When I first came to the House of Commons and walked out into the lobby, men sprang to their feet. I asked them to sit down since I'd come to walk around. I didn't want them doing me favours.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was very pushed to look a certain way and act a certain way, and it wasn't me, but I played by their rules to get my foot in the door.
The door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats.
Men who consistently leave the toilet seat up secretly want women to get up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and fall in.
Indeed I did not stand as a beggar at the Parliament door, for I never was at the Parliament-House, nor stood I ever at the door as I do know or can remember; not as a petitioner I am sure.
Sometimes I've been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.
You see, I'd not a very good place here; the fellows looked on me as a sort of special object of ridicule, on account of the hat and cane, walk, and so on, though I thought I'd got over that by this time.
My duty to the army and to the republic whose battles we were waging forbade me assuming a position of seeming hostility to any portion of the brave men under my command.
You ask men in office to be honest; I ask them to serve the public.
I directed the men in our barque to approach near the savages, and hold their arms in readiness to do their duty in case they notice any movement of these people against us.
I was in the Commons recently and saw a young lady wearing a nice pair of shoes. I said I liked them and she said my shoes were the reason she became involved in politics.