Amelia:

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Sisters! Brothers! Look around you and witness a world that calls itself civilised - forward-thinking and innovative - yet shackles its women like criminals! Look upon your wives, your mothers, your daughters, and ask yourselves: what rights do they possess? The answer is none! No vote. No voice. No freedom at all but that which men allow them! And that, my friends, is no freedom at all!

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And the moment we show any sign of opinion, any flicker of free thought, they call us madwomen! They brand us lawbreakers, rioters, disturbers of the peace! But tell me - whose peace is this? Certainly not ours!

It is a peace that binds us to our homes, that keeps us silent while men write the laws that govern our lives. If that is peace, then let us break it! Let us shatter it with our voices, with our feet in the streets, with our fists against the doors of Parliament until they have no choice but to hear us!

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We have behaved as they demanded. We have politely pleaded, we have silently petitioned, we have stood quiet as mice in their hallowed halls while they laughed us out. And when we took to the streets, when we stood in defiance, what did they do? They took our fellow sisters, ordinary women, no different from you or me - not thieves or murderers, not drunks or swindlers, and they locked them in cells alongside the common criminal. And when we refused their mockery of generosity and mercy, when we refused to eat their food, they forced tubes down our throats like animals! They call that justice! If a man returns home in a drunken rage and strangles his wife to death, if he beats her and abuses her for nothing more than his own anger, should his punishment be the same as that of a woman who merely wishes for a say in her own life? Whose justice is this? For it is certainly not ours!

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I ask you this: did you hear of Mary Clarke? Arrested, starved, beaten-released only to die from the very struggle she fought for! Or Emily Davison, trampled beneath the hooves of a king’s horse, giving her very life to open the eyes of a sheltered, polite society that refuses to see what stands before them! And yet they have the audacity to ask us to wait! They tell us to be patient, that things will change one day.

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I do not wish to wait for one day. For a day that may never come. No more waiting. No more patience. No more begging at the feet of men who will never willingly grant us what is already ours! A say in one’s own life is not a privilege, it is a birthright! And we will have it - by words, if they will listen. By deeds, if they will not!

 

So let them arrest us! Let them strike us down! We welcome it! For every woman they silence, ten more will rise! For every voice they stifle, a thousand more will cry out! We are not weak. We are not afraid. And we will not be stopped!

 

This is not a society of modern thinkers, of open-mindedness and growth. This is a society of oppression, of silence, and of restraint! And whose vision of society is that? Certainly not ours!