Rosa Bonheur on Women’s Rights

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Sep 21, 1876

Rosa Bonheur on Women’s Rights

Rosa Bonheur, the greatest female painter that ever handled a brush, was asked, “Have you given the Woman’s Rights question any attention?” “Woman’s Rights—woman’s nonsense!” she answered. “Women should seek to establish their rights by great and good works, and not by conventions. If I had got up a convention to debate the question of my ability to paint Marche au Chevaux (The Horse Fair), for which England would pay me forty thousand francs, the decision would have been against me. I felt the power within me to paint. I cultivated it, and have produced works that have won the favorable verdicts of the great judges. I have no patience with women who ask permission to think.”