No! on Human Rights and Freedom, on a subject that is as self-evident as that two and two make four, there is no need of any written authority.
But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.
But say some, would you expose woman to the contact of rough, rude, drinking, swearing, fighting men at the ballot box? What a humiliating confession lies in this plea for keeping woman in the background!
Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute ‘Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.’
Again, I shall be told that the law presumes the husband to be kind, affectionate, and ready to provide for and protect his wife. But what right, I ask, has the law to presume at all on the subject?
The mass of the people commence life with no other capital than the union of head, hearts and hands. To the benefit of this best of capital the wife has no right.
If any difference should be made by law between husband and wife, reason, justice and humanity, if their voices were heard, would dictate that it should be in her favor.
Fathers like to have children good-natured, well-behaved, and comfortable, but how to put them in that desirable condition is out of their philosophy.
Do you not yet understand what has made woman what she is? Then see what the sickly taste and perverted judgment of man now admires in woman.
The few bright meteors in man’s intellectual horizon could well be matched by women, were she allowed to occupy the same elevated position.
Why should women not be a martyr for her cause?
Ignorance is the evil – knowledge will be the remedy. Knowledge not of what sort of beings we shall be hereafter, or what is beyond the skies, but a knowledge pertaining to terra firma, and we may have all the power, goodness and love that we have been taught belongs to God himself.
When a man comes to me and tries to convince me that he is not a thief, then I take care of my coppers.
If God is pleased in making you sick and unhappy, I hate God.