Peace & Justice Activists Posters “Wo...-Wy...-”
with curriculum enrichment resources for social studies classrooms, teachers, home schoolers, offices.

Mary Wollstonecraft
Victoria Woodhull

Virginia Woolf

Mary Wollstonecraft
b. 4-27-1759; London
d. 9-10-1797

“Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws of nature.” - Vindication of the Rights of Women

• more Mary Wollstonecraft posters
• more Writers Who Changed the World posters

Victoria Claflin Woodhull
b. 9-23-1838; Homer, Licking Co., Ohio
d. 6-9-1927; England

Victoria Woodhull was publicized in Gilded Age newspapers as a notorious and controversial symbol for women's rights, free love, and labor reforms. Victoria and her sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, published a newpaper advocating women's suffrage with money earned in their successful Wall Street brokerage firm (whose financial backing came from Cornelius Vanderbilt). Victoria ran for the United States Presidency in 1872, Tennessee ran for Congress in the State of New York.

Victoria Woodhull quotes ~
• “I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.”
• “I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable I trust that my sincerity will not be called into question.”
• “Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.”

• Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored

Virginia Woolf, neé Stephen
b. 1-25-1882; London
d. 3-28-1941; suicide, bipolar disorder

Virgina Woolf, considered one of the foremost authors on the 20th century, was a feminist and pacifist. Her family was well connected in the literary culture; among visitors to her home when she was a child included Henry James and George Eliot. She was a founder of the Bloomsbury Group, her great aunt was photographer Julia Cameron, her sister Vanessa Bell became a notable painter and designed her book covers; her godfather was American poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell.

Virginia Woolf quotes ~
• “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
• “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
• “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
• “I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.”
• “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
• “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

• The Virginia Woolf Reader
• Women Writers posters
• Mrs. Dalloway book cover poster

Frances “Fanny” Wright
b. 9-6-1795; Scotland
d. 12-13-1852; Cincinnati, OH

Frances “Fanny” Wright was a lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer.

As an experiment in utopian ideals she founded the Nashoba Commune (near Memphis, TN) in 1825, the same year she became a US citizen. The commune was a test project to educated and emanicpate slaves were no slaveholders would lose money for freeing slaves. Nashoba failed because of poor crops, the scandal of having whites and blacks living together, and the absence of Wright due to illness.

Wright also was part owner of the New Harmony Gazette in the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, the work of Robert Owen, one of the founders of socialism and the cooperative movement.

Fanny Wright quotes ~
• “I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.”
• “There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being. Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.”
• “All men are born free and equal! That is: our moral feelings acknowledge it to be just and proper, that we respect those liberties in others, which we lay claim to for ourselves; and that we permit the free agency of every individual, to any extent which violates not the free agency of his fellow creatures.”
• “I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mohammedan nor Theist; I am but a member of the human family, and would accept of truth by whomsoever offered -- that truth which we can all find, if we will but seek in things, not in words; in nature, not in human imagination; in our own hearts, not in temples made with hands.”

• Fanny Wright: Rebel in America