In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Women had a rights movement where they fought for changes. Men... don't band together in quite that way. It happens not in such a public-cascade way as in a house-to-house way.
When I started giving talks about women's history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, 'Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.' It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.
When the women's liberation movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, at the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe in the basic principles of any of those philosophies.
The rights of women are to the 21st century what civil rights were to the 20th.
Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.
As a woman standing up here, we have to fight for the rights of women.
Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.
I demanded more rights for women because I know what women had to put up with.
I'm not obsessed with the rights of women; it can be a bit excessive. I want to put men and women on an equal footing. I think we are equal but different.
During the 19th-century struggle for women's rights in America, many saw a competition between rights for black people and those for women.