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If women were once permitted to read Sophocles and work with logarithms, or to nibble at any side of the apple of knowledge, there would be an end forever to their sewing on buttons and embroidering slippers.

Anna Julia Cooper

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Anna Julia Cooper
Age: 105 †
Born: 1858
Born: August 10
Died: 1964
Died: February 27
Educator
Historian
Political Theorist
Suffragist
Writer
Raleigh
North Carolina
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper
Anna Julia Cooper
Black woman of the South
Anna Julia Haywood
Women
Apples
Embroidering
Work
Side
Sophocles
Would
Sides
Nibble
Education
Sewing
Forever
Slippers
Knowledge
Permitted
Read
Buttons
Ends
Apple

More quotes by Anna Julia Cooper

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Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.
Anna Julia Cooper
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... the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R's, a littlemusic and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Woman's cause is one and universal.
Anna Julia Cooper
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I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society.
Anna Julia Cooper
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The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.
Anna Julia Cooper
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It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice.
Anna Julia Cooper
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The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.
Anna Julia Cooper
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If our vaunted rule of the people does not breed nobler men and women than monarchies have done it must and will inevitably give place to something better.
Anna Julia Cooper
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... so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy.
Anna Julia Cooper
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... religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true and life is action, growth, development--begun now and ending never.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day - respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.
Anna Julia Cooper
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The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Teach [our girls] that there is a race with special needs which they and only they can help that the world needs and is already asking for their trained, efficient forces.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him.
Anna Julia Cooper
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... women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea.
Anna Julia Cooper
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No man can prophesy with another's parable.
Anna Julia Cooper