Mr. Roosevelt, this is my principal request--it is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you leave the pres...idential chair, recommend Congress to submit to the Legislatures a Constitutional Amendment which will enfranchise women, and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without doing this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... women are supposed to be unfit to vote because they are hysterical and emotional and of course men would not like to have emot...ion enter into a political campaign. They want to cut out all emotion and so they would like to cut us out. I had heard so much about our emotionalism that I went to the last Democratic national convention, held at Baltimore, to observe the calm repose of the male politicians. I saw some men take a picture of one gentleman whom they wanted elected and it was so big they had to walk sidewise as they carried it forward; they were followed by hundreds of other men screaming and yelling, shouting and singing the "Houn' Dawg".... I saw men jump up on the seats and throw their hats in the air and shout: "What's the matter with Champ Clark?" Then, when those hats came down, other men would kick them back into the air, shouting at the top of their voices: "He's all right!!"... No hysteria about it--just patriotic loyalty, splendid manly devotion to principle. And so they went on and on until 5 o'clock in the morning--the whole night long. I saw men jump up on their seats and jump down again and run around in a ring. I saw two men run towards another man to hug him both at once and they split his coat up the middle of his back and sent him spinning around like a wheel. All this with the perfect poise of the legal male mind in politics! I have been to many women's conventions in my day but I never saw a woman leap up on a chair and take off her bonnet and toss it up in the air and shout: "What's the matter with" somebody. I never saw a woman knock another woman's bonnet off her head as she screamed, "She's all right!".... But we are willing to admit that we are emotional. I have actually seen women stand up and wave their handkerchiefs. I have even seen them take hold of hands and sing, "Blest be the tie that binds." Nobody doubts that women are excitable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Determination and skill come out of a depth of political and cultural experiences. Women resist and are brave in the most ordinary...-seeming situations: on a welfare line, after being told that medical benefits are going to cut; on a street late at night helping a sister who is being harassed; as a mother demanding that the hospital stop experimenting with sterilization on her daughters; one sister to another trying to convince her to stop shooting up because it's giving the man a victory, swallowing up her life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence. This fight for our own independenc...e will lead to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement in this country. Only the independent woman can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unju...st world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I lost myself in my work and never felt that marriage would give me the security I wanted. I thought that through the trade uni...on movement we working women could get better conditions and security of mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think men respect women ... [ellipsis in original] I don't think they really respect their opinions. I don't think they re...ally respect their ability to do a job. And, therefore, when it comes to the business of hiring somebody, they're always sort of hanging back and suspicious whether the woman would actually be able to do it. Meantime, these people that are doing this to you are people that you swamped when you were going through school. I don't mean that in a bitter way. I mean this is a fact of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. "Resist...ance to tyranny is obedience to God."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some of us who sit upon this platform have many a time been clamored down, and told that we had no right to speak, and that we wer...e out of our place in public meetings; far be it from us, when women assemble, and a man has a thought in his soul, burning for utterance, to retaliate upon him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »