Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Susan B. Anthony: Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
Susan B. Anthony: Suffrage is the pivotal right.
Buffy Saint-Marie: Choke on your blue white and scarlet hypocrisy
Frederick Douglass: When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages, for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman’s cause.
Angela Davis: To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women
Victoria Woodhull: Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.
Sojouner Truth: That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Ntozke Shange:Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable.
Harriet Tubman: I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over de fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.
Fannie Lou Hamer: One night I went to the church. They had a mass meeting. And I went to the church, and they talked about how it was our right, that we could register and vote. They were talking about we could vote out people that we didn’t want in office, we thought that wasn’t right, that we could vote them out. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote.
Maya Angelou: As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
Jimi Hendrix: If it was up to me, there wouldn’t be no such thing as the establishment.
Anna Quindlen: Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Alice Paul: We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.
Simone de Beauvoir: The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
Nina Simone: Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.
Ida B. Wells: “The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd”
These Quotes Were Compiled by:
Sheila Parks Founder of The Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots
Podcast: Play in new window | Download









