While we honour religion and believe it to be a powerful factor in elevating our race, we discriminate, as we hope our readers will also do, between it and dogmatism. Dogmatism has been the bane of civilization and a curse to mankind. It has degraded our sex, stifled intelligent inquiry, and persecuted every independent reformer and every noble cause.
Tennessee Celeste ClaflinWith all her masculine vigour and glory, Greece fell, gradually atrophied, because one half of her had been, of set purpose, intellectually and politically paralyzed.
Tennessee Celeste ClaflinThe history of woman is the history of the continued and universal oppression of one sex by the other. The emancipation of woman is her restoration to equal rights and privileges with man.... Need we wonder, then, at the sad spectacle which humanity offers us? Its hideous wars, its social abominations, its foul creeds, its treacheries, vices, wants, diseases, lusts, tyrannies, and crimes are the natural outcome of the subjugation of one half of the human race by the other.
Tennessee Celeste Claflin... no community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.
Tennessee Celeste ClaflinLet us have a fair field! This is all we ask, and we will be content with nothing less. The finger of evolution, which touches everything, is laid tenderly upon women. They have on their side all the elements of progress, and its spirit stirs within them. They are fighting, not for themselves alone, but for the future of humanity. Let them have a fair field!
Tennessee Celeste Claflin