A Pageant of Great Women
By Cicily Hamilton
A dramatic poem of power and beauty. Woman contends with prejudice in an argument before the throne of Justice, calling a pageant of the world’s great women to justify her claims. She wins her freedom and speaks to man as follows:
I have no quarrel with you, but I stand
For the clear right to hold my life my own:
The clear, clean right. To mould it as I will,—
Not as you will, with or apart from you
To make of it a thing of brain and blood,
Of tangible substance and of turbulent thought—
No thin, gray shadow of the life of man!
Your love, perchance, may set a crown on it;
But I may crown myself in other ways—
(As you have done, who are in one flesh with me).
I have no quarrel with you; but, henceforth
This you must know: The world is mine as yours—
The pulsing strength and passion and hurt of it:
The work I set my hand to, woman’s work,
Because I set my hand to it.