"I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned"
About this Quote
Stone’s line lands like a quiet rebuke wrapped in generosity: “never-ending gratitude” is the velvet glove, but the hand underneath is steel. She’s not merely praising “young women of today.” She’s warning them about the fragility of an entitlement that feels natural once it’s won. The sentence is engineered to do two things at once: offer thanks for progress, and insist that progress has a price tag most beneficiaries would rather not itemize.
The key move is her narrowing of “free speech” into something more basic and more brutal: “to speak at all in public.” That clause exposes the older regime she fought against, when women’s public voice wasn’t controversial because of its content but because of its existence. Stone is pointing to a cultural order where a woman speaking was treated as a kind of disorder, an offense against propriety, religion, and male authority. In that light, “free speech” isn’t an abstract constitutional principle; it’s a bodily act performed under threat.
The subtext is strategic: gratitude is being used as a political tool. By framing the struggle as a debt paid forward, she tries to inoculate the next generation against complacency and against the myth that rights arrive through enlightenment alone. Stone, who lectured in hostile halls and helped build abolitionist and women’s rights networks, knew how movements get rewritten as inevitabilities. Her sentence refuses inevitability. It insists on memory as a form of defense: if you can’t name the cost, you’re more likely to let someone bargain away the purchase.
The key move is her narrowing of “free speech” into something more basic and more brutal: “to speak at all in public.” That clause exposes the older regime she fought against, when women’s public voice wasn’t controversial because of its content but because of its existence. Stone is pointing to a cultural order where a woman speaking was treated as a kind of disorder, an offense against propriety, religion, and male authority. In that light, “free speech” isn’t an abstract constitutional principle; it’s a bodily act performed under threat.
The subtext is strategic: gratitude is being used as a political tool. By framing the struggle as a debt paid forward, she tries to inoculate the next generation against complacency and against the myth that rights arrive through enlightenment alone. Stone, who lectured in hostile halls and helped build abolitionist and women’s rights networks, knew how movements get rewritten as inevitabilities. Her sentence refuses inevitability. It insists on memory as a form of defense: if you can’t name the cost, you’re more likely to let someone bargain away the purchase.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
|---|
More Quotes by Lucy
Add to List
