Daily Inspiration Quote by Victoria Woodhull

Woodhull’s question is a trap door: it forces the listener to admit the cruelty first, then confront the hypocrisy that justifies it. “Is it fair” sounds polite, almost courtroom-neutral, but the sentence is built like an indictment. The verb pair does the work. “Treat ... worse” names the material reality of inequality - pay, property, custody, respectability politics. “Revile” shifts from policy to stigma: it’s not enough to disadvantage women; the culture needs to despise them for the very category used to rationalize the disadvantage. The cruelty is doubled, then laundered as “common sense.”

The subtext is Woodhull’s larger project: exposing how power disguises itself as morality. In the 19th-century U.S., “woman” wasn’t just a demographic label; it was a legal and social argument deployed to restrict rights. The question reveals a circular logic: women are deemed unfit because they’re women; they’re punished because they’re deemed unfit; the punishment becomes proof. Woodhull, who lived under relentless public scandal and surveillance, understood that gendered judgment is often retroactive - society hands you fewer options, then condemns you for the life that results.

It’s also a rhetorical move aimed at coalition-building. Instead of asking for sympathy, she asks for consistency, daring even skeptical audiences to defend an obviously lopsided moral ledger. The sting is that the “reviling” isn’t an accidental byproduct of inequality; it’s one of its enforcement mechanisms.