Justice & Law Quote by Franklin P. Adams

A neat little couplet like this does its work by sounding obvious while quietly indicting the era that made it necessary. Franklin P. Adams, a journalist with a columnist's ear for symmetry, builds a "true republic" out of parallel clauses that should be redundant in any functioning democracy. The fact that it lands as a corrective tells you the joke is on the republic, not on the reader.

The first half flatters the founding myth: "men, their rights and nothing more" echoes a civic ideal of limited government and individual liberty. Then the hinge turns. "Women, their rights and nothing less" exposes the cheat code in that myth: rights have historically been treated as a male default, while women are offered protections, pedestalizing, or "separate spheres" in lieu of actual equality. Adams doesn't argue policy; he weaponizes balance. The cadence creates moral pressure. If you accept the first clause as patriotic common sense, the second clause becomes unavoidable.

Context matters: Adams wrote as women's suffrage and broader legal equality were live fights in American public life, debated in newspapers, legislatures, and living rooms. His line reads like a newsroom distillation of an argument activists had to make endlessly: that asking for women's rights isn't asking for extra, it's asking to stop the quiet subtraction. "Nothing less" is the key phrase - a refusal of partial citizenship, and a reminder that a republic that rationed rights by gender was never "true" to begin with.