Freedwoman

“ You think there are few women who are stifled by the burden of their freedom! And so you don’t want to admit that such women, from aversion to your cultured life, from love of the unusual, and from love, of course, of me, are able to become slaves! ”

“ She talked of freedom until some pious prudes really suspected she meant license, and she predicted that the time would come when the genius of woman would rise superior to the imposed trammels of sex. She should have lived in the present age, when she would have seen woman’s struggles for emancipation, as exhibited in the French female clubs, and the German free associations, to say nothing of the free inquirers and declaimers against female slavery in this country. ”

“ Secondly, he would reduce woman to insignificance, having her rule by arts and small devices; making her the inferior of man, on whom she is dependent and to whose caprice she is bound to submit,--a sort of toy or slave, engrossed only with domestic duties, like the woman of antiquity. He would give new rights and liberties to man, but none to woman as man's equal,--thus keeping her in a dependence utterly irreconcilable with the bold freedom which he otherwise advocates. ”

“ It has been the means of sending to their graves unknown, unknelled, and unnamed, thousands of women whose high intellects have been wasted, and whose powers for good have been paralysed and undeveloped. To the subjection and degradation of woman I ascribe the sufferings and crimes of humanity, nor will Society be ever truly raised, or ennobled, or perfected until woman’s freedom has been granted, and she takes her rightful place as the equal of man. ”

“ And what women—again, the best or those less worthy? Has woman been freed from subjection, from an inferior place in the scheme of life, only to become so intoxicated with a personal freedom, with her own personal ambition, that she fails to see what emancipation really means? Will she be contented merely to imitate man rather than to work out a destiny of her own? We think not. When the first flush of freedom has passed, the pendulum will turn again and woman will find a truer place than she knows now or has known. ”

“ May I ask you to bring to that labor as fair a spirit, as unprejudiced an outlook, as just a decision as he would have done?
I ask this not as a partisan of woman's rights, but as a lover of the human race. In this faint dawn of woman's day, I discern not woman's development of freedom merely, but the promise of that higher, finer, purer civilization which is to redeem the world, the lack of which makes men tyrants and women slaves. ”

“ In the education and elevation of women, then, lies the great hope of the future. Leading Freethinkers have always seen this. Shelley's great cry, "Can man be free if woman be a slave?" is one witness, and Mill's great essay on The Subjection of Women is another. ”

“ It is one of the most absurd notions derived from eighteenth century enlightenment that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man. Among all savages and barbarians of the lower and middle stages, sometimes even of the higher stage, women not only have freedom but are held in high esteem. ”

“ Already some women to whom a profession or mental eminence has given exceptional freedom [Pg 89] show us in society that women can be free and yet be sweet. Indeed they almost demonstrate the Feminist contention that women must be free before they are sweet, for are not these women—of whom all of us can name a few—the noblest and most desirable of their kind? The New Woman is like a freshly painted railing: whoever touches it will stain his hands, but the railing will dry in time. ”

“ Yet now, if ever, women must be true to the cause of liberty. They had been, through all the ages, willing martyrs to the general good. Now it was laid upon them to assume the responsibilities of a new crusade, to undertake a fresh martyrdom, and this time it was for themselves. Leagued against them was half--quite half--of their sex. Vanity and prettiness, dalliance and dependence were their characteristics. ”

“ Roland, has made the remark that in order to free woman, man, the workingman, must first be freed,—the economic conditions must first undergo a universal change. Then why, in freedom’s name, is woman’s cause not more frequently urged as an argument to that end? O, that woman herself would only awake to a sense of her condition! O, sisters, awake! Hasten the advent of the coming day that proclaims your freedom from the tyranny of man, by aiding him to obtain the rights that are justly his. ”

“ Its motives in thus marching across the path of feminine emancipation were probably more complicated and confused than that alternative suggests, and sheer vanity abounded in the mixture. But undoubtedly that extremity is the vanishing extremity of these things. The new freewoman is going to be a grave and capable being, soberly dressed, and imposing her own decency and neutrality of behaviour upon the men she meets. And along the line of sober costume and simple and restrained behaviour that the freewoman is marking out, the married woman will also escape to new measures of freedom. ”

“ The Hall of Liberty stands here to day as a living witness to the desire of woman to be heard. It was six years ago that I first saw it in my dreams. It is reality now, and will endure through all time, as a memorial of the first great effort made by woman to shake off the chains of slavery, that ever since our knowledge of man began, have held her a prisoner in the gilded gaols of inactivity and helplessness. I stand here to-day prepared to deny that woman is the inferior of man, either in mental capacity or physical strength, provided always that she be given equal advantages with him. ”

“ How does the objector know that women do not desire equality and freedom? He never knew a woman who did not, or would not, desire it for herself individually. It would be very simple to suppose that, if they do desire it, they will say so. Their position is like that of the tenants or laborers who vote against their own political interests to please their landlords or employers; with the unique addition that submission is inculcated on them from childhood, as the peculiar attraction and grace of their character. ”

“ Was it because he had just been reading an article in a new number of the Quarterly, on "Contemporary Feminism," with mingled amazement and revolt, roused by some of the strange facts collected by the writer? So women everywhere—many women at any rate—were turning indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections, servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the individuality and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long marriage ”

“ Every woman, whether of high or low condition, of humble powers or vigorous intellect, has a duty to perform, and she is false to the honor and rights of her sex if she do not array herself on the side of freedom. ”

“ I know that my objection on the score of the incapacity of women is quite as applicable to that of men; but is it a reason, because you have admitted the right of the ignorant masses of men who had not demanded it, to show yourselves equally unwise with respect to women who are in the same position? I will correct myself, gentlemen, of what you term my aristocratic spirit, when I see your political freedmen comprehending the tendencies of civilization, and making use of their right to drive the abettors of the past to despair by promoting the triumph of liberty and equality. ”

“ So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it will in the end be worth every taunt and groan. Today the dreams of the mothers are coming true. ”

“ One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is to find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none other than the need of personal felicity—a need as lively and profound in the heart of woman as of man—and the supreme necessity for a discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the gravest danger. ”

“ The femme libre (free woman) of the new social order may, indeed, escape the charge of neglecting her family and her household by contending that it is "not her vocation to become a wife and a mother." Why then, we ask, is she constituted a woman at all? Merely that she should become a sort of second-rate man? We have already declared, and we repeat, that we wish a free career for every talent. ”

“ Now, God recognizes as liberty only that which is extended to both sexes, and not to one alone; so he has prescribed that all the germs of social evils, as the savage state, barbarism, civilization, should have no other pivot than the enthrallment of women; and that all the germs of social good, as the sixth, seventh and eighth period, should have no other pivot, no other compass, than the progressive affranchisement of the weaker sex. ”

“ She had never known what real freedom was; women of the comfortable class—and men, too, for that matter—usually are born into the petty slavery of conventions at least, and know nothing else their whole lives through—never know the joy of the thought and the act of a free mind and a free heart. ”

“ From its sources ages ago, amid the protests which we know barbaric women must have made against the cruel wrongs done their sex, we clearly trace its course through the centuries, moving slowly but majestically onward, gathering momentum with each century, each generation, until just before us lies the golden sea of woman's full liberty. ”

“ In claiming intellectual equality for women, she begs them not to permit themselves to be despoiled of the “honest liberty so painfully won—the liberty of knowing, thinking, working, shining.” In spite of her courageous words, however, this paragon of so many talents and virtues, the glory of her sex and the pride of her city, asserts herself in a half-deprecating way, as if she were asking pardon for presuming to publish her little verses, and shelters herself behind the admiring friends who are willing to “take half the shame.” ”

“ At the very bottom of the social heap, bearing the accumulated burden of the whole mass, was woman. All the tyrannies of soul and mind and body which the race endured, weighed at last with cumulative force upon her. ”

“ The impulse to set herself free had risen again with overmastering force; yet the freedom could only be an exchange of calamity. There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. ”

“ And for that reason it will be rejected by many women to-day. At present the inspiration towards freedom in the Woman's Movement has involved a tendency to follow individual paths, without waiting to consider to what end they lead. There has arisen a sort of glamour about freedom. No one of us can be free, for no one of us stands alone; we are all members one of another. And woman's destiny is rooted in the race. ”

“ And the difficulty of the problem consists, above all, in this: that, although it is a hard, cruel, plainly iniquitous thing to deprive a woman of liberty and subject her to a règime of tyranny in order to constrain her to live for the race and not for herself, yet when liberty is granted her to live for herself, to satisfy her personal desires, she abuses that liberty more readily than a man does, and more than a man forgets her duties toward the race. ”

“ The emancipation of woman has practically ceased to be the freedom which enlarges soul and heart. It is conducted quite officially, like a business, and dogmatically, too, without feeling for the pulsating manifoldness of life, and has become an egoistic self-concentrated campaign. On this account I, and many others of my generation, with many more of the younger generation, stand outside of the movement, although we actively wished, and still wish, for the freedom of woman. ”

“ His own exclamation: "Women should be free—as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. ”

“ If, as we have reason to believe, as late as the beginning of the second or Middle Status of barbarism, instead of following the father of her children to his house as his slave, a woman remained in a home owned, or at least controlled jointly by herself, her mother, her sisters, and her daughters, it is plain that a state of female independence existed which was incompatible with female subjection. ”

“ The visionary who cherishes the hope of a renovated society in which all shall be satisfied, the woman who flings herself into prison in the expectation that through her sacrifice the freedom of women will be attained, is a figure to the outward eye, indistinguishable in its obscurity from the multitude around who jeer and wonder and applaud. ”

“ 'Can man be free if woman be a slave? ”

“ If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves? ”

“ A woman is like a darky, who fancies that 'freedom' means three-quarters of the sidewalk, or a small boy who imagines that doing as he pleases means smashing his sister's toys and stealing sweets from the pantry. ”