Carrie Chapman Catt, a leader in the women's suffrage movement in its last years (leading the more "conservative" faction), was also the founder of the League of Women Voters after suffrage was won, and a founder of the Women's Peace Party during World War I.
Selected Carrie Chapman Catt Quotations
• The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guarantee of your liberty. (From "On Women Voting" 1920)
• To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.
• This world taught woman nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public, and said the sex had no orators.
• When a just cause reaches its flood-tide, as ours has done in that country, whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power.
• There are two kinds of restrictions upon human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by public opinion.
• There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.
• Just as the world war is no white man's war, but every man's war, so is the struggle for woman suffrage no white woman's struggle, but every woman's struggle.
• The answer to one is the answer to all. Government by "the people" is expedient or it is not. If it is expedient, then obviously all the people must be included.
• Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government.
• Frances Perkins: "The door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats." (to Carrie Chapman Catt)
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About These Quotes
Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection © Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2009. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.
Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Carrie Chapman Catt Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/carrie_catt.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online sources including this page)
