On where women’s rights come from

I think the best way to understand the early women’s rights movement is to understand it as a religious movement – that most of the women involved in women’s rights activism had very strong religious convictions. Many of them came from more liberal religious groups, so for example, Quakers were very involved in both abolitionism and feminism. These women believed that they had a sacred cause and that they were doing God’s work by trying to expand human equality to include both women and African-Americans.