"Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done"
About this Quote
There is impatience in Susan B. Anthony's wish to "live another century", but it is the strategic kind: a refusal to let progress be treated as self-executing. The line works because it collapses personal mortality into political timeline. Anthony is not indulging nostalgia or daydreaming about legacy; she's measuring reform against the brutally slow pace of institutions built to outlast the people challenging them.
The specific intent is twofold. First, it’s a rallying cry that enlarges the horizon. By naming a century, she frames women's rights as a generational project, not a single campaign or election. Second, it’s a rebuke to complacency. "Fruition" suggests work already planted and tended - petitions, lectures, organizing, arrests, ridicule absorbed as routine. The phrase "so much yet to be done" keeps the credit from hardening into closure. It denies the comforting story that one legislative win equals liberation.
The subtext is also tactical: Anthony positions the movement as inevitable but unfinished. That combination is motivational. Inevitability prevents despair; unfinishedness prevents rest. It’s an argument against the political habit of granting women narrow "advances" and calling the debt paid.
Context matters. Anthony lived through abolition, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the bitter splintering of reform coalitions; she watched democracy expand for some while remaining gated for others. Her sentence carries the weight of those compromises. It reads like a note passed forward: don't confuse my lifetime with the movement's lifespan.
The specific intent is twofold. First, it’s a rallying cry that enlarges the horizon. By naming a century, she frames women's rights as a generational project, not a single campaign or election. Second, it’s a rebuke to complacency. "Fruition" suggests work already planted and tended - petitions, lectures, organizing, arrests, ridicule absorbed as routine. The phrase "so much yet to be done" keeps the credit from hardening into closure. It denies the comforting story that one legislative win equals liberation.
The subtext is also tactical: Anthony positions the movement as inevitable but unfinished. That combination is motivational. Inevitability prevents despair; unfinishedness prevents rest. It’s an argument against the political habit of granting women narrow "advances" and calling the debt paid.
Context matters. Anthony lived through abolition, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the bitter splintering of reform coalitions; she watched democracy expand for some while remaining gated for others. Her sentence carries the weight of those compromises. It reads like a note passed forward: don't confuse my lifetime with the movement's lifespan.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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