Susan B. Anthony

“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.”

“Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.”

“No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.”

“She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.”

“Every woman should have a purse of her own.”

“An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.”

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

“This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.”

“Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.”

“There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.”

“If women will not accept marriage with subjection, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The women who will not be ruled must live without marriage. And during this transition period... single women make comfortable and attractive homes for themselves.”

“I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.”

“The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.”

“Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.”

“Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.”

“Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform.”

“I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

“Here, in this very first paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can 'the consent of the governed' be given if the right to vote be denied?”

“Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.”

“Suffrage is the pivotal right.”