesn't want her to be. This happens because of the way society has built the institution.

… laws make every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passions

Marriage is such a lottery …. the poor woman is virtually a slave to her husband.

Forcing a woman to marry someone she does not want and preventing her from wedding someone she chooses ... is not permissible. Anyone who insists on forcing a woman ... to marry against her will is disobeying God and His Prophet.

That there are a lot of women in the United States who are not feminists is not surprising. To be a feminist you have to believe in your equality and rights, which can make your life unpleasant and dangerous if you live in a marriage, a family, a community, a church, a state, that does not agree.

Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out.

Most of the well-known American feminists of the 19th century did not come out against the institution of marriage.

Marriage is a custom brought about by women who then proceed to live off men and destroy them, completely enveloping the man in a destructive cocoon or eating him away like a poisonous fungus on a tree.

I never meant to marry. In my opinion, a woman born in the last half of the nineteenth century of the Christian era suffered from enough disadvantages without willfully embracing another.

He (man) has made her (woman), if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property. even to the wages she earns.

Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband has sent more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce.