self-ownership

Updated: May 27, 2025

He maintained the entire equality of the race, the inherent right of self-ownership, the equal claim of all to a fair participation in the enactment of the laws by which they are governed. He saw clearly that slavery, as it existed in the South and on his own plantation, was inconsistent with this doctrine.

John Greenleaf Whittier - The Conflict with Slavery, Part 1, from Volume VII,: The Works of Whittier: the Conflict with Slavery, Politics: and Reform, the Inner Life and Criticism

Impelled by the motive of self preservation, by the sheer necessity of saving itself from those who would have destroyed it, and of saving to the freedmen the simple inherent right of self-ownership, the nation was forced to confer upon the Negro the right to vote by the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment.

John L. Love - The Disfranchisement of the Negro: The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6

Each says to the girl trapped into unholy matrimony, from whom the right to look inside the trap has been cunningly withheld: "Back to your lord and master! Go to him, he is your husband kiss him take his hand in thine!" Neither is ashamed to enforce a contract to demise the self-ownership of one human being to another, when that human being is a woman.

William Frend De Morgan - When Ghost Meets Ghost

Adaptation to the social state, now perpetually hindered by anti-social conflict, may then go on unhindered; and all the great societies, in other respects differing, may become similar in those cardinal traits which result from complete self-ownership of the unit, and from exercise over him of nothing more than passive influence by the aggregate.

John Lord - Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14 : The New Era; A Supplementary Volume, by Recent Writers, as Set Forth in the Preface and Table of Contents