When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?
ATTRIBUTION:
Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898), U.S. suffragist, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), U.S. suffragist, author, and social reformer, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), U.S. suffragist, author, and social reformer. As quoted in The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, ch. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and herself (1886).
Speaking before the U. S. House of Representatives on March 31, 1876, as President of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Gage was alluding to the common anti-suffrage argument that women might not vote wisely.
