The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.
Emmeline PankhurstRead
I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed, we have brought the government of England to this position, that it has to face this alternative: either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the determination of women to gain their right to vote, highlighting the drastic consequences of ignoring their demands.
Emmeline Pankhurst’s quote addresses the struggle for women's suffrage by presenting a stark choice to the government of England: either accept women's right to vote or face severe consequences. It underscores the urgency of the women’s movement and challenges the belief that women are incapable of achieving significant societal change, demanding equal rights as essential rather than an option.
Themes
WomenVoteSuffrageChangeEquality
In practice
Example use cases
During a women's rights rally, this quote can inspire attendees to push for voting rights.
More from Emmeline Pankhurst
All quotes →Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.
Emmeline PankhurstRead
Justice and judgment lie often a world apart.
Emmeline PankhurstRead
Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.
Emmeline PankhurstRead
You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.
Emmeline PankhurstRead
You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under.
Emmeline PankhurstRead
Similar quotes
The women's movement and the result that I get to benefit from and my generation gets to benefit from is that we might be doing housework, but we might not be. And we get to choose, and we get to negotiate and work that out with our prospective husbands or with our husbands.
Margaret HooverRead
The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.
Beatrix PotterRead
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
Margo JeffersonRead
We should not forget that in the '60s, George Wallace's motto was 'segregation forever,' and that he did nothing to deter bombings and other acts of violence and, by his actions, condoned them.
Coretta Scott KingRead
I hope the day will never come when the American nation will be the champion of the status quo. Once that happens, we shall have forfeited, and rightly forfeited, the support of the unsatisfied, of those who are the victims of inevitable imperfections, of those who, young in years or spirit, believe that they can make a better world and of those who dream dreams and want to make their dreams to come true.
John Foster DullesRead
I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.
Jane SmileyRead