Tapestry of Faith: Faithful Journeys: A Program about Pilgrimages of Faith in Action for Grades 2-3

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Find these and other quotations from Fannie Barrier Williams in The New Woman of Color: The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893-1918, edited by Mary Jo Deegan (Northern Illinois University Press, 2002).

We believe that the world always needs the influence of every good and capable woman, and this rule recognizes no exceptions based on complexion.

... [It] may be stated that the contentions of colored women are in kind like those of other American women for greater freedom of development. Liberty to be all that we can be, without artificial hindrances, is a thing no less precious to us than to women generally.

[T]he inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a maxim that will become more blessed when the hand of woman shall take it from its sepulture in books and make it the gospel of everyday life and the unerring guide in the relations of all men, women, and children.

Colored women organized have succeeded in touching the heart of the race, and for the first time the thrill of unity has been felt.

The Club movement is well purposed. There is in it a strong faith, an enthusiasm born of love and sympathy, and an ever increasing intelligence in the ways and means of effecting noble results. It is not a fad. It is not an imitation. It is not a passing sentiment. It is not an expedient or an experiment. It is rather the force of a new intelligence against the old ignorance. The struggle of an enlightened conscience against the whole brood of social miseries born out of the stress and pain of a hated past.

A book about women in Unitarian Universalist history that includes a biographical sketch and excerpted writings from Fannie Barrier Williams is Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform 1776-1936, edited by Dorothy May Emerson (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2000).

See an article about Fannie Barrier Williams, by June Edwards, in the online Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography.