Matilda Joslyn Gage Quotes

From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose.

Women should unite upon a platform of opposition to the teaching and aim of that ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom--the Church.

It is sometimes better to be a dead man than a live woman.

It has not been without bitter resistance by the clergy that woman's property and educational rights have advanced. Woman's anti-slavery work, her temperance work, her demand for personal rights, for political equality, for religious freedom and every step of kindred character has met with opposition from the church as a body and from the clergy as exponents of its views.

There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is liberty.

The law known as Marchetta, or Marquette, compelled newly married women to a most dishonorable servitude. They were regarded as the rightful prey of the Feudal Lord from one to three days after their marriage, and from this custom the eldest son of the serf was held as the son of the Lord.... Marquette was claimed by the Lord's Spiritual, as well as by the Lord's Temporal. The Church, indeed, was the bulwark of this base feudal claim.

The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her judgment, her own conscience, her own will.

While so much is said of the inferior intellect of woman, it is by a strange absurdity conceded that very many eminent men owe their station in life to their mothers.

... non-use of rights does not destroy them.

Woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself.

When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?

Both church and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has assumed the right to think for woman.

Do not allow the Church or State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment

When all humanity works for humanity, when the life-business of men and women becomes one united partnership in all matters which concern each, when neither sex, race, color, or previous condition is held as a bar to the exercise of human faculties, the world will hold in its hands the promise of a millennium which will work out its own fulfillment.

The soul must support its own supremacy or die.

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one-thousand generations back of them... Millions of women dead and gone are speaking through us today