Suffragettes Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“A few British suffragettes everybody laughed at started the cause of equality between men and women.”

“First off, as has been well stated by many Indigenous Feminists before us, the idea of gender equality did not come from the suffragettes or other so-called "foremothers" of feminist theory. It should also be recognized that although we are still struggling for this thing called "gender equality," it is not actually a framed issue within the feminist realm, but a continuation of the larger tackling of colonialism. So this idea that women of colour all of a sudden realized "we are women," and magically joined the feminist fight actually re-colonizes people for who gender equality and other "feminist" notions is a remembered history and current reality since before Columbus. The mainstream feminist movement is supposed to have started in the early 1900s with women fighting for the right to vote. However, these white women deliberately excluded the struggles of working class women of color and participated in the policy of forced sterilization for Aboriginal women and women with disabilities. Furthermore, the idea that we all need to subscribe to the same theoretical understandings of history is marginalizing. We all have our own truths and histories to live.”

“Be militant in your own way! Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property...do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. Take me if you dare! (Emmeline Pankhurst, 1912)”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”