About Ernestine Rose: Ernestine Louise Rose was an atheist feminist, individualist feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America.
Cultivate the frontal portion of her brain as much as that of man is cultivated, and she will stand his equal at least. Even now, where her mind has been called out at all, her intellect is as bright, as capacious, and as powerful as his.
Do you not yet understand what has made woman what she is? Then see what the sickly taste and perverted judgment of man now admires in woman.
Fathers like to have children good-natured, well-behaved, and comfortable, but how to put them in that desirable condition is out of their philosophy.
If any difference should be made by law between husband and wife, reason, justice and humanity, if their voices were heard, would dictate that it should be in her favor.
There is no reason against woman's elevation, but prejudices.
She had her reward! - that reward of which no enemie could deprive her, which no slanders could make less precious - the eternal reward of knowing that she had done her duty.
In case of separation, why should the children be taken from the protecting care of the mother? Who has a better right to them than she? How much do fathers generally do toward bringing them up?
In the laws of the land, she has no rights; in government she has no voice. And in spite of another principle recognized in this Republic, namely, that 'taxation without representation is tyranny,' she is taxed without being represented.
The main cause is a pernicious falsehood propagated against her being, namely that she is inferior by her nature. Inferior in what? What has man ever done that woman, under the same advantages could not do?
It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.
We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.
But say some, would you expose woman to the contact of rough, rude, drinking, swearing, fighting men at the ballot box? What a humiliating confession lies in this plea for keeping woman in the background!
Much is said about the burdens and responsibilities of married men. Responsibilities indeed there are, if they but felt them: but as to burdens what are they?
The few bright meteors in man's intellectual horizon could well be matched by women, were she allowed to occupy the same elevated position.
Blind submission in women is considered a virtue, while submission to wrong is itself wrong, and resistance to wrong is virtue alike in women as in man.
Why should women not be a martyr for her cause?
