Time & Perspective Quote by Lucy Stone

Stone slips past doctrinal landmines with a disarming opener: "I know not what you believe of God". In a 19th-century America where public speech still had to clear a religious bar, she refuses the purity test. The move is strategic, almost radical in its politeness: she widens the tent, then pivots to a claim that sounds pious while smuggling in a feminist argument about human purpose.

Her God is not a disciplinarian tallying chores; He's an author of "yearnings and longings". That phrasing matters. It treats desire as evidence, not temptation - a moral data point. For women especially, whose ambitions were routinely dismissed as vanity or disorder, Stone reframes wanting as something granted, therefore legitimate. The subtext is pointed: if aspiration is God-given, then a society that confines women to domestic maintenance isn't just unjust; it's theologically incoherent.

The line about "feeding and clothing the body" is a sharp reduction of what women were told their lives were for: service, upkeep, survival. Stone doesn't romanticize hunger or housekeeping; she demotes them. It's an argument for education, civic participation, speech, and selfhood - the right to develop a mind and a public voice - without needing to declare war on faith. In an era when suffrage activists were caricatured as godless, Stone uses religious language as cover and as cudgel, turning the culture's highest authority against its narrowest expectations.