Aging & Wisdom Quote by Victoria Woodhull

Woodhull’s line reads like a warm embrace, then snaps into something more radical: a demand. She starts with the big American-sounding sweep - “no difference who or what you are” - stacking identities (age, race, religion) to preempt the usual gatekeepers of respectability. In a 19th-century public sphere built to exclude, that catalogue isn’t just inclusive; it’s confrontational, a refusal to let “difference” be used as a moral veto.

The pivot is the engine: “I want to love you all and be loved by you all” sounds devotional, even utopian. Then comes the steel: “and I mean to have your love.” Woodhull isn’t asking for tolerance; she’s claiming entitlement to social belonging. That last clause converts sentiment into politics. Love becomes a public resource she intends to access, not a private favor she hopes to earn.

Context sharpens the stakes. Woodhull was a suffragist, a free-love advocate, and a scandal magnet - routinely cast as unfit, obscene, or dangerous by the same culture that preached Christian virtue and “womanly” modesty. When someone like Woodhull says she will be loved, it’s not narcissism; it’s counter-propaganda against a society that polices women’s desire, mobility, and speech by withholding esteem. She’s also quietly flipping the script on moral hierarchy: pagan, Jew, Christian appear side by side, suggesting that the real measure of virtue is the capacity for mutual regard, not doctrinal purity.

The subtext is strategic: you can’t build a mass movement on purity tests. By insisting on love across categories, she’s proposing solidarity as a discipline - and daring the audience to either join it or admit their exclusions out loud.