Women Born In The 19th Century

"I pity them! No doubt they were unaware of the anguish they caused me. They were the masters and I was the slave. Just as it is natural for us to do good, so it is natural for them to behave as they did behave to me. They did so out of habit, not out of wickedness."

"Seeing the sun, the moon and the stars, I said to myself: Who could be the Master of these beautiful things? And I felt a great desire to see him, to know Him and to pay Him homage..."

"Laeken is becoming the enchanted Burg Prunn. Nobody dares to approach it anymore."

"In her early writings in the 1840s and 1850s she had been an ardent supporter of women's rights and even free love, and had received particular notoriety with her shocking 1851 novel Realities. In her middle years, however, she modified her radical views, and her novels such as The Rebel of the Family (1880) reflect her growing conservatism and ambivalence about women's rights."

"We landed at the Ferry House, and struck off into the woods full of globe flowers by the lake side, and of yellow poppies by the wood wall; of hyacinths beneath the trees; of the curved crozier heads of the sprouting bracken; of young foxglove spathes, thick, downy, and as yet flowerless; of tufts of mountain fern like Indians' head-dresses; of trailing brambles and yet more delicate sprays of wild-raspberry; of bird's-eye, blue and lustrous, of violets and wood-sorrel; of lady's-mantles, green, gold-spotted; of delicate wind-flowers and starry stitchwort,—full of all manner of sweet wood-flowers; and then, returning, we saw two large carts and two large horses put into the ferry-boat, which a man nearly as large rowed leisurely across, according to the mode and manner of the place."

"In re-reading these pages I am now more than ever convinced that I have struck the right chord of condemnation, and advocated the best virtues and most valuable characteristics of women. I neither soften nor retract a line of what I have said."

"The world, they would say, was made up of "A's" and "B's" – anarchists and bureaucrats; and they were all on the side of the "B's"."

"Within a trade, in the absence of any Common Rule, competition between firms leads, as we have seen, to the adoption of practices by which the whole industry is deteriorated. The enforcement of a common minimum standard throughout the trade not only stops the degradation, but in every way conduces to industrial efficiency."

"Within a community, too, in the absence of regulation, the competition between trades tends to the creation and persistence in certain occupations of conditions of employment injurious to the nation as a whole. The remedy is to extend the conception of the Common Rule from the trade to the whole community, and by prescribing a National Minimum, absolutely to prevent any industry being carried on under conditions detrimental to the public welfare."

"We shall never understand the Awakening of Women until we realise that it is not mere feminism. It is one of three simultaneous world-movements towards a more equal partnership among human beings in human affairs. ... [T]he movement for woman's emancipation is paralleled, on the one hand, by the International Movement of Labour—the banding together of the manual working classes to obtain their place in the sun and, on the other, by the unrest among subject-peoples struggling for freedom to develop their own peculiar civilisations."

"Their first book, The Permanent Official, fills three plump volumes, and took them and their two secretaries upwards of four years to write. It is an amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions the history and the administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for all time."

"Perhaps nothing illustrates better the diabolical character of the Stalinist regime than the 140-mile Belomor Canal, built at Stalin's instigation to link the Baltic Sea and the White Sea. Between September 1931 and August 1933, somewhere between 128,000 and 180,000 prisoners - most of them from Solovetsky, with Frenkel directing their efforts - hacked out a waterway, equipped only with the most primitive pick-axes, wheelbarrows and hatchets. So harsh were the conditions and so inadequate the tools that tens of thousands of them died in the process. This was hardly unforeseeable; for six months of the year the ground was frozen solid, while in many places the prisoners had to cut through solid granite. And, as so often, the net result was next to worthless economically: far too narrow and shallow to be navigable by substantial vessels. Yet when Shaw's fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were given a tour of the finished canal they were oblivious to all this. As they put it in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), it was 'pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration'."

"The Webbs explicitly rejected the 'naive belief that. . . Soviet] penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue.' Such notions were simply 'incredible' to 'anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world'. Slavery always has its apologists, but seldom are they so ingenuous. The thirty-six Soviet writers who, under Gorky's direction, produced the hyperbolic book The Belomor-Baltic Canal Named for Stalin at least had the excuse that the alternative to lying might be dying. The Webbs wrote their rubbish in the safety of Bloomsbury."

"Their bureaucracy was never étatisme: it claimed much for the State, but much for the group also. Only the individual seemed somehow to get left out, or rather to be told to fit himself in, and not to fuss."

"It is a mistake to believe that the Webbs' basic idea was State Socialism. It was in fact nothing less than the application of scientific thinking to politics. About this I had many arguments with Beatrice. Like Bernard Shaw, she totally lacked the strain of dissenting morality which is so strong an element in the British character and especially in the Labour Party. ... They were interested in the economic and political structure of society; they were disinterestedly, and I would even say passionately, desirous of social improvement and greater human happiness. Their watchwords...were "measurement and publicity". That is to say, they wanted to substitute quantitative for qualitative arguments, to find a solution and to subject it to criticism instead of gassing about justice and liberty. To avoid the danger of tyranny they agreed that there must be freedom of criticism and "public accountability" for all State action. But they were never really interested in liberty – that is to say, they did not recognize the intractable complexity of individuals. People must be placed in categories for the purposes of government, and if they did not fit, so much the worse."

"The only woman who appears regularly in the New Statesman in the early months is its co-founder Beatrice Webb. She is represented in her partnership with Sidney Webb and their solid 22-part series “What is Socialism?”, which dominates the first months of the magazine. Just one instalment of this series is devoted to, as they call it, "freedom for the woman". In its dogged lines, I find both what must have been most attractive and what may have been most alienating about feminism 100 years ago. What is attractive is the insistence on material emancipation. After centuries of mystification of the angel of the house, the Webbs are fiercely sure that there is, quite simply, a "loss of personal dignity and personal freedom . . . inherent in dependence on the caprice of another . . . The childbearing woman, like the wage earner, must be set free from economic subjection." Fifty years before Betty Frie­dan told American housewives the same thing, Beatrice Webb suggested to British housewives that economic dependence was not romantic. Elsewhere in her life and writing, Webb was often conflicted about feminism and the woman’s role beyond the home. Yet this is a straightforward message of material independence. Even now, we often see Daily Mail columnists bridling at the idea that being financially dependent involves any loss of personal freedom. What a call to arms this must have been 100 years ago."

"Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one."

"In a republican land the power behind the throne is the power. Save yourself the trouble of calling caucuses, printing party journals, distributing ballots, and the like. Let men who are fit for nothing of more consequence do this little work, which is best done by mere nobodies … Don’t drag the engine, like an ignoramus, but bring wood and water and flame, like an engineer."

"Let us rise in the moral power of womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy, and insulted justice, and eternal truth, and mighty love and holy freedom."

"The Female Anti-Slavery Society was the first national woman's rights organization in the United States. It was composed of Black and white women, and Black women made up a significant part of its leadership, notably in Boston and Philadelphia. Sara Parker Remond, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Letetia Still, the Forten sisters (Margaretta, Harriet, and Sarah), among others, joined forces with white women such as Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley Foster, and Maria Weston Chapman to organize the collective labors of the antislavery movement."

"If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere."

"Feminist writers, not trained historians, were the first to undertake a systematic attempt to approach the problem of women's role in American life and history. This took the form of feminist tracts, theoretical approaches, and compilations of woman's "contributions." The early compilers attacked the subject with a missionary zeal designed, above all, to right wrong. Their tendency was to praise anything women had done as a "contribution" and to include any women who had gained the slightest public attention in their numerous lists. Still, much positive work was done in simply recounting the history of the woman's rights movement and some of its forerunners and in discussing some of the women whose pioneering struggles opened opportunities to others. Feminist writers were hampered by a two-fold bias. First, they shared the middle-class, nativist, moralistic approach of the Progressives and tended to censure out of existence anyone who did not fit into this pattern. Thus we find that women like Frances Wright and Ernestine Rose received little attention because they were considered too radical. "Premature feminists" such as the Grimké sisters, Maria Weston Chapman, and Lydia Maria Child are barely mentioned."

"Grudge no expense — yield to no opposition — forget fatigue — till, by the strength of prayer and sacrifice, the spirit of love have overcome."

"Confusion has seized us, and all things go wrong:The women have leaped from "their spheres"And instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along,And are setting the world by the ears!"

"A mi nadie me marea a ojos cerrados yo distingo cual es el mejor chocolate, bueno, si este si que esta requete bueno es chocolate abuelita con sabor a la antiguita, hagan la prueba contra cualquiera chocolate abuelita es requete bueno."

"Hay que pensar en que se tiene uno que morir que estamos aquí de paso y prepararnos y hacer todo el bien que se pueda."

"Pedirme a mi que hable del cine Mexicano? es como solicitar mi autobiografía, que no habré vivido, que no habré visto, y de cuantas maneras distintas me han visto a mi? sin ir mas lejos tierna como en "La gallina clueca", llorosa como en "Cuando los hijos se van", dulce como en "El baisano Jalil", y enérgica y dominante y al mismo tiempo cariñosa como en "Los tres García" me han visto muy viva y muy muerta."

"Quiero enviar al publico de México un saludo muy cariñoso, que yo no los olvido que yo cada día hago mas esfuerzos por gustar que si no gusto pues ya fue una desgracia pero el publico es benigno y me perdona todos mis errores, verdad que me los perdona?"

"Porque si tú no sientes el público no siente."

"Un día me canse y lo llame y le dije óigame hijito venga para acá, no se crea usted que ser estrella consiste en llegar tarde a los llamados, el ser estrella consiste en llegar a tiempo a su llamado, cumplir con su deber, dar todo lo que se tiene para alagar al publico y salir triunfante hasta donde se pueda, eso es ser estrella pero no llegar tarde a los llamados."

"Within a temple's towering walls I stand A temple vast; the heaven is its dome: No corniced crag was hewn by human hand, Nor by it wrought this tracery of foam;"

"O wondrous sphinx! within thy marble breast What undreamed secrets lie concealed! Hast thou no pity for my wild unrest My maddening longing for the unrevealed?"

"If he bring me a rose, a briar rose, To place in my braided hair, I shall know there are thorns in life for me And many a wearying care. If he bring me a lily pure and pale And lay it upon my breast, I shall know that my life will be of peace, As a bird in its mother's nest."

"Joan Robinson, a leading Keynesian and radical, produced a specimen for me to analyze. I said something like, "This is obviously the writing of a foreinger, so it's difficult for me to analyze. But I would say it is written by someone who had considerable artistic but not much intellectual talent." It turned out to be the handwriting of Lydia Lopokova, the world-famous Russian ballerina whom Keynes had married. That was surely my greatest triumph of the year at Cambridge!"

"At first we got along very well. Esipova even boasted outside the class that she had pupils who wrote sonatas (I completed Sonata, Op. 1, and played it to Esipova, who took it home and inserted pedaling). But before long trouble began. Esipova’s method of teaching was to try to fit everyone into a standard pattern. True, it was a very elaborate pattern, and if the pupil’s temperament coincided with her own, the results were admirable. But if the pupil happened to be of an independent cast of mind Esipova would do her best to suppress his individuality instead of helping to develop it. Moreover, I had great difficulty in ridding myself of careless playing, and the Mozart, Schubert and Chopin which she insisted on were somehow not in my line. At that period I was too preoccupied with the search for a new harmonic idiom to understand how anyone could care for the simple harmonies of Mozart."

"Religion can not be defined as belonging to any special faculty; and even reverence and worship are but local manifestations of the religious element, and can not be said to be true religion unless they extend through every department of the mind. Religion, properly considered, is that subtle agent of the soul which aspires to perfection in whatever way it is to be attained; and seeks to worship God because he is infinite, and is what man is for ever aspiring to become."

"Reason is a religious duty and quality of the mind; and exercise of the judgment upon all occasions and subjects is true and most divine worship."

"There is true religion in that man who, instead of endeavoring to perfect but one department of his nature, makes his physical, mental, social, and moral life, equal. Cultivate your physical nature, perfect your life, and in that proportion your soul will be perfect. Cultivate strength, vigor, power, manliness, and symmetry, and in that proportion the soul can think greater thoughts."

"Religion does not consist alone in reverence or adoration for a special object; but it makes that reverence the controlling and prompting influence of all other faculties of the mind. Thus there can be a religion of intellect, of love, of every department of the human mind; and a religion of life combines the whole of human existence, and makes up the sum of every department of earthly life."

"There is a true, religious devotion in the mind and feelings of that man whose soul springs forth in beauty and power, whose physical form is upright and symmetrical, and who, in fulfilling the laws of health, fulfils the laws of Deity. There is a true religion in the intellectual man, who, penetrating deeply into the earth, and air, and sky, for scientific investigation, culls all the treasures of thought and beauty, and stores them up in his memory as sacred and divine."

"A religion of bigotry and sectarianism … becomes, not a religion of life, but a religion of one special department and thus a man may be religious on one plane and entirely irreligious on another."

"There is certainly a religion which belongs to the physical form, and which should be regarded in degree as much as that which belongs to the soul. It is as much a duty for every man and woman to perfect fully their physical form as for them to continually search for immortality."

"Your theology has taught you to believe that any religion, to be perfected, must be so at the sacrifice of the physical form or powers. Hence, the ancient religionists confined themselves within the cloistered cells of monasteries, and there with true devoutness of feeling they sought to perfect the immortality of the soul by crucifying the body. Health, life, intellect—all were sacrificed to this fanaticism for a happy immortality. … Ask any religionist what constitutes true and perfect religion, and he will tell you it is that which crucifies the human part and cultivates the divine."

"When you endeavor to perfect every department of that form—physically, mentally, spiritually—then you are fulfilling the laws of true religion. Can a soul perfect itself in every department, when the physical form is groaning under disease, and continually decaying in consequence of the endeavor to crucify it? Never. The soul must spring forth spontaneously, and the form must be subservient to the slightest thought and feeling of the soul."

"She never knew how bad she was."

"People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing."

"Mrs. Jenkins could dream if she could not sing."

"Critics have long wondered whether Coloratura Jenkins' art can be described as singing at all. But she will intrepidly attack any aria, scale its altitudes in great swoops and hoots, assaying its descending trills with the vigor of a maudlin cuckoo."

"It is never right to be more Catholic than the Pope."

"Meu amor! Meu amante! Meu amigo! Colhe a hora que passa, hora divina, Bebe-a dentro de mim, bebe-a comigo! Sinto-me alegre e forte! Sou menina! [...] E à volta, Amor... tornemos, nas alfombras Dos caminhos selvagens e escuros, Num astro só as nossas duas sombras!..."