Victoria Woodhull

Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped.

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 would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.

I and others of my sex find ourselves controlled by a form of government in the inauguration of which we had no voice.

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.

I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint.

For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity.

I endeavor to make the most of everything.

By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?

My judges preach against free love openly, practice it secretly.

Denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.

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.

My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily.

I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.

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?

While others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it.

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.

Women have no government.

If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.

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.

Is it fair to treat a woman worse than a man, and then revile her because she is a woman?

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.

I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.

Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.

When I found I had given birth to a human wreckage, to a child that was an imbecile, my heart was broken.

Woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life.

To go behind a man’s hall-door is mean, cowardly, unfair opposition.