The Woman They Could Not Silence Quotes

“In the end, this is a book about power. Who wields it. Who owns it. And the methods they use. And above all, it's about fighting back.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“doctors were policing women who stepped outside society’s strictly defined gender spheres—work and intellect for men, home and children for women—in what could be described as a “medicalization of female behavior.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“It's a book that is set over 160 year ago. A lot has changed. A lot hasn't. We are only just beginning to appreciate exactly how a person's powerlessness may lead to struggles with their mental health. With our understanding, statics showing higher rates of mental illness in women, people of color and other disenfranchised groups become translated into truth. NOT a biological deficiency as doctors first thought. But a cultural creation that, if wanted to, we could do something about.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Woman is too volatile and spiritual a being to be kept down by mere brute force,”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“A peace based on injustice…is a treacherous sleep whose waking is death. Your honor lies in waking out of it.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“As Elizabeth put it, “I have neglected no duties, have injured no one, have always tried to do unto others as I would wish to be done by; and yet, here in America, I am imprisoned because I could not say I believed what I did not believe.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Insane asylum - a place where insanity is made.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“The Illinois law in fact explicitly stated that married women could be admitted “without the evidence of insanity…required in other cases.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“If these sufferers can bear to feel it, I can and will bear to see it…for if I do not see these things, I cannot testify that I did. So I will even look on,”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Elizabeth’s mind spun from what he told her. Under the laws of the United States at that time, a man’s wife was his property: Theophilus could do as he wished. She later wrote in bleak despair, “I…have married away all the freedom I ever had in America”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“That class of men who wish to rule woman, seem intent on destroying her reason.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“submission is no virtue.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Unruly women are always witches, no matter what century we’re in.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Just think!” Elizabeth later exclaimed. “Forty men and women clubbed together to get me imprisoned just because I chose to think my own thoughts, and speak my own words!”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“She fought every day of her life to make things better, dedicating her life to others, wanting justice for all. She was torn down for it, her reputation ravaged. Yet she squared her shoulders and dusted herself off after every single setback. She went back out there to meet that hostile world, with her hoop skirts swishing and her brown eyes gleaming, ready to fight another day. And yes, they called her crazy. But if that’s crazy, we should stand back and admire. For just look at what “crazy” can do.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“The worst that my enemies can do…they have done, and I fear them no more,” she wrote with increasing excitement. “I am now free to be true and honest…no opposition can overcome me.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Because in the nineteenth century—and beyond—women were supposed to be calm, compliant angels. They were even encouraged, for their health, to endeavor “to feel indifferent to every sensation.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“a world in which they were all worth something.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Fear nothing so much as the sin of simply not doing your duty,”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Indeed, she’d recently begun to conceive of her stand for selfhood as “business that God has sent me to do.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“The law gave him power “to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“But no one dared to fight for her.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Wife,” he said hesitantly, “you will get out of the wagon yourself, won’t you? You won’t compel us to lift you out before such a large crowd?” Elizabeth smiled sweetly. “No, Mr. Packard,” she replied at once. “I shall not help myself into an Asylum. It is you who are putting me there. I do not go willingly… I shall let you show yourself to this crowd, just as you are.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“I must defend myself,” she realized, “or go undefended.”21 Because no one was coming to save her. She had to save herself.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“I am fully determined never to return to my husband again, of my own free-will.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“I am a martyr for the rights of opinion in woman, in the year 1860, in this boasted, free America”2 she wrote passionately.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“I will not suffer humanity to be so abused, as you do here, without lifting my voice against it,” she wrote, “and it will be heard.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“6 Her conscience told her she must fight for her rights, “to be…an example [to] women to raise them from being in bondage to man.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Incessant talking.” “Unusual zealousness.” “Strong will.” These were, in fact, textbook examples of female insanity in the nineteenth century. Doctors frequently saw pathology in female personality.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“The asylum was, in short, a “storage unit for unsatisfactory wives.”19 They’d been, Elizabeth observed archly, “put here, like me, to get rid of them.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear