The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of thecompass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.
I have met few men in my life, worth repeating eight times.
The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.
Whatever oppressions man has suffered, they have invariably fallen more heavily on woman. Whatever new liberties advancing civilization has brought to man, ever the smallest measure has been accorded to woman, as a result of church teaching. The effect of this is seen in every department of life.
It is as disastrous to true government in the state, and home, to teach all womankind to submit to the authority of man, as divinely ordained, as it is to teach all mankind to bow down to the authority of kings and Popes, as divinely ordained.
Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education; the more people know, – the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience, and observation, – the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought and action.
How anyone, in view of the protracted sufferings of the race, can invest the laws of the universe with a tender loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is to me amazing.
To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.
The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.
I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.
We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all laws into contempt.
A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offe.
All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.
Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love-friends, counselors-a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life’s struggles, must know the highest human happiness;-this is marriage; and this is the only cornerstone of an enduring home.
It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.
Progress is the victory of a new thought over old superstitions.
Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self- sovereignty.
It is the inalienable right of all to be happy.
Thus far women have been the mere echoes of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and the customs of social life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future. A just government, a humane religion, a pure social life await her coming.