Boston Women's Memorial

Boston Women's Memorial. . , Boston Women’s Memorial, Lucy Stone , Born in Brookfield, she was one of the first Massachusetts women to graduate from college. She was an ardent abolitionist, a renowned orator, and the founder of the Woman’s Journal, the foremost women’s suffrage publication of its era., Let woman’s sphere be bounded only by her capacity. , Speech, Woman’s Rights Convention, Worcesteer, 1851, The legal right for woman to record her opinion wherever opinions count is the tool for whose ownership we ask. , Woman’s Journal, 1891, From the first years to which my memory stretches I have been a disappointed woman. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer. , Speech, National Woman’s Rights Convention, Cincinnati, 1855, I believe the world grows better because I believe that in the eternal order there is always a movement swift or slow toward what is right and true. , Last published statement,The Independent, 1893, Abigail Adams , 1744 – 1818 , Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, she was the wife of the second president of the United States and the mother of the sixth. Her letters establish her as a perceptive social and political commentator and a strong voice for women’s advancement. , … and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. , Letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776, If we were to count our years by the revolutions we have witnessed, we might number them with the Antediluvians. So rapid have been the changes: that the mind, tho fleet in its progress, has been outstripped by them, and we are left like statues gazing at what we can neither fathom, or comprehend. , Letter to Mercy Otis Warren, March 9, 1807, Phillis Wheatley , ca. 1753 – 1784 , Born in West Africa and sold as a slave from the ship Phillis in colonial Boston, she was a literary prodigy whose 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was the first book published by an African writer in America. , Imagination! who can sing thy force? , Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? , Soaring through air to find the bright abode, , Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God, , We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, , And leave the rolling universe behind: , From star to star the mental optics rove, , Measure the skies, and range the realms above. , There in one view we grasp the mighty whole, , Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul. , I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate , Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: , What pangs excruciating must molest, , What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? , Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d , That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: , Such, such my case. And can I then but pray , Others may never feel tyrannic sway? , To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, … in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance … the same Principle lives in us. , Letter to the Reverend Samson Occom, February 11, 1774