Women from the United States

2190 quotes found

"Today I walked into the sunset — to mail some letters —.. .But some way or other I didn't seem to like the redness much so after I mailed the letters I walked home — and kept walking - The Eastern sky was all grey blue — bunches of clouds — different kinds of clouds — sticking around everywhere and the whole thing — lit up — first in one place — then in another with flashes of lightning — sometimes just sheet lightning — and some times sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across it -. I walked out past the last house — past the last locust tree — and sat on the fence for a long time — looking — just looking at — the lightning — you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land — land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know — There was a wonderful moon. Well I just sat there and had a great time by myself — Not even many night noises — just the wind —.. .I wondered what you were doing - It is absurd the way I love this country — Then when I came back — it was funny — roads just shoot across blocks anywhere — all the houses looked alike — and I almost got lost — I had to laugh at myself — I couldn't tell which house was home - I am loving the plains more than ever it seems — and the SKY — Anita you have never seen SKY — it is wonderful —"

- Georgia O'Keeffe

0 likesPainters from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesPeople from WisconsinPresidential Medal of Freedom recipientsWomen from the United States
"How did you even know if you loved another person? Was it a hunch, like a good smell that you couldn’t identify for sure, or did a time come when you had evidence? Was it like walking through a house and once you’d crossed a certain threshold, that was love and you could never turn back? Maybe you’d go into other rooms, you’d fight or even breakup, but you’d always be on the other side of love, after and not before it. My interest in couples felt anthropological - even liking Cross, even wanting to hear from Martha that she could imagine me dating him, I myself could not imagine us together... When I through of Sin - Jun and Clara - and I did so often- what was hardest to wrap my head around was how they’d been a couple while living in the same room. How had they known when to fool around and when to just sit at their desks doing homework? Hadn’t it been either too intense, too tiring to always be around the person you wanted to impress, or else too familiar? Maybe in such close quarters you gave up hope of impressing them and sat there picking your earwax and not caring if you looked cute. But didn’t you lose something there, too? If that was what people meant by intimacy, it didn’t hold much appeal for me- it seemed like you’d be fighting each other for oxygen."

- Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld

0 likesNovelists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesPeople from CincinnatiWomen from the United States
"Serafin was] an extraordinary coach, sharp as a vecchio lupo [old wolfe]. He opened a world to me, showed me there was a reason for everything, that even fiorature and trills ... have a reason in the composer's mind, that they are the expression of the stato d'animo [state of mind] of the character — that is, the way he feels at the moment, the passing emotions that take hold of him. He would coach us for every little detail, every movement, every word, every breath. One of the things he told me — and this is the basis of bel canto — is never to attack a note from underneath or from above, but always to prepare it in the face. He taught me that pauses are often more important than the music. He explained that there was a rhythm — these are the things you get only from that man! — a measure for the human ear, and that if a note was too long, it was no good after a while. A fermata always must be measured, and if there are two fermate close to one another in the score, you ignore one of them. He taught me the proportions of recitative — how it is elastic, the proportions altering so slightly that only you can understand it. ... But in performance he left you on your own. "When I am in the pit, I am there to serve you, because I have to save my performance." he would say. We would look down and feel we had a friend there. He was helping you all the way. He would mouth all the words. If you were not well, he would speed up the tempo, and if you were in top form, he would slow it down to let you breathe, to give you room. He was breathing with you, living the music with you, loving it with you. It was elastic, growing, living."

- Maria Callas

0 likesSingers from New York CityOpera singersWomen singersWomen from the United StatesWomen born in the 1920s
"Listen to me, everyone speak about Callas. But I know Callas. I know Callas before she was Callas. She was fat and she had this vociaccia -- you know what a vociaccia is? You go kill a cat and record its scream. She had this bad skin. And she had this rich husband. We laugh at her, you know that? And then, I sat in on a rehearsal with Maestro Serafin. You know, it was Parsifal and I was supposed to see if I do one of the flowers. I didn't. And she sing that music. In Italian of course. And he tell her this and he tell her that and little by little this voice had all the nature in it -- the forest and the magic castle and hatred that is love. And little by little she not fat with bad skin and rich-husband-asleep-in-the-corner; she witch who burn you by standing there. Maestro Serafin he say to me afterwards, you know now something about Parsifal. I say, 'No, Maestro, I know much more. I know how to study. And I know that we are more than voices. We are spirit, we are god when we sing, if we mean it.' Oh yes, they will go on about Tebaldi this and Freni that. Beautiful, beautiful voices, amazing. They work hard. They sincere. They suffer. They more talented than Maria, sure. But she was the genius. Genius come from genio -- spirit. And that make her more than all of us. So I learn from that. Don't let them take from you because you are something they don't expect. Work and fight and work and give, and maybe once in a while you are good."

- Maria Callas

0 likesSingers from New York CityOpera singersWomen singersWomen from the United StatesWomen born in the 1920s
"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love. When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love. When Audre Lorde fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love. When Sonia Sanchez makes lightning of her tongue, moving from Southern colloquialisms to stanzas shaped by Swahili, traversing an ocean in one breath, it is an act of love. Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn't have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?"

- Phillis Wheatley

0 likesAfrican AmericansPoets from the United StatesChristiansSlavesWomen from the United States
"The Court now confronts a question it has never had to answer in the Nation’s history: Whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution. The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law. The majority makes three moves that, in effect, completely insulate Presidents from criminal liability. First, the majority creates absolute immunity for the President’s exercise of “core constitutional powers.” This holding is unnecessary on the facts of the indictment, and the majority’s attempt to apply it to the facts expands the concept of core powers beyond any recognizable bounds. In any event, it is quickly eclipsed by the second move, which is to create expansive immunity for all “official act[s].” Whether described as presumptive or absolute, under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution. That is just as bad as it sounds, and it is baseless. Finally, the majority declares that evidence concerning acts for which the President is immune can play norole in any criminal prosecution against him. That holding, which will prevent the Government from using a President’s official acts to prove knowledge or intent in prosecuting private offenses, is nonsensical."

- Sonia Sotomayor

0 likesJustices of the Supreme Court of the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesLawyers from the United StatesCatholics from the United StatesWomen from the United States
"Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishesto place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law."

- Sonia Sotomayor

0 likesJustices of the Supreme Court of the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesLawyers from the United StatesCatholics from the United StatesWomen from the United States
"Sotomayor was among the finalists I was considering, some in the legal priesthood suggested that her credentials were inferior to those of Kagan or Wood, and a number of left-leaning interest groups questioned whether she had the intellectual heft to go toe-to-toe with conservative ideologues like Justice Antonin Scalia. Maybe because of my own background in legal and academic circles-where I'd met my share of highly credentialed, high-IQ morons and had witnessed firsthand the tendency to move the goalposts when it came to promoting women and people of color-I was quick to dismiss such concerns. Not only were Judge Sotomayor's academic credentials outstanding, but I understood the kind of intelligence, grit, and adaptability required of someone of her background to get to where she was...Given my high regard for Kagan and Wood, I was still undecided when Judge Sotomayor came to the Oval Office for a get-to-know-you session. She had a broad, kind face and a ready smile. Her manner was formal and she chose her words carefully, though her years at Ivy League schools and on the federal bench hadn't sanded away the Bronx accent...the judge and I talked about her family, her work as a prosecutor, and her broad judicial philosophy. By the end of the interview, I was convinced that Sotomayor had what I was looking for, although I didn't say so on the spot."

- Sonia Sotomayor

0 likesJustices of the Supreme Court of the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesLawyers from the United StatesCatholics from the United StatesWomen from the United States
"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers - Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices. You're going to challenge. You're going to say, "Why not?". You're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here's the deal: These are your choices, they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all of the odds against you?" And Mao Zedong said, you know, "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine." And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things and you don't have to follow other peoples choices and paths. Ok? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war, you lay out your own path, you figure out what's right for you. You don't let external definition define how good you are internally, you fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path."

- Anita Dunn

0 likesUnited States federal government officialsPolitical commentators from the United StatesWomen from the United StatesPeople from MarylandWomen born in the 1950s
"Certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party. She was one of the headliners at the recent CPAC conference (but when your competition is a teenager who has a dream about the Republican Party and Stephen Baldwin, it’s not really saying that much). Coulter could be the poster woman for the most extreme side of the Republican Party. And in some ways I could be the poster woman for the opposite. I consider myself a progressive Republican, but here is what I don’t get about Coulter: Is she for real or not? Are some of her statements just gimmicks to gain publicity for her books or does she actually believe the things she says? Does she really believe all Jewish people should be “perfected” and become Christians? And what was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election? If you truly have the GOP’s best interests at heart, how can you possibly justify telling an audience of millions that a Democrat would be a better leader than the Republican presidential candidate? (I asked Ann for comment on this column, including many of the above questions, but she did not answer my request.)"

- Meghan McCain

0 likesPeople from ArizonaPeople from PhoenixBloggers from the United StatesColumnists from the United StatesWomen from the United States
"One of the most interesting things about business to me is that I find so many business men who are willing to try experiments. I should like to tell you about two evenings I spent last winter and the contrast between them. I went one evening to a drawing-room meeting where economists and M.Ps. talked of current affairs, of our present difficulties. It all seemed a little vague to me, did not seem really to come to grips with our problem. The next evening it happened that I went to a dinner of twenty business men who were discussing the question of centralization and decentralization. Each one had something to add from his own experience of the relation of branch firms to the central office, and the other problems included in the subject. There I found L hope for the future. There men were not theorizing or dogmatizing; they were thinking of what they had actually done and they were willing to try new ways the next morning, so to speak. Business, because it gives us the opportunity of trying new roads, of blazing new trails, because, in short, it is pioneer work, pioneer work in the organized relations of human beings, seems to me to offer as thrilling an experience as going into a new country and building railroads over new mountains. For whatever problems we solve in business management may help towards the solution of world problems, since the principles of organization and administration which are discovered as best for business can be applied to government or international relations. Indeed, the solution of world problems must eventually be built up from all the little bits of experience wherever people are consciously trying to solve problems of relation. And this attempt is being made more consciously and deliberately in industry than anywhere else."

- Mary Parker Follett

0 likesBusiness theorists from the United StatesSociologists from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesPeople from BostonWomen from the United States
"A developer has bought the central-city apartment building where Sandy, a single mother, has been living with her two children; he plans to convert it into condominiums. … She looks in the newspaper and online for apartment rental advertisements, and she is shocked at the rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments. … Sandy searches for two months, with the eviction deadline looming over her. Finally she settles for a one-bedroom apartment a forty-five-minute drive from her job. … Sandy sees no other option but to take the apartment, and then faces one final hurdle: she needs to deposit three months' rent to secure the apartment. She has used all her savings for a down payment on the car, however. So she cannot rent the apartment, and having learned that this is a typical landlord policy, she now faces the prospect of homelessness. This mundane story can be repeated with minor variations for hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. … She is largely a victim of circumstances beyond her control—the landlord’s decision to sell the apartment building, a sex-segregated labor market that makes low-wage service jobs the primary work opportunity for women without college or technical training, the "spatial mismatch" that locates those jobs far from most affordable housing, and so on. … Most people react to a situation like Sandy's with the intuition that something is wrong. But what is the wrong, and who is responsible for it? The wrong is structural injustice."

- Iris Marion Young

0 likesAcademics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesSocialist feministsPeople from New York CityWomen from the United States
"Organizational design often focuses on structural alternatives such as matrix, decentralization, and divisionalization. However, control variables (e.g., reward structures, task characteristics, and information systems) offer a more flexible approach. The purpose of this paper is to explore these control variables for organizational design. This is accomplished by integration and testing of two perspectives, organization theory and economics, notably agency theory. The resulting hypotheses link task characteristics, information systems, and business uncertainty to behavior vs. outcome based control strategy. These hypothesized linkages are examined empirically in a field study of the compensation practices for retail salespeople in 54 stores. The findings are that task programmability is strongly related to the choice of compensation package. The amount of behavioral measurement, the cost of measuring outcomes, and the uncertainty of the business also affect compensation. The findings have management implications for the design of compensation and reward packages, performance evaluation systems, and control systems, in general. Such systems should explicitly consider the task, the information system in place to measure performance, and the riskiness of the business. More programmed tasks require behavior based controls while less programmed tasks require more elaborate information systems or outcome based controls."

- Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

0 likesWomen academics from the United StatesBusiness theorists from the United StatesFellows of the British AcademyWomen from the United StatesStanford University faculty
"If nothing else, fiction has empowered a lot of people in the act of resistance. The Hate U Give, I know, has birthed several young activists and I’m so happy with that, I’m so proud these young people have decided to speak up and speak out on things that concern them. There was one young lady in Texas, it started out with her deciding she was going to speak up for the book when it was challenged by the school district. And that led to her becoming an activist in her own right in other areas. So I think books can empower. Rudine Sims Bishop [the author and educator] says that books are either mirrors, windows or sliding-glass doors, and that’s important in the act of resistance. You need that mirror to see yourself, to know what you can be and know what you are. And then you need that window to see into someone else’s life so you can understand what’s happening around you in the world that you may not notice at first glance. And you need the sliding-glass door so that you can step into someone else’s life and walk in with some empathy and use that empathy to make yourself heard. So yeah, I think books play a huge role in resistance. They play a huge role in opening people’s eyes and they’re a form of activism in their own right, in the fact that they do empower people and show others the lives of people who may not be like themselves.""

- Angie Thomas

0 likesYoung adult authorsAfrican AmericansNovelists from the United StatesWomen from the United StatesPeople from Mississippi
"Print media started collapsing in the mid-2000s. When I first started out, it seemed like alternative news weeklies were the future of newspapers. It was a booming industry. It was a product of the nineties and that nineties mentality. At the time, I had a day job at the University of Virginia and I was sending my strip out and picked up one paper here and another paper there very gradually. I was building up a client list and then that fateful day where Village Voice Media dropped comics across the entire chain. I was actually spared the worst of that. I think I was just in the Village Voice at the time, but that was a big loss. Not that the pay was all that great, but it had been my goal to get into that paper. At the time I really wasn’t sure whether I would be able to continue, but then dailykos came along and picked up a bunch of alt weekly cartoonists and breathed some life into our industry online. They did really well on dailykos they were shared a lot and got good traffic and I think it set a precedent. Not that it was the first home for political cartoons online, but something about dailykos at that moment turned the tide a bit. A few more websites started running political cartoons – and paying fairly for them. People started realizing that they were highly shareable and that they could do well online. I’ll add that print has stabilized. At least it had stabilized under the second Obama administration. I actually added papers during that time. I wouldn’t say this is a growth industry. I think it would be very hard to break into now, but I did get the sense that print media had stabilized and some papers were doing okay. For me it’s really a hybrid now between print and digital. Certainly the digital side of things has grown the most in the past few years."

- Jen Sorensen

0 likesCartoonists from the United StatesIllustratorsWomen from the United StatesPeople from PennsylvaniaBloggers from the United States
"After all, la lucha continúa (the struggle continues). It is hard to ignore the fact that the civil rights struggles that we were part of during our younger years to eradicate all kinds of inequalities, are being eroded in the present by unleashed backlashes in a US society still afflicted by a widening gap between the poor and the wealthy, and between the white population and rapidly growing populations of color. A swarm of right wing politicians and the corporate capital that controls their political campaigns want to turn back the clock on the most significant changes and accomplishments that came out of the US civil rights movement-whether by enacting legislation to limit or suppress the electoral power of Latinos/as and African Americans, gerrymandering districts to favor white voters, demonizing immigrants and fostering xenophobic, racist, and undemocratic discourses, infringing upon the reproductive rights of women, weakening unions, opposing increases in the minimum wage, curtailing all the government programs that benefit the most needy sectors of US society, diminishing opportunities to climb the socioeconomic ladder and thus shrinking the middle class, refusing to accept the catastrophic effects of climate change, and favoring laws that facilitate and perpetuate an insatiable accumulation of wealth by the white privileged elites and the corporate sector. A complicitous right-wing media only adds fuel to these ideological crusades by propagandizing similar positions, and fostering demagoguery and fearmongering against culturally and racially diverse populations and immigrants."

- Edna Acosta-Belén

0 likesEducators from the United StatesWomen from the United States
"May I state at the out-set, that I always regarded the Hearst press as yellow, violently anti-labor and reactionary? In the course of my organizing activities in several parts of this country, the Hearst press consistently attacked us, blaming the ILG and its organizers for instigating strikes, causing people to lose their jobs, livelihoods, homes, etc. As last as 1936, the Hearst press, writing about the leadership of the CIO in the Roosevelt campaign attacked our ILG and its leadership, including yourself, as Communists. (I was given the distinction of being an Anarchist and a friend of Emma Goldman, an honor I shall never deny.) I recall that in 1927 a similar stunt was performed by Hearst in printing the story of the lives of Sacco-Vanzetti, who were electrocuted, the articles notwithstanding. The Hearst press has already been on the decline for several years because the awakened labor rank and file refused to be bull-dozed any longer. Today, the printing of your story in the classic Hearst sensational style, is simply giving his yellow, reactionary press a new lease on life, to say the least. I followed the articles and must admit that Mr. Joseph Mulvaney, the fellow who induced you to consent to his writing these stories, will be handsomely rewarded by Hearst, for the circulation will surely jump a score of thousands or more. do not know what objectives you aim to reach in consenting to be publicized in such a fashion, save one-to give the writer a chance to earn a living (is he at least a Union man?)"

- Rose Pesotta

0 likesLabor leadersFeminists from the United StatesAnarchists from the United StatesJews from the United StatesWomen from the United States
"I think it’s wonderful to be the American Ambassador while we are able to celebrate the 100th year of U.S.-Albania diplomatic relations. As you know, last year, we celebrated 30 years since the restored relationship. And if we look across from the 100 years as well as the 30 years, I think we can say that the two of us, Albania and the United States have accomplished quite a lot. Just looking at the last 30 years alone, when I talk to friends who knew Albania in 1991 and I describe for them what we are doing together now, in 2022, they can hardly believe it. I will just give you a few examples. In 1991, as we all know, Albania was one of the poorest countries in the world and in those 30 years, as Albania broke free from the communist dictatorship, I think the people of Albania have proven themselves to be quite resilient and have inspired the world through their own determination. So, that’s why I announced when I got here that our program here, our agenda is to focus on democracy, defense, and business. So, you’ve broken free of communist dictatorship; the institutions of democracy and law, rule of law, have been installed, and we’re working to strengthen them as much as we can. You’ve gone from a country that is dependent to a country that is a member of NATO in 2009, a country that is on the doorstep of the European Union, and, as of January 1st this year, a country that sits next to the United States, China, Russia, France, Great Britain, as a member of the UN Security Council and that’s a big jump. Then of course the second issue is defense. And in those 30 years, those 100 years, we’ve gone from a communist dictatorship that was closed to the world, now Albania is host to U.S. forces, as of this year. So, this is an historic change. And then of course, finally, on business. Some of the biggest businesses are coming to Albania. We can talk more about this later, but they’re focused on energy for now and I see other areas being opened up as well, including in technology. So, we have the Skavica hydropower plant, it’s not a done deal yet, but it’s looking very good; and we have Vlora, the thermal power plant that will now be bringing in LNG. So, these have huge implications for Albania’s role in the region, not just in terms of Albania’s ability to secure energy for itself but for Albania’s contribution to the region, as a net exporter of energy and energy security."

- Yuri P. Kim

0 likesUnited States Ambassadors to AlbaniaUnited States Assistant Secretaries of State for European and Eurasian AffairsWomen from the United StatesPeople from South KoreaUniversity of Pennsylvania alumni
"After church on Sundays, I would build forts with blankets and sheets, covering my bedroom from corner to corner. Underneath those bedding canopies I created a world of my own, my first experiences with privacy from my parents. To save space on storage, my mother kept her nylons in my bottom dresser drawer. I found them, and natural curiosity led me to try them on. I wondered what was so special about these shriveled brown socks that only my mom got to wear. In the dark secrecy of my forts, I lay on my back, stretched my legs up toward the sky, and slowly rolled the nylons down over my legs. I was almost hypnotized by the sensation of nylon on skin. This must be what it feels like to be a woman, I thought to myself. My father would walk by and see the sheets and blanket tent tops I had constructed over the furniture. "Tommy, what the hell are you doing in there?" he'd bark. "Nothing!" I'd call back, and I would roll the nylons off my legs and hide them as quick as I could. No one ever had to tell me that what I was doing in my fort was indecent behavior. I could just feel that it was wrong, as if I was born with the shame. I had already been caught playing Barbies with a neighbor girl. My father's reaction was a cold stare of disapproval and a new G.I. Joe. It was put to me bluntly that "little boys don't play with Barbie dolls like little girls do," and that was that."

- Laura Jane Grace

0 likesSinger-songwriters from the United StatesGuitarists from the United StatesWomen from the United StatesWomen singers from the United StatesWomen guitarists
"I was an artist with many social connections, and – don’t tell! – I may have been a spy. I was born on Long Island, New York in 1725, but by the time I was four I was living in Bordentown, New Jersey. My father was a devout Quaker, and I was passionate about art, especially sculpting, so when I was twenty-one I moved to Philadelphia, the center of American art. I married a fellow Quaker, Joseph Wright, and we moved back to Bordentown, before he unexpectedly died in 1769. But I didn’t give up my art dreams, and along with my sister Rachel, who was also a widow, we started a business making wax sculptures, and soon we had salons in Philadelphia and New York City. I met Benjamin Franklin, and he convinced me to move to London and introduced me to important people who wanted to be sculpted. Things were bad between Britain and its colonies, and I supported the efforts of Prime Minister William Pitt who was trying to reconcile everyone. But at the same time, while my many subjects – including the King himself – were posing, we’d talk openly and honestly about what was going on. If any valuable military or political news came my way, I’d write it in a letter to the Continental Congress, which I would then smuggle out in my wax statues. I also tried to help American prisoners of war who were jailed in England. And at the same time, I also tried to compensate Loyalists for their losses. I wanted to get back to New Jersey, but I died in London in 1786. Nobody knows where I am buried."

- Patience Wright

0 likesWomen artistsSculptors from the United StatesWomen from the United StatesWomen born before the 19th century
"In Des Moines, we live on a quiet street in a beautiful old wooded neighborhood. Our house is surrounded by a large yard with three century-old oak trees, bushes, and perennials. I have my own study with all my print history books. My printmaking studio is in the basement of our house. I have a 36 x 60" American French Tool etching press. From 1970, when we moved to Des Moines after graduate school, until 1997 I worked primarily as an artist and a teacher of printmaking, design, and art history. In 1974, I began to curate exhibitions on the history of prints for the DMAC, then was invited to do projects for other museums. In 1997, after I had been doing guest curatorial projects for 20 years, the DMAC finally created my part-time position as curator of prints (now prints and drawings). My responsibilities at the museum include organizing three or four exhibitions a year on prints and drawings, writing gallery guides and labels, gallery talks, doing research on works in the permanent collection, recommending acquisitions, advising on conservation, working as part of the curatorial team, cultivating collectors and donors, etc. We don't have a public print room, so there is no public access to the collection. I am staff liaison for the Des Moines Art Center Print Club, a very active group of print collectors, artists, and people interested in prints. They organize monthly programs, commission prints, and purchase works for the collection."

- Amy Namowitz Worthen

0 likesWomen from the United StatesPrintmakersCuratorsArt historiansWomen born in the 1940s