Ricky Gervais TV - Anne Finch - Elizabeth Cady Stanton - John Stuart Mill - Lydia Maria Child - Margery Corbett Ashby - Susan B Anthony - America: The Story of the US TV - Simon Schama TV - Queen Victoria - Anthony & Stanton & Gage & Harper - Victoria Claflin Woodhull - Emmeline Pankhurst - Christabel Pankhurst - Eva Gore-Booth - Andrew Marr TV - The Freewoman 1911 - Elizabeth Blackwell - Harriet Beecher Stowe - Mary S Anthony - Olive Banks - Amanda Vickery TV - Slogan - Karl Marx - Suffragette 2015 - Clare Balding’s Secrets of a Suffragette TV - Lucy Worsley TV - Inside Holloway: Women Behind Bars TV - The Soul of America TV -
In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst set up a new society called The Women’s Social & Political Union. It believed in action not words. And held demonstrations and attacked property in protest against the lack of women’s rights. These suffragettes – or lesbians – were often arrested and put in jail – bet they had a field day ... Course nowadays there are muff-bandits in all walks of life. They’re still usually biffers quite like K D Lang or Ellen, but now and again a real babe turns fishmonger. And that’s a real waste. Next week – gay rights. Ricky Gervais, The Eleven O’Clock Show: Women’s Rights, Channel 4
How are we fallen! Fallen by mistaken rules,
And education’s, more than nature’s, fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed. Anne Finch, The Introduction, 1913
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Convention July 1848
The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race ... marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Woman’s degradation is in man’s idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Free Thought Magazine 1896
The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves. John Stuart Mill, letter 14th July 1869
Womanstock is rising in the market. I shall not live to see women vote, but I’ll come and rap at the ballot box. Lydia Maria Child 1802-80, American abolitionist & suffragist
We were basing our request for the vote on inequalities and injustices and lack of opportunity. Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, interview BBC 1972
Join the Union, girls, and together say, Equal Pay for Equal Work! Susan B Anthony 1820-1906
The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. Susan B Anthony
And together they begin to make their voices heard. In October 1836 women from the Lowell Mills gather after work and organise. Their protest against wage cuts is one of the first strikes in US history. And they will win. The mill bosses backed down. A generation of young women go on to become teachers, writers and college graduates. Harriet Robinson would become a leading suffragette. America: The Story of the US: Division, History 2010
And you’d find women – articulate, intelligent and impassioned. And among those women the most striking of all was Mary Wollstonecraft. She was the Spirit of the Times. Mary Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e1: Forces of Nature, BBC 2002
The reason she [Wollstonecraft] said why women were so slighted was that from the time they were little girls their entire being was designed with the sole and sovereign aim of pleasing men. She had no time for Rousseau’s idea that women by their very nature could be no more than wives and mothers ... She is rightly remembered as the founder of modern feminism. ibid.
His [Churchill's] grandstanding egotism. As Home Secretary he was a bit too ... trigger-happy employing troops against strikers. He regarded the suffragettes like prisoners of war. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e4: The Two Winstons
I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of Women’s Rights, with all its attendant horrors on which our poor feeble sex is bent. Forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety ... Were women to unsex themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen, and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection. Queen Victoria
We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever. Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman Suffrage 1886
Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerrilla opposition. Victoria Claflin Woodhull
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. Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story
I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it. ibid.
There is something that Governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy … I say to the government: You have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for their incitement to rebellion. Take me if you dare. Emmeline Pankhurst, speech 17th October 1912
The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics. Emmeline Pankhurst
This was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known in England, or for that matter in any other country ... We interrupted a great many meetings ... and we were violently thrown out and insulted. Often we were painfully bruised and hurt. Emmeline Pankhurst
We are here to claim our right as women, not only to be free, but to fight for freedom. That it is our right as well as our duty. Christabel Pankhurst
If it is right for men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would be like today if men had not, since time began, fought for their freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the freedom of the children they bear. Emmeline Pankhurst
Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case. Emmeline Pankhurst
There is no class in the community who has such good reason for objecting and does so strongly object to shrieking and throwing yourself on the floor and struggling and kicking as the average working women, whose human dignity is very real to her. Eva Gore-Booth of Lancashire Women Textile Workers Representation Committee, letter to Millicent Fawcett re militant campaign of WSPU 1905
And women still weren’t allowed to vote. On the morning of 13th October 1905 Christabel Pankhurst was still respectable. She was a well-dressed middle-class law student. But she was on her way to break just about every taboo she could think of. She was walking along here with her new friend Annie Kenney – a working-class mill girl known as the Blue-Eyed Beggar. But what they were planning was truly shocking. Because they were on their way to a huge political meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. And they were determined at all costs to be arrested. The meeting was a Liberal rally attended by the MPs Sir Edward Gray and Winston Churchill. Christabel and Annie jumped up on to their seats and shouted, ‘Will the Liberals give women the vote?’ They refused to answer. So the women unfurled a banner emblazoned with the words, Votes for Women! Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
Annie Kenney went to Manchester’s Strangeways Prison for three days. Christabel Pankhurst for six. And their short imprisonment was an inspiration to women all over Britain. ibid.