Questions Topics

... while our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth century logic. They leave nothing to be desired generally in regard to gallantry and chivalry, but they actually do not seem sometimes to have outgrown that old contemporary of chivalry—the idea that women may stand on pedestals or live in doll houses,... but they must not furrow their brows with thought or attempt to help men tug at the great questions of the world.
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)

In asking for a voice in the government under which we live, have we been pursuing a shadow for fifty years? In seeking political power, are we abdicating that social throne where they tell us our influence is unbounded? No, no! The right of suffrage is no shadow, but a substantial entity that the citizen can seize and hold for his own protection and his country’s welfare. A direct power over one’s own person and property, an individual opinion to be counted, on all questions of public interest, are better than indirect influence, be that ever so far-reaching.
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)

Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvelous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man who had ever been in politics in this country, could—his admirers said—have brought together so many hostile interests and made so fantastic a combination. Some men went so far as to maintain that he would “rope in the President himself before the old man had time to swap knives with him.” The beauty of his work consisted in the skill with which he evaded questions of principle. As he wisely said, the issue now involved was not one of principle but of power.
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)