Children are the anchors that hold us to life. Sophocles 497- 406 BC

 Plutarch, Greek historian and biographer who lived 46-119 AD said ‘Mothers ought to bring up and nurse their own children; for they bring them up with greater affection and with greater concern, as loving them from the heart, and so to speak, every inch of them”

We are not bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation – Abigail Adams 1744 -1818

There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother… Rights are liable to be perverted to wrongs when we are incapable of rightly exercising them – Sarah Hale- 1788-1879 writer of “Mary had a little lamb” and promoter of the Thanksgiving national holiday

In the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”
― Lucretia Mott 1793- 1880

I believe the laws which deprive married women of their rights and privileges have a tendency to lessen them in their own estimation as moral and responsible beings  Sarah Grimke 1792- 1873

Motherhood must be revalued, not over-emphasized, not sentimentalized and surrounded with an aura of glory but viewed in an intelligent sensible light. To this end I recommend motherhood endowment. Through motherhood endowment  mother of tomorrow will escape perpetual tutelage.. Setting her free will repay the world.  Harriet Stanton Blatch  1856- 1940

Your laws degrade rather than exalt woman. Your customs cripple rather than free .Your system of taxation is alike ungenerous and unjust.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815- 1902

Even where a woman does all the work of a family, rising early and late taking rest, cooking and washing, cleaning and mending, and performing all sorts of housework her husband will talk of ‘supporting her’ and never seems to think that he owes her any wages for her labor. Lillie Devereux Blake 1833- 1913  “Women’s Place Today”

Think you that the woman who has worked hard all her days in helping her husband to accumulate a large property consents to the law that places this wholly at his disposal? Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815- 1902

The labor of women in the house certainly enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could and in this way women are economic factors in society. Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860-1935 Women and economics”

The home is the nursery of the infinite – William Channing 1780- 1842

The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom – Henry Ward Beecher  1813 – 1887

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.Winston Churchill  1874 – 1965

No man is poor who has had a godly mother – Abraham Lincoln 1809- 1865

A hearth is no hearth unless a woman sit by it – Richard Jefferies 1848- 1887

The soul is healed by being with children – Fyodor Dostoevsky  1821- 1881

We do not fight men. We fight bad principles – 1881 Ernestine Ross 1810- 1892

Wives by their labor and economy in domestic matters really earn on an average as much as their husband Virginia Penny 1826 – 1913

Woman has been the great umpaid laborer of the world. Susan B. Anthony 1820- 1906

When Susan Anthony rose to call the meeting to order she was deluged with many beautiful floral tributes and said’ Well this is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then- but they were not roses” Ida Harper 1851- 1931

The assumption that women however hard they work in the household do not support themselves but are supported by their husband, that they earn nothing and own nothing- that assumption upon which all our property laws are based is so abominable that I cannot find word to express my opinion of it. Theodora Youmans 1863 – 1932

And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! (and she bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power). I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns..I could work as much and eat as much as a man..I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a’n’t I a woman?”Den dat little man he say women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wan’t a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?” .. From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do wid Him.”  Sojourner Truth 1797- 1883

I believe in the same pay for the same work. Don’t you?  Louisa May Alcott 1832- 1888

In marriage the independence of the husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual and their obligation reciprocal Lucretia Mott 1793 – 1880

Farm women have always been partners in their husband’s businesses but no one ever noticed – Laura Ingalls Wilder 1867- 1957

No woman can become or remain degraded without all women suffering- Emily Murphy  1868- 1933

If women want to participate in the national pension plan they should be able to  Sir Richard Cartwright Canada 1835- 1912

Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.”
― Mahatma Gandhi  1869- 1948

Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother – Lin Yutang 1895- 1976

What’s done to children, they will do to society – Karl Menninger

 1893 – 1990

I would venture that Anon, who wrote so man poems without signing them, was a woman- Virginia Woolf- a Room of One’s Own 1882- 1941

Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just  did it backwards and in high heels- Faith Whitlesey 1939- 2018

No one has ever objected to women working. The only thing they have objected to is paying women for working- Gladys Strum 1906 – 2005

I consider it downright impertinence for a man on a farm to talk about supporting his wife. When she cooks his meals and sews and mends for him and his children from dawn until dusk, what is she doing if she is not supporting herself?  Francis Marion Beynon  1884 – 1951

Women who set a low value on themselves make life hard for all women.

The economic dependence of women is perhaps the greatest injustice that has been done to us, and has worked the greatest injury to the race – Nellie McClung 1873 – 1951

It is dangerous to make a new norm that every woman must work outside the home in order to achieve self-worth  Arlene Rossen Cardozo -1938- 2014 “Woman at Home”

The housewife who remains at home is just as much a producer of goods and services as the paid worker. Canadian Royal Commission on the Status of Women 1970

Children are people but they are also objects of labour. While children are young, child care is also full-time work. Meg Luxton 1980 – “More than a labour of love: three generations of women’s work in the home”

Women are frequently referred to as poultry. We cluck at hen parties. When we aren’t henpecking men, we are egging them on. In youth we are chicks. Mothers watch over their broods. Later we are old biddies with an empty-nest syndrome.  Is it just a coincidence that so many women’s wages are chicken feed? (Association of Operating Nurses Journal twentieth century

Housewives have been told that their contributions are priceless but they receive fewer of the benefits our society provides even its lowest paid members – no salary, no unemployment insurance, no federal support, no pension. Rae Andre  1981 “Homemakers; the forgotten workers’

Women cannot attain economic equality as long as the major economic role they perform is outside the economy and is disregarded in policy formulation. As long as we exclude the household and the labour performed within it from the legitimate economic framework of our society, women cannot attain equality and they will not be able to share in the benefits of society proportionately to the contribution they make of it, June Menzies 1975  “The uncounted house; the perception of women in policy formation”

The parent  is and remains the first and most important teacher that the child will ever have – Rabbi Kassel Abelson 1990s

Your conscience is what your mother told you before you were six years old – Brock Chisholm, Toronto psychiatrist – 1946

A woman should be able to choose whether to work outside the home or in it.  Johnnie Tillman 1972

What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for heir babies is best after all Dr. Benjamin Spock 1903 – 1998

In the second stage we could move for some very simple aids that make it possible for mothers or fathers who want to stay home and take care of their own children to do so with some economic compensation that might make the difference. Betty Friedan 1921- 2006

Money should be paid to mothers of small children not as welfare with al the stigma attached to that status but as a return to the policy of a mother’s pension- payment for the services these women perform. Daniel Patrick Moynihan  1927 – 2003

We want to keep the family allowance paid automatically, never mind whether the men are working or not working, on strike or supplementary benefits, paid all time through sickness, unemployment strikes or breakdown of marriage. The product that our housework produces is people. We produce labor power.  Suzie Fleming 1973

The care sector of the economy cannot be treated as a bottomless well from which water can always be drawn . Isabella Bakker 1956 – present  “The strategic silence: gender and economic policy” 1994   “Unpaid work and macroeconomics” 1998,”Where are the women? Gender equity, budgets and Canadian public policy” 2008

The economic dependence of women is perhaps the greatest injustices that has been done to us and has worked the greatest injury to the race. Nellie McClung   1873 – 1951

Housewives are not considered to be part of the productive labor force. The fact that their work is not included in the national accounts is a clear indication of this. Nevertheless, their invisible and unpaid work ensures the maintenance and renewal of the current labour force at the same time that it produces the next generation of workers.Monique Proulx  1978 “Five Million Women: the value of household work”

Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work. C. S. Lewis 1898 – 1963

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against. No better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning- Kate Millett  1934- 2017

Mothers and housewives are the vacationless class- Anne Morrow Lindberg 1906- 2001

The phrase “Working mother” is redundant- Erma Bombeck 1927- 1996

 “Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.”
― bell hooks, Gloria Jean Watkins 1952- present

 “The “feminine” woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.”
― Susan Faludi,  1959- present

“Men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing…[and recognizes that]precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else…  (Waring also famously said that when she saw a mother with a child, she knew she was watching a woman at work )
― Marilyn Waring  1952 – present