Suffragettes Quotes

“Bah! Suffragettes. I've no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!”
― Jennifer Worth, Shadows of the Workhouse

“Do not think your single vote does not matter much. The rain that refreshes the parched ground is made up of single drops.”
― Kate Sheppard

“One historical note that I just love: When the suffragettes were marching, at one point they started wearing red lipstick so they would all be wearing the same bold color and stand in solidarity with one another. I love how this little thing many women had in their purses became a powerful political symbol. It's a reminder that we don't have to diminish ourselves as women to be seen as strong. You can push for societal change and you can love getting dressed up. You don't have to choose.”
― Reese Witherspoon, Whiskey in a Teacup: What Growing Up in the South Taught Me About Life, Love, and Baking Biscuits

“So then the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which personally I think is rather a mouthful,' Adelaide said as she set down her wineglass.
'I'm sure others have much shorter terms,' the doctor said, sawing into his steak with more vigor than necessary.
'Such as?' Grace asked.
'There are plenty who just call us bitches, dear.”
― Mindy McGinnis, A Madness So Discreet

“It is obvious to you that the struggle will be an unequal one, but I shall make it - I shall make it as long as I have an ounce of strength left in me, or any life left in me.”
― Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story

“I want to say right here, that those well-meaning friends on the outside who say that we have suffered these horrors of prison, of hunger strikes and forcible feeding, because we desired to martyrise ourselves for the cause, are absolutely and entirely mistaken. We never went to prison in order to be martyrs. We went there in order that we might obtain the rights of citizenship. We were willing to break laws that we might force men to give us the right to make laws.”
― Emmeline Pankhurst

“I can be a little prickly when people make assumptions about women.”
― Michael Pryor, Hour of Need

“The suffragettes were all about speaking up, screaming for their rights. You can't speak up for your right to be silent.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“When men in Congress come to blows at somemthing someone said,
I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red;
But if two women disagree, with very little noise,
It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise.”
― Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times

“I think that's when I understood that you only ruined my life because my life needed ruining. Because the life you rejected demanded that I spend all my time telling my daughter to be less and my son to be more.”
― Courtney Milan, The Suffragette Scandal

“Mrs. Sanger was a woman who would have understood my mother, I was sure.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

“The suffragettes were easy to condemn, but hard to ignore. Their actions also boosted donations to peaceful, law-abiding suffragist societies. Many of those who claimed to be repelled by the militants were what we would now call "concern trolls" pretending to care about the success of a movement they never supported anyway.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“If she is one of the most valuable of the nation’s citizens she should have a voice in its affairs”
― Constance Smedley

“I'm twenty-two and a woman.
One of the ways men diminish women's status and our contribution whilst simultaneously entrenching their quasi-paternal male authority is to call us girls. Girls go to school, Captain. Women tend the wounded, make the shells and drive the ambulances.”
― Ben Elton, The First Casualty

“Is it true that the English government is calling on women to do work abandoned by men?

Yes, it is true.

Is not a woman's place the home?

No, not when men need her services outside the home.

Will she never be told again that her place is the home?

Oh, yes, indeed.

When?

As soon as men want their jobs back again.”
― Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times

“However benevolent men may be in their intentions, they cannot know what women want and what suits the necessities of women's lives as well as women know these things themselves.”
― Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement

“We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a 
broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest
 ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest 
triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine 
heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or 
saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or 
criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs
of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts
and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment
 seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the 
awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible

“The Women’s March had restored my faith as I am sure it has introduced the young generation to the new wave of feminism. A feminist movement that was made up of both sexes and all ages and creeds, one that did away with the arguments and stood arm in arm for a greater cause, a cause which the Arab media did not wish to project.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Just as we tell women today to vote, in honour of the suffragettes who campaigned for the right to do so, we owe it to these female sports pioneers to draw inspiration from their stories, to continue the fight.”
― Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives

“You remember I almost shot Roger Babson one morning when I thought he was a wild turkey.”
― Gilbert Mansergh, The Marvelous Journals of Miss Virginia Pettingill

“She stood staring out into the void. 'One woman's mishap - what is that? A thing as trivial to the great world as it's sordid in most eyes. But the time has come when a woman may look about her and say, What general significance has my secret pain? Does it "join on" to anything? And I find it *does*. I'm no longer simply a woman who has stumbled on the way.' With difficulty she controlled the shake in her voice. 'I'm one who has got up bruised and bleeding, wiped the dust from her hands and the tears from her face - and said to herself not merely: Here's one luckless woman! but - here is a stone of stumbling to many. Let's see if it can't be moved out of other women's way. And she calls people to come and help.”
― Elizabeth Robins, The Convert

“Don't let your husband feel you are a 'dear little woman' but no good intellectually. If you find yourself getting stale, wake up your brain. Let there be nothing your husband can talk about that you will be unable to understand.
Don't profess to know nothing about politics. Any man who is worth his salt does care, and many men learn to despise women as a whole because their wives take such an unintelligent attitude.”
― Blanche Ebbutt, Don'ts for Wives

“They have beautified and decorated the shrine, but they have kept it empty of the divinity which gave a significance to the paraphenaila of the shrine”
― Emily Wilding Davidson

“What is treated as of no value is apt to grow valueless”
― Barbara Bodichon

“Well, we are showing them that government does not rest upon force at all: it rests upon consent”
― Emmeline Pankhurst

“An original inscription,” I continued, “reads, ‘Woman first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declaring herself an entity to be reckoned.”
― Lauren Edmondson, Ladies of the House: A Modern Retelling of Sense and Sensibility

“Husbands came home at night with a new eagerness. . . . As for children, their attitudes changed rapidly from one of affectionate toleration for poor, darling mother to one of wide-eyed wonder. Released from the smother of mother love, for she was too busy to be more than casually concerned with them, they discovered that they liked her. She was a great sport. She had guts.”
― Ida Alexa Ross Wylie

“Ook in Europa werd in deze jaren her en der gedemonstreerd tegen de verhoging van de defensie-uitgaven – in Nederland bijvoorbeeld tegen de nieuwe Vlootwet – en gewaarschuwd voor een nieuwe wapenwedloop. Voor Eleanor moest dit een kruistocht worden tegen de oorlog, even machtig als de kruistocht tegen de slavernij, even machtig als de kruistocht van de suffragettebeweging. In de jaren daarna werd ze een centrale figuur binnen de Amerikaanse anti-oorlogsprotesten.”
― Geert Mak, Wisselwachter

“From the suffragettes to the civil rights movement, what was once condemned as radical disruption is now celebrated as moral courage. We must remember this pattern – and refuse to let our rights be eroded by fear. This is not new, and we will not be silenced.”
― Charlotte Church

“He moved an inch toward her. “You’re the loveliest woman ever to bash her head against a wall, but the wall you’re battering is and thicker than the Great Wall of China, and there’s only one of you. It’s not the stones that will give way to you, my dear.”
Free swallowed. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“Ah, the wall is made of paper, then, and you’ll burst through it at any second.” He laughed at her, and she could hear that ice in his voice. “Give yourself another ten years, and maybe you’ll understand what you’re facing. Until then, go ahead. Keep fighting.”
Free contemplated him in the darkness. “After tonight, do you still think that I’m naïve? That I don’t understand how the world works?”
“There’s no proof you do understand it. After everything you saw today, you still stayed up to send out your next issue. What do you imagine your little paper will change? Do you think that suddenly, Delacey will read one of your essays and say, ‘Good God, I’ve got it all wrong. Women deserve to be treated fairly after all’?”
“No,” Free looked away. “Of course I don’t think that. I’ll never convince him.”
“Or do you imagine that there is a group of men somewhere who haven’t yet made up their minds on the question of female suffrage? Men who are thinking, ‘Well, I suppose women might be actual human, just like men. Maybe I had better look out for them.’”
Free felt her face flush. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Because I can tell you what will happen,” Mr. Clark said in his dark, dangerous voice. “You women will squawk amongst yourselves about injustice and fairness. Maybe if you do it loudly enough, someday a handful of you will be allowed to vote, and it will be accounted a great victory. Maybe in fifty years, women will achieve a distinct minority in the professional classes. We might have a woman doctor, a woman barrister, and then five or ten of you might form an organization together and shake hands because something has been accomplished.”
Free let out a breath.
“Maybe in a hundred years of women voting, you might manage a single female Prime Minister.” He gave her a rough smile. “But just the one, and even so, people will never take her seriously. If she’s stern, they’ll blame her menstrual cycle. If she smiles, it will be proof that women are not strong enough to lead. That’s what you’re setting yourself up for, Miss Marshall. A lifetime of small wins, of victories that land like lead in your stomach. Your cause may be just. But you’re delusional if you think you can accomplish anything. You’re pitting yourself against an institution that is older than our country, Miss Marshall. It’s so old that we rarely even need speak of it. Rage all you want, Miss Marshall, but you’ll have more success emptying the Thames with a thimble.”
He touched a finger to his forehead in mock salute, as if tipping a hat. As if she’d just departed the land of reality, and he’d wished her a pleasant journey. His words didn’t match his actions, though. He came even closer to her as he spoke, leaning in with every sentence, until he seemed almost on the verge of kissing her.”
― Courtney Milan, The Suffragette Scandal