Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an unconventional American reformer, American leader of the women’s suffrage movement. In 1872, she ran for President of the United States. Woodhull was also the first woman to run for the U.S. presidency. Inspirational Victoria Woodhull quotes will encourage you to think a little deeper than you usually would and broaden your perspective.
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Most Famous Victoria Woodhull Quotes
There are none so ignorant but they may be taught. So, too, are there none so unfortunate in their understanding of the true and high relation of the sexes as not to be amenable to the right kind of instruction.
I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.
I believe in Spiritualism; I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the damnation by which men corrupt God’s most holy institution of sexual relations.
To go behind a man’s hall-door is mean, cowardly, unfair opposition.
I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.
Is it fair to treat a woman worse than a man, and then revile her because she is a woman?
No legal ceremony–no election of the woman–no penalty for the perfidy of the man–no law to compel him to do his duty, no compensation for the poor woman who is turned adrift like the girl of the street, penniless, to sell herself on the best possible terms. This is Divine marriage, or Moses and the Bible lie; and this is Bible divorce–putting away!
I boldly entered the arena of business and exercised the rights I already possessed.
It is extremely unfortunate that an editor’s own life and practice should be notoriously at variance with his written principles.
Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.
Women have no government.
I supposed that to marry was to be transported to a heaven not only of happiness but of purity and perfection.
It is not great wealth in a few individuals that proves a country is prosperous, but great general wealth evenly distributed among the people. . .
My judges preach against free love openly, practice it secretly.
Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped.
While others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it.
The uses of government should be to foster, protect and promote the possession of equality.
All talk of women’s rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them.
Inspirational Victoria Woodhull Quotes
There is something wrong with a government that makes women the legal property of their husbands. The whole system needs changing, but men will never make the changes. They have too much to lose.
Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.
One of the charges made against me is that I lived in the same house with my former husband, Dr. Woodhull, and my present husband, Col. Blood. The fact is a fact.
I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint.
Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child nor think of murdering one before its birth.
The sin of all time has been the exercise of assumed powers. This is the essence of tyranny.
By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?
The American nation, in its march onward and upward, can not publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half its citizens by narrow statutes.
Woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life.
I went with my husband and an innocent child to California. I went to a theatrical manager and asked him to allow me to earn money enough on the stage to buy our tickets home. He did.
Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.
The wife who submits to sexual intercourse against her wishes or desires, virtually commits suicide; while the husband who compels it, commits murder.
Love is that which exists to do good, not merely to get good.
When I first saw the light of day on this planet, it seemed as if I had been rudely awakened from a death-like sleep.
It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.
I offer you the remedy of Free Love as an antidote for enforced lust, and the world will have to take it before the disease can be cured.
I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Top Victoria Woodhull Quotes
Women have every right; they just have to excercise them.
If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.
When I found I had given birth to a human wreckage, to a child that was an imbecile, my heart was broken.
I endeavor to make the most of everything.
The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression . . . by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation, or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained.
My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism.
The women of the country have the power in their own hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order.
So after all I am a very promiscuous free lover. I want the love of you all, promiscuously.
Woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.
I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.
there are scores of thousands of women who are denominated prostitutes, and who are supported by hundreds of thousands of men who should, for like reasons, also be denominated prostitutes, since what will change a woman into a prostitute must also necessarily change a man into the same.
You are all aware that my private life has been pictured to the public by the press of the country with the intent to make people believe me to be a very bad woman.
A new educational system in which all children born shall have the same advantage of physical, industrial, mental and moral culture, and thus be equally prepared at maturity to enter upon active, responsible and useful lives. . . . In so doing, it strikes a fatal blow at . . . the most demoralizing of all monopolies. . . educational superiority.
I and others of my sex find ourselves controlled by a form of government in the inauguration of which we had no voice.
Political matters are developing so fast that we must not let a single thing slip without use.
If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?
I imagined that the priestly ceremony was perfect sanctification, and that the sin of sins was for either husband or wife to be false to that relation.
All that is good and commendable now existing would continue to exist if all marriage laws were repealed tomorrow . . .
For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity.
I shall make it my business to take my chances in the matter of libel suits.
A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.
Hundreds, thousands, aye, millions of human beings, men, women and children, wander the streets of our cities and the highways of our country, hungry, ragged and cold, vainly seeking in this land of plenty, where physical want should be unknown.
I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable I trust that my sincerity will not be called into question.
I do not assume to speak for anyone. I know I speak in direct opposition to the wishes of many by whom I am surrounded.
I know that my companions from the moment of birth were heaven’s choicest souls. I grew side by side with them, in fact all the education and inspiration came over them.
It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?
Denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.
I was divorced from Dr. Woodhull for reasons which to me were sufficient, but I was never his enemy.
Strike as much and as hard as you please, only don’t do it in the dark so that I cannot know who is my enemy.
The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus…Whoever has read the ‘Weekly’ knows I hold abortion (except to save the life of the mother) to be just as much murder as the killing of a person after birth is murder.
Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputations on the line in support of an idea or enterprise.
I believed that a husband must necessarily be an angel, impossible of corruption or contamination.
Good care is taken that each state shall have its prisons . . . and other asylums; but not one building is erected nor one law enforced that would teach the people how not to contribute to these over-crowded receptacles of human misery . . . . All of our politicians are ready to deal with the effects, but not one of them is brave enough to penetrate the substratum of society and deal with the cause.
No man who respects his mother or loves his sister, can speak disparagingly of any woman; however low she may seem to have sunk, she is still a woman. I want every man to remember this. Every woman is, or, at some time, has been a sister or daughter.
