Not to be your own, bodily, mentally, or morally — that is to be a slave... Slavery is, not to belong to yourself — to be robbed of yourself. There is nothing that I so much abhor as that single thing — to be robbed of one’s self. We are our own legitimate masters. Nature has not created masters and slaves; nature has created man free as the air of heaven. The black man and the white man are equally the children of nature. The same mother earth has created us all; the same life pervades all; the same spirit ought to animate all. Slavery deprives us of ourselves.
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About Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Rose was a 19th-century American social activist. Ernestine Louise Rose was a suffragist, abolitionist, and freethinker who has been called the “first Jewish feminist.” Her career spanned from the 1830s to the 1870s, making her a contemporary to the more famous suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Read more on Wikipedia →