Home > Work > The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote
1 " I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them," is how [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton described their [hers and Susan B. Anthony's] work together. "
― , The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote
2 " [Upon the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Carrie Chapman] Catt wrote ... to the women voters of the nation:The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act! "
3 " When the founders wrote “We the People,” they really meant “We the White, Wealthy Men.” Despite much lofty rhetoric, all men were not created equal, and women didn’t count at all. "
4 " For Carrie Catt, woman suffrage was not simply a political goal; it was nothing less than the next logical step in the moral evolution of humankind. "
5 " Winning the vote required seventy-two years of ceaseless agitation by three generations of dedicated, fearless suffragists, who sought to overturn centuries of law and millennia of tradition concerning gender roles. The women who launched the movement were dead by the time it was completed; the women who secured its final success weren’t born when it began. It took more than nine hundred local, state, and national campaigns, involving tens of thousands of grassroots volunteers, financed by millions of dollars of mostly small (and a few large) donations by women across the country. "
6 " Men had always taken for themselves the prerogative to decide for women, unilaterally determining what women should do, prescribing what they must not do, announcing which rights women were “entitled” to have. Men decided what was “best” for women, without their consultation or consent, then wrote laws to codify this judgment. That was the way of the world, learned men liked to say, claiming God had bestowed upon them such authority: one half of humanity held dominion over the other half, by right of a certain shape of genitalia. "
7 " We have long since recovered from our previous faith in the action of men based upon a love of justice, "
8 " We won’t have negro rule. Republicans and Democrats alike would take their muskets and go to the polls to prevent it.” Todd was, unfortunately, correct about that. "
