Women's suffrage quotes, and where each one comes from
Women's suffrage quotations are only as reliable as the document behind them, and most of the lines circulating under the campaigners' names have no document behind them at all.
This site prints five quotations in total, each one taken from a text that can be named and dated: the Declaration of Sentiments and the ninth resolution adopted at Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848, one fragment of the Fourteenth Amendment, the complete text of the Nineteenth, and the opening sentence of Florence Kelley's Philadelphia speech of 22 July 1905. Everything else the campaign said is described here rather than quoted, because a quotation without a source is how a misattribution starts, and two of the lines most often printed under these women's names are exactly that.
The five quotations, and the document behind each
The five below are printed with the document, the date and the occasion, which is the minimum a quotation needs before anyone should repeat it.
From the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted at the Woman's Rights Convention, Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York, 19 and 20 July 1848. The Declaration was modeled on the Declaration of Independence and carried one hundred signatures, sixty eight women and thirty two men. Its charge against the existing order opens:
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
The ninth resolution, put to the same convention. Eleven resolutions were put and ten passed unanimously. This one, the demand for the vote, did not. Frederick Douglass spoke for it and it carried by a narrow margin:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified 1868. The amendment introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time, in the phrase that counted representation:
the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age
The Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on 4 June 1919 and certified on 26 August 1920. This is the complete text, both sentences, and it is short enough that there is no excuse for paraphrasing it:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Florence Kelley, at Philadelphia on 22 July 1905, on child labor and woman suffrage. Kelley was Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois from 1893 and led the National Consumers League from 1899. The speech opens with the count:
We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread.
What Sojourner Truth is famous for, and why her most famous line is absent
Sojourner Truth is famous for a speech she gave at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851, and for a life before it that is documented independently of any speech. She was born enslaved in Ulster County, New York, as Isabella Baumfree, around 1797. She was freed by New York's emancipation law in 1827. She went to court to recover her son Peter, and she won.
The speech is the problem. Two texts of it exist and they are not versions of one another.
- The contemporaneous text is a report by Marius Robinson, who was present, published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on 21 June 1851, within weeks of the speech. It is not written in southern dialect and it does not contain the famous refrain in the form everybody knows.
- The familiar text was published by Frances Dana Barker Gage in 1863, twelve years after the event. It is the source of the refrain and it is the source of the dialect.
Truth was born and raised in New York and her first language was Dutch, which makes a southern dialect very unlikely as a record of how she spoke. This site therefore quotes neither text. Handing a reader a third version of a disputed speech is how the problem propagates, and the useful thing to know is not a line but the fact that there are two documents, only one of them written down by a witness.
Lucretia Mott, and quotations that have no document
Lucretia Mott, 1793 to 1880, contributed to the campaign at its origin: she was among the women delegates refused their seats at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, and it was there that she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met. The Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls followed on 19 and 20 July 1848, and the 1848 documents are the point at which the demand was made in writing.
Lines attributed to Mott circulate widely on quotation sites and in classroom material, usually without a date, a title or an occasion. None of them appears on this site. That is not a judgment that she never said them. It is the consequence of the rule above, applied without exceptions. Applied to Mott, that rule currently yields nothing, and saying so is more useful than filling the gap.
How to check a suffrage quotation before you use it
- Name the document. A convention report, a printed address, a newspaper account or a court record. If the only source offered is another quotation site, stop here.
- Date the document, not the event. The two are different, and the distance between them is where the Akron speech went wrong: 1851 for the speech, 1863 for the famous text.
- Ask whether the writer was present. Marius Robinson was in the room in Akron. That is why his report carries more weight than a later reconstruction, whatever the later one is quoted for.
- Compare the earliest printing with the famous version. When they differ in dialect, in structure or in the presence of the memorable line, the memorable line is the part to distrust.
- Describe the argument instead of quoting it when steps one to four fail. A summary of what somebody argued costs a reader nothing and claims nothing false.
The lines this site will not print
Three categories of line are refused here, and each is refused for a stated reason. The refrain the Akron speech is now known by is refused because it comes from the text published twelve years afterward and not from the report by the witness. The short declaration of confidence attached to Susan B. Anthony, 1820 to 1906, in later printings is refused because no document, date and occasion have been established for it here. Anything presented as a quotation from Alice Paul, 1885 to 1977, is refused on the same ground. Where a speech title is known, this site names the title, such as Anthony's Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? or Anna Howard Shaw's The Fundamental Principle of a Republic, delivered at Ogdensburg, New York, in 1915. Naming a speech is not quoting it, and it is the honest half of what most quotation pages promise.