It is twenty-eight years ago to-day since the first woman's rights convention ever held assembled in the Wesleyan chapel at Seneca... Falls, N.Y. Could we have foreseen, when we called that convention, the ridicule, persecution, and misrepresentation that the demand for woman's political, religious and social equality would involve; the long, weary years of waiting and hoping without success; I fear we should not have had the courage and conscience to begin such a protracted struggle, nor the faith and hope to continue the work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death... at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the mother's womb holds us for ten months not in preparation for itself but for the region to which we seem to be discharg...ed when we are capable of drawing breath and surviving in the open, so in the span extending from infancy to old age we are ripening for another birth. Another beginning awaits us, another status. We cannot yet bear heaven's light except at intervals; look unfalteringly, then, to that decisive hour which is the body's last but not the soul's. All that lies about you look upon as the luggage in a posting station; you must push on. At your departure Nature strips you as bare as at your entry. You cannot carry out more than you brought in; indeed, you must lay down a good part of what you brought into life. The envelope of skin, which is your last covering, will be stripped off; the flesh and the blood which is diffused and courses through the whole of it will be stripped off; the bones and sinews which are the structural support of the shapeless and precarious mass will be stripped off. That day which you dread as the end is your birth into eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a perfect Tragedy is the noblest Production of human Nature, so it is capable of giving the Mind one of the most delightful and... most improving Entertainments. A virtuous Man (says Seneca) strugling [sic] with Misfortunes, is such a Spectacle as Gods might look upon with Pleasure: And such a Pleasure it is which one meets with in the Representation of a well-written Tragedy. Diversions of this kind wear out of our Thoughts every thing that is mean and little. They cherish and cultivate that Humanity which is the Ornament of our Nature. They soften Insolence, sooth [sic] Affliction, and subdue the Mind to the Dispensations of Providence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis not such lines as almost crack the stage When Bajazet begins to rage;... Nor a tall met'phor in the bombast way, Nor the dry chips of short-lunged Seneca. Nor upon all things to obtrude And force some odd similitude. What is it then, which like the power divine We only can by negatives define?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have given the best of myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political freedom for women, knowing that upon this re...sts the hope not only of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the libert...y of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her--Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone--a long galaxy of great women.... Those older women have gone on, and most of those who worked with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We fully believed, so soon as we saw that woman's suffrage was right, every one would soon see the same thing, and that in a year ...or two, at farthest, it would be granted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »