Justice & Law Quote by Ernestine Rose

“Away with that folly” is not polite persuasion; it’s a purge. Ernestine Rose opens by treating the opposition’s premise as intellectual garbage, not a respectable difference of opinion. That rhetorical choice matters: the mid-19th-century debate over women’s rights often hid behind “concern” for femininity, as if equality were a kind of moral contamination. Rose refuses the soft-focus framing and names the argument for what it is - a superstition dressed up as protection.

The line pivots on a sharp exposure of the bait-and-switch at the heart of patriarchal logic. Women are told their “character” depends on legal and civic diminishment; their identity is made conditional on exclusion. Rose’s subtext is surgical: if womanhood can be revoked by recognition, then “womanhood” was never a natural essence. It was a social role enforced by deprivation. Equality doesn’t erase gender; it threatens the hierarchy that profits from gender being treated as destiny.

Context sharpens the edge. Rose, a Polish-born Jewish freethinker and abolitionist who spoke across American reform circuits, was arguing in a culture that treated women’s political participation as a kind of gender treason. Her sentence anticipates a familiar modern move: opponents of rights claiming they’re defending a group’s “true nature.” She flips it: what’s being defended isn’t femininity, but male comfort and control.

The brilliance is its simplicity. She doesn’t ask for permission to be an exception. She insists that equality is not a makeover; it’s recognition.