#harriet martineau
Celebrating International Women’s Day (March 8), we’ve got a handful of 19th century (and one 20th century) literary quotations by, for, and about the position and power of women:
- “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” –George Eliot (Marian Evans, 1819-1880), Middlemarch (1872)
- “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” –Charlotte Bronte(1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)
- “‘I am sure I am,’ said Margaret, in a firm, decided tone. ‘Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used-not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.’” –Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell(1810-1865), North and South (1855)
- “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.” –Jane Austen(1775-1817), Persuasion (1817)
- “The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.” –Queen Victoria (1819-1901) [source unknown]
“Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts — suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!” –Florence Nightingale(1820-1910), Cassandra (written 1860; published posthumously)
- “'What help?’ I asked.
'You’d scorn my help,–as Nature’s self, you say,
Has scorned to put her music in my mouth,
Because a woman’s. Do you now turn round
And ask for what a woman cannot give? […]
–am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?
Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,
Yet competent to love, like [GOD]?’"
–Elizabeth Barrett Browning(1806-1861), Aurora Leigh (1856)- " As all virtues nourish each other, and can no otherwise be nourished, the consequence of the admitted fallacy is that men are, after all, not nearly so brave as they ought to be; nor women so gentle. But what is the manly character till it be gentle? The very word magnanimity cannot be thought of in relation to it till it becomes mild, Christ-like. Again, what can a woman be, or do, without bravery? Has she not to struggle with the toils and difficulties which follow upon the mere possession of a mind ? Must she not face physical and moral pain, physical and moral danger ? Is there a day of her life in which there are not conflicts wherein no one can help her— perilous work to be done, in which she can have neither sympathy nor aid? Let her lean upon man as much as he will, how much is it that he can do for her ? from how much can he protect her ? From a few physical perils, and from a very few social evils. This is all.” –Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), “WOMAN. General Treatise on the Education, Morals, Religion, and Overprotection of Women.” (1834-7)
- “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their FASCINATING graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them, that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.” –Mary Wollstonecraft(1759-1797), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
- ’“Our country,”’ she will say, 'throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. “Our” country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. “Our” country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For,’ the outsider will say, 'in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’“ –Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Three Guineas (1938)
Every year, I return to these gems. Ten doesn’t even scratch the surface of these texts, these authors, or the glorious history of women whose thoughts have changed the world.
