"While others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it"
About this Quote
Woodhull’s line snaps like a banner unfurling in the wind: faith is cheap, labor is costly, and she’s tired of watching people confuse the two. The phrasing sets up a clean moral contrast - “others” versus “I” - but the real target is broader than personal bragging. It’s a critique of respectable reform culture, the kind that treats social change as something to be wished for, sermonized about, or deferred to Providence. Prayer here isn’t spirituality so much as a metaphor for passivity, for outsourcing urgency to time, fate, or polite gradualism.
The subtext is almost managerial in its impatience: progress has a payroll. Woodhull, a suffragist and radical who ran for U.S. president in 1872, understood how “good times” get rhetorically invoked to soothe dissent. If the future is always “coming,” then no one has to take the reputational risk of making it arrive. Her sentence refuses that anesthetic. It also functions as self-authorization from a woman society expected to be devotional, compliant, and grateful for incremental scraps. She recasts virtue not as piety but as agency.
In the Gilded Age swirl of suffrage, labor agitation, free-love scandal, and moral policing, Woodhull’s bluntness is strategic. It’s a call to stop confusing hope with action, and a reminder that movements don’t run on optimism - they run on people willing to be unpopular while doing the work.
The subtext is almost managerial in its impatience: progress has a payroll. Woodhull, a suffragist and radical who ran for U.S. president in 1872, understood how “good times” get rhetorically invoked to soothe dissent. If the future is always “coming,” then no one has to take the reputational risk of making it arrive. Her sentence refuses that anesthetic. It also functions as self-authorization from a woman society expected to be devotional, compliant, and grateful for incremental scraps. She recasts virtue not as piety but as agency.
In the Gilded Age swirl of suffrage, labor agitation, free-love scandal, and moral policing, Woodhull’s bluntness is strategic. It’s a call to stop confusing hope with action, and a reminder that movements don’t run on optimism - they run on people willing to be unpopular while doing the work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
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