Through weary, wasting years men have destroyed, dashed in pieces, and overthrown, but today we stand on the threshold of woman's era, and woman's work is grandly constructive.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Black poet and author

…[T]here is no class that can safely delegate its interests to another class. It is because human nature is defective that human laws are made; and human nature being defective, it is never safe to trust it with irresponsible power.

Gail Hamilton, A Woman's Wrongs: A Counter-Irritant, 1868

 

There is no subject so much connected with individual happiness and national prosperity as the education of daughters.

Lydia Maria Francis Child, reformer and writer

 

The Evangelical Alliance, that so readily passed a resolution declaring dancing a sin for a church member, tabled a resolution declaring slavery a sin for a bishop.

Lucretia Mott, James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters

I cannot see why Max O'Rell should have exclaimed with such unction that if he were to be born over again he would choose to be an American woman. He has never tried being one. He does not realize that she not only has in hand the emancipation of the American woman, but the reformation of the American man and the education of the American child.

Kate Douglas Wiggin, Children's Rights, 1892
Author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

There is a broad distinction between religion and theology. The one is a natural, human experience, common to all well-organized minds. The other is a system of speculations about the unseen, and unknowable, which the human mind has no power to grasp, or explain; and these speculations vary with every sect, age, and type of civilization. No one knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action, than thou and I; and we know nothing.

Lucretia Mott, James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters

And if men are so bad that they cannot be trusted to vote with women, is it beyond question that they ought to be trusted to vote for women?

Gail Hamilton, A Woman's Wrongs: A Counter-Irritant, 1868

 

I myself have never been able to find our precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenver I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

Rebecca West, 1913