| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
| |
| |
| NUMBER: | 65280 |
| QUOTATION: | The American nation, in its march onward and upward, can not publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half its citizens by narrow statutes. The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression of that will by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation, or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927), U.S. suffragist, social reformer, author, and publisher; relocated to England in 1877. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, ch. 23, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1882).
From an address delivered before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 11, 1871. The previous year, Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, had founded Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a journal which advocated, among other reforms, woman suffrage, socialism, and free love. In 1872, the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto would appear in its pages, and Woodhull would become the first woman candidate for the Presidency of the United States, nominated by the People’s party with the famous former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Douglass, too, supported woman suffrage. |
| |
| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
|
|
