Daily Inspiration Quote by Victoria Woodhull

The bite of Woodhull's question is that it refuses to negotiate. "Why is a woman to be treated differently?" isn't a polite appeal for better manners; it's an indictment that treats unequal treatment as an irrational habit that can no longer hide behind tradition. By framing discrimination as something that requires an explanation, she flips the burden of proof onto the people benefiting from it. The sentence is a trap: any answer sounds like an excuse.

Then she pivots to inevitability. "Woman suffrage will succeed" lands less as optimism than as a strategic forecast, the kind movements use to outlast ridicule, arrests, and legislative stalling. Woodhull knew the opposition wasn't always formal debate in Congress or the courts. Calling it "miserable guerilla opposition" captures the texture of backlash as harassment, whisper campaigns, and procedural sabotage - the small, relentless attacks designed to exhaust reformers without ever arguing on the merits. "Guerilla" suggests irregular warfare, not honorable contest: ambushes, smear tactics, and social punishment.

Context matters here because Woodhull wasn't a respectable spokesman safely inside the tent. As a radical suffragist who also challenged sexual double standards and class hypocrisy, she was routinely painted as dangerous, immoral, or insane - proof, to critics, that women couldn't be trusted with power. The line reads like a refusal to be domesticated by those stereotypes: she names the ugliness of the resistance and declares it powerless to stop history's momentum.