Women Born In The 1880s

"I feel very strongly that if you are going to do anything, you have to take one thing and do it."

"during that time we opened—and by “we” I mean the whole women’s movement—we opened a great many doors to women with the power of the vote, things like getting women into the diplomatic service. And don’t forget we were successful in getting equality for women written into the charter of the United Nations in 1945."

"if we had universal suffrage throughout the world, we might not even have wars."

"(You were once quoted to the effect that in picking volunteers you preferred enthusiasm to experience.) AP: Yes. Well, wouldn’t you? I think everybody would. I think every reform movement needs people who are full of enthusiasm. It’s the first thing you need. I was full of enthusiasm, and I didn’t want any lukewarm person around. I still am, of course"

"we did hear a lot of shouted insults, which we always expected. You know, the usual things about why aren’t you home in the kitchen where you belong. But it wasn’t anything violent. Later on, when we were actually picketing the White House, the people did become almost violent. They would tear our banners out of our hands and that sort of thing."

"to me it was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote. Seems almost unthinkable now, doesn’t it? With all these millions and millions of women going out happily to work today, and nobody, as far as I can see, thinking there’s anything unusual about it. But, of course, in some countries woman suffrage is still something that has to be won"

"(When did you actually become involved in suffrage work?) AP: Well, after I got my master’s in 1907, my doctoral studies took me to the School of Economics in London. The English women were struggling hard to get the vote, and everyone was urged to come in and help. So I did. That’s all there was to it. It was the same with Lucy Burns."

"if women who are Republicans simply help the Republican Party, and if women who are Democrats help the Democratic Party, women’s votes will not count for much. But if the political Parties see before them a group of independent women voters who are standing together to use their vote to promote Suffrage, it will make Suffrage an issue — the women voters at once become a group which counts; whose votes are wanted."

"When the Quakers were founded…one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes. So I never had any other idea…the principle was always there.”"

"The militant policy is bringing success. . . . the agitation has brought England out of her lethargy, and women of England are now talking of the time when they will vote, instead of the time when their children would vote, as was the custom a year or two back."

"As a social worker, I am thinking of the aged; I am thinking of the sick in the hospitals today, in the Japanese community; I think of the babies born since Christmas time, and those about to be born; I am thinking of the young people in the schools and colleges of this State. Are they a menace to this community, that they must all be moved now?"

"“These are law-abiding, upright people of our community. What is it that makes it necessary for them to evacuate? Have they done anything? Is there anything in their history in this area to justify such a fear of them developing overnight?”"

"One of the most difficult things the doctor and teacher have to do is to blast the popular and ancient delusion that there is an instinctive preparation for parenthood; that because a husband and wife produce a child they are mysteriously endowed with perfect wisdom concerning the nurture and development of this child."

"I am distressed that there are so few who indulge in the ecstacy of even a humble translation, and still fewer who attain the worthy translation."

"Because of its very personal influence men of action as far back as Cicero have proclaimed that there can be no more distinguished calling than that of instructing youth."

"Prohibition, whether of the use of alcohol or anything else we may want or wish to do, will never develop in us or any people self control, a sense of social responsibility, or the ability to make wise choices for ourselves."

"It is as stupid to oust ancient history from the schools in favor of American and modern European history as it would be to knock out the first two stories of a skyscraper and expect the structure to stand."

"I myself did not want to leave the shop for fear of losing a day or even more perhaps in finding other work. To lose half a dollar meant that it would take so much longer before mother and the children would come. And now I wanted them more than ever before. I longed for my mother and a home where it would be light and warm and she would be waiting when we came from work. Because I longed for them so I lived much in imagination. For so I could have them near me. Often as the hour for going home drew near I would sit stitching and making believe that mother and the children were home waiting."

"I had just time to put away my coat and go over to the table, when the boss shouted gruffly, "Look here, girl, if you want to work here you better come in early. No office hours in my shop." It seemed very still in the room, even the machines stopped. And his voice sounded dreadfully distinct. I hastened into the bit of space between the two men and sat down. He brought me two coats and snapped, "Hurry with these!" From this hour a hard life began for me. He refused to employ me except by the week. He paid me three dollars and for this he hurried me from early until late. He gave me only two coats at a time to do. When I took them over and as he handed me the new work he would say quickly and sharply, "Hurry!" And when he did not say it in words he looked at me and I seemed to hear even more plainly, "Hurry!" I hurried but he was never satisfied. By looks and manner he made me feel that I was not doing enough. Late at night when the people would stand up and begin to fold their work away and I too would rise feeling stiff in every limb and thinking with dread of our cold empty little room and the uncooked rice, he would come over with still another coat."

"It is the woman herself that matters rather than her covering."

"The Leeds Mercury has always taken a pride in stating fairly all points of view in public life."

"I have arranged the poems by women in a separate section, irrespective of whether British or American; not in any sense of sexual rivalry, but merely from a natural desire to give them prominence and to show that despite their lack of opportunity, women feel all the poetry of flight and are fully alive to all that progress in aviation means to the world."

"I do not advocate neglecting your parents: honour and succour them, especially in their old age, but don’t stay at home and do housework when you long, body and soul, to fly to the uttermost ends of the earth, there to find your mission in life and your gift to the world."

"The Communists are Jews, and Russia is being entirely administered by them. They are in every government office, bureau and newspaper. They are driving out the Russians and are responsible for the anti-Semitic feeling which is increasing."

"I have done more for the Boers than my fellow countrymen will ever know"

"to one of which I am attached by bonds of friendship, to other by ties of common origin"

"Already then, there was in my subconsciousness as unsatisfactoriness about powerlessness, which was accompanied by being locked in a cage, whereby made taking an initiative, of any kind, impossible"

"the government did not fulfil the urge in their hearts and felt that the public wished to see me openly revealing my sympathy for our kinsmen; how could I as the head of state!"

"only in the intimacy with mother I could be just a human"

"For the whole world I became a heroine, very easy, but not complimentary, since I had done nothing in this case, received the most ridiculous letters from places all over the world; especially a steady flow of praises came from France! I have never seen such a exaggerated reaction"

"Principles heretofore unknown, signifying the emergence of a new era in creative work - an era of purely artistic achievements. An era of the final emancipation of the Great Art of Painting from Literary, Social, and crudely everyday attributes uncharacteristic of it at its core. The elaboration of this valuable world outlook is the service of our times, irrespective of idle speculation about how quickly the individual trends created by it will flash by."

"Rozanova was well aware of Italian Futurism, although unlike Exter, she did not travel in Italy.. .In her careful application of the Italian Futurist evocation of mechanical speed, explosivity, and mobility, Rozanova followed the same path as Malevich (as in his 'Knife-Grinder', 1912;) and Kliun (as in his 'Ozonator', 1913—14), and her concurrent writings suggest, she regarded Futurism to be a key phase in the artistic evolution toward Suprematism. Rozanova expressed this impulse not only in her vivid, dynamic paintings, but also in what Yurii Annenkov described as the 'black plumes of her drawing'."

""Closely examining Rozanova's Suprematist period, we see that Rozanova's Suprematism is contrary to that of Kazimir Malevich, who constructs his works from a composition of quadrate forms, while Rozanova constructs hers from color. For Malevich, color exists solely to distinguish one plane from another; for Rozanova, the composition serves to reveal all the possibilities of color on a plane. In Suprematism, she offered a Suprematism of painting, not of the square [referring to Malevich]."

"Only the absence of honesty and of a true love of art provides some artists with the affrontery to live on stale cans of artistic economics stocked up for years, and, year in year out, until they are fifty, to mutter about what they had first started to talk about when they were twenty."

"Opponents of the New Art fall back on this calculation, rejecting its self-sufficient meaning and, having declared it 'Transitional,' being unable even to understand properly the conception of this Art, lumping together Cubism, Futurism, and other phenomena of artistic life, not ascertaining for themselves either their essential differences or the shared tenets that link them."

"The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why It Is Misunderstood."

"A Pin To See The Peep-Show"

"Jane: What do you think of his book Arthur? Gideon: I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it. ...I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I can see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think..."

"Rose Macaulay is a wise guide, tolerant, generous-minded, liberal, courageous, cheerful, and her judgments of society and social values are always sound."

"The best book she has written, and that is saying a lot."

"Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank. Another is lack of proportion, the obsession with one desire or one principle to the minimising or exclusion of others; exaggeration, in fact."

"Each wrong act brings with it its own anaesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years."

"Poem me no poems."

""Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

"Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind. ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing."

"How fast and how loud foreigners talk ! It is a gift ; the British cannot talk so loud or so fast. They have too many centuries of fog in their throats."

"The trouble about the fashions is, there are too many going on at once, and you can't follow them all. Sometimes, I think I will give them all up, and just be dowdy."

"To the politician we are something of a dark horse. He does not know what we want; he wishes he did. Do we know ourselves? Vaguely we know that we don't want the politician."

"Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, and afterwards no sign of where they went is to be found."

"Instinct is the direct connection with truth."