Jeffrey Rosen Quotes

The Constitution did not mention women when it was first written, and it still doesn't.

An Act to Relieve the Legal Disabilities of Women

… since the women started out on their crusade they have scored in every project they undertook against unjust laws. I would like to see them help make the laws and those who are to enforce them. I would like to see the whiplash in women's hands.

Women had first to convince the world that they had souls and then that they had minds and then it came on to this matter of political entity and the end is not yet.

People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.

I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took.

Roll up your sleeves, set your mind to making history, and wage such a fight for liberty that the whole world will respect our sex.

In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.

For a people is only as great, as free, as lofty, as advanced as its women are free, noble and progressive.

If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it.

The last speaker alluded to this movement as being that of a few disappointed women. From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being - every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.

At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.

God bless that women are free in America. We can say what we want, and I do think women will heal the world.

Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacity...If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior...If non-violence is the law of our being, the future is with women.

Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.

The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided.

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.

The day will come when men will recognize woman as his peer, not only at the fireside, but in councils of the nation. Then, and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race.

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

Woman has so long been subject to the disabilities and restrictions with which her progress has been embarrassed that she has become enervated, her mind to some extent paralyzed; and like those still more degraded by personal bondage she hugs her chains.

The Revolution Cannot Triumph Without the Emancipation of Women