So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move ahead without woman's sharing in the movement, and to help give a right impetus to that movement is woman's highest privilege.
--Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1893

. . . the most important effect of the suffrage is psychological. The permanent consciousness of power for effective action, the knowledge that their own thoughts have an equal chance with those of any other person . . . this is what has always rendered the men of a free state so energetic, so acutely intelligent, so powerful.
--Mary Putnam Jacobi, 1894

. . . when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everyone will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the joyments which woman now possesses were always hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon to-day has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.
--Susan B. Anthony, 1894

No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.
--Susan B. Anthony, 1895

We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1896

Of all the old prejudices that cling to the hem of the woman's garments and persistently impede her progress, none holds faster than this. The idea that she owes service to a man instead of to herself, and that it is her highest duty to aid his development rather than her own, will be the last to die.
--Susan B. Anthony, 1897

There never seems to be any difficulty in stretching the laws and the constitution to fit any kind of a political deal, but when it is proposed to make some concession to women they loom up like an unscalable wall.
--Susan B. Anthony, 1899

Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her.
--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1899

In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.
--Carrie Chapman Catt, 1911

I have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.
--Rebecca West, 1913

The struggle of self-consciousness is the essence of the feminist movement. Slowly but inevitably, the soul of a sex is emerging from the dim chamber of instinct and feeling into the strong sunshine of reason and will.
--Katharine Anthony, 1915

It was in dealing with the early feminist that the Government acquired the tact and skillfulness with which it is now handling Ireland.
--Rebecca West, 1916

You can't protect women without handicapping them in competition with men. If you demand equality you must accept equality. Women can't have it both ways.
--Mary Bell-Richards, 1925

I could make out a good case for specially protecting men. It is time some attention was paid to vital statistics. More boys are born than girls, yet more girls survive. There are always more widows than widowers, there are two million more women than men. In other words, woman's survival rate is greater than man's, and women are getting stronger all the time. If either sex needs protection, it would seem to be men.
--Jane Walker, 1927

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
--Virginia Woolf, 1929

Learning to cherish and emphasize feminine values is the primary condition of our holding our own against the masculine principle . . .
--Emma Jung, 1931

The art of being a woman can never consist of being a bad imitation of a man.
--Olga Knopf, 1932

The outer limitations to woman's progress are caused by the fact we are living in a man's culture.
--Olga Knopf, 1935

Until the sky is the limit, as it is for men, men as well as women will suffer, because all society is affected when half of it is denied equal opportunity for full development.
--Mary Barnett Gilson, 1940

. . . until opportunity is as free from sex discrimination as the right to vote finally came to be, no man has any right to criticize women for failure to measure up to men.
--Mary Barnett Gilson, 1940