Women Born In The 1880s

"There is no reason why a woman’s administration shouldn’t be as efficient as a man’s!"

"She was the anchorwoman of the council and much respected in the city. When she said something, she meant it, and knew what she was talking about."

"A woman needs to be interested in politics, whatever her party, for the good of the country."

"Chinnery did not exhibit her work during her lifetime, but her photographs were published in several of Australia's major newspapers, along with articles and anecdotes written by her. In March 1935, she produced a three-page article and photo spread for the weekend magazine of The New York Times."

"In addition to her photographic work, Chinnery kept extensive diaries of her time in New Guinea and Papua. She began to rewrite her diaries as a book in the mid-1930s, but abandoned this work after the 1937 volcanic eruption in Rabaul, after which she returned to Australia."

"Her manuscripts were typed up by her four daughters and donated to the National Library of Australia, which published them in 1998 as Malaguna Road: The Papua and New Guinea Diaries of Sarah Chinnery, edited by Kate Fortune."

"For the rest of her life, she never quit her quest to help others."

"She was a powerful, experienced legislative voice for education."

"It’s education primarily that takes me to Olympia ... I find such a woeful lack of people who can and will speak for the schools. Too many sincere people just don’t know what they're talking about ... just don't understand the problems."

"It gives you a bit of a heart twist to walk right up to the courthouse and put your name opposite that of a man – not whom you’re going to marry – but opposite the name of a man who's your friend – and who want the same job you could fill."

"She also championed the fight to recognize Native American fishing rights on Huron Bay."

"At a time when minorities, including Native Americans, were subjected to considerable economic and social discrimination, Anderson’s determination to attend college and return the benefits of her education to her community was notable. Her role as educator, legislator, and public health reform leader aided the Native American community as well as the whole of society."

"Nebraskans can be grateful that she was destined to spend her remarkable life in the state."

"Evidently the citizens of Issaquah initially appreciated her strength and independent spirit, because her name was bandied about as a candidate for Issaquah mayor in 1930 and in fact, she ran."

"A physically large woman with an equally large amount of inner strength, she was not afraid of confronting Jack's clients when they fell behind on their bills and following up to make sure the bills got paid."

"Stella Alexander developed a reputation for frugality and toughness in her early years in Issaquah during the 1920s."

"The likes of Hazel Abel are among the rarest resources of the world."

"Cave challenged the male exclusivity of the legal profession."

"Miss Cave had humble legal aspirations and sought only to provide counsel should she be allowed to pursue a legal career. She did not aspire to the Bench."

"She is the model of determination and icon for anyone who is or feels like an ‘outsider’"

"I am aware that my application is most unusual and no doubt without precedent, but trust that the Masters of the bench will give it their serious consideration and I should, in the event of a favourable reply, be pleased to conform to any special rules they may think fit to impose."

"I still delight in it when people find pleasure in my work. To paint is to reach out, hoping that one will touch. One wants to be understood."

"Maggie Laubser was often influenced by exotic beauty and her various travels within South Africa. Her portraits of young Indian and African women, in which flower motifs are employed as decorative surrounds, are some of her finest. Comparable works include Young girl with head scarf holding a protea, Pondo woman and Indian girl with poinsettias."

"She singled out Franz Marc of Der Blaue Reiter and Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff and Pechstein of Die Brücke as significant to her personality, although she would claim not to have been influenced by them."

"Her brushwork and color choice became more expressive and less consistent with her earlier works, using angular features and colored shapes to both her landscape paintings and portraits."

"A woman past forty should make up her mind to be young, not her face."

"It investigates questions of nationalism, gender and sexuality in the autobiographical texts of Petronella van Heerden and Elsa Joubert."

"She gave up practicing medicine and came to Harrismith to farm cattle and was legendary among the boere here."

"Through focusing on childhood experiences in Kerssnuitsels, marketed as a youth memoir, Van Heerden succeeds to convey her gradual awakening to the discriminating binaries imposed on women of her cultural and historical context in late 19th century and early 20th century South Africa."

"As political scientist De Klerk (1975:xiv) claims, ‘[t]he key to the Afrikaners is Calvinism’ and the strict doctrines enforced by the state and church can be said to have inhibited Van Heerden’s self-defining quest in her writing since she might have been ostracised (or imprisoned), in my opinion, if she imparted her more radical political opinions or openly discussed her sexuality as ‘mannish [lesbian]'."

"My analysis is underpinned by relevant life writing and feminist criticism, such as the notion of female."

"I preferred to live as master of men, not their servant."

"Since you men claim to be wiser and have better minds than women, then how come you are seduced by seeing their faces."

"There was no religious prohibition of showing a woman's face, that Egyptian peasants do not cover their faces, and that the white transparent cloth barely covers the face."

"Men claim they have superior intelligence, saying there have been more men of genius than women. They forget that only when people use their gifts do they develop. That is why poor men who have spent their lives as cooks or tailors have not excelled in the arts or sciences. How can we expect, therefore, to find women whose knowledge is confined to this sphere excelling as geniuses?"

"I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror— The wide brown land for me!"

""I am a woman and I do not love war, but rather than accepting this (colonialism) I prefer war.”""

""My womanliness and your manliness is going to be tested on the battle field. Do not absent yourself!”""

"There is a film in which Asta Nielsen is looking out of the window and sees someone coming. A mortal fear, a petrified horror, appears on her face. But she gradually realizes that she is mistaken and that the man who is approaching, far from spelling disaster, is the answer to her prayers. The expression of horror on her face is gradually modulated through the entire scale of feelings from hesitant doubt, anxious hope and cautious joy, right through to exultant happiness. We watch her face in closeup for some twenty metres of film. We see every hint of expression around her eyes and mouth and watch them relax one by one and slowly change. For minutes on end we witness the organic development of her feelings, and nothing beyond."

""Asta Nielsen" means the power to speak of pathos, to see pain, and to find the middle path between Baudelaire's flower of evil and the sick rose of which Blake sang."

"I may add that Alice Paul's visit to London has brightened the lives of such Woman's Party exiles as Hazel Hunkins, Betty Gram and myself. To see this wonder-worker-so quiet, so indefatigable, so sure, once more beginning to move mountains, revives one's faith in the future."

"In 1940, at the World's Fair held in New York City, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, addressing a receptive audience, declared that it is woman's main task to stop war...Though more militant than Mrs. Catt as a leader in the suffrage movement, Alice Paul was no less certain that war sprang from men's nature and that women were under obligation to put a stop to wars. When, in April, 1941, she was interviewed on her return from Geneva, where she had spent two years directing the organization of an international movement for equal rights for women, she declared, relative to the war in Europe: "Women's instincts are constructive and tend to build and create, not to tear down." The guilt of war she laid wholly on men, saying: "This war was brought about without the women having anything to say or do about it, and now they are the greatest sufferers.""

"I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women — by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment."

"Miss Alice Paul, Ph.D., D.C.L., author of the Equal Rights Treaty, and a founder of the National Woman's Party of the United States, is chairman of the committee on nationality of the Inter-American Commission of Women, and to her indefatigable labor in research and the compilation of material is due the commission's monumental report now ready for presentation at the first plenary session. This report covers the nationality of women throughout the world. In every case, it gives actual excerpts from the law in the original language, with translation. This applies even to laws in Japanese, Greek, Siamese, Bulgarian, Russian, etc., with the original text in the original script facing the translation on the opposite page. Synopses of the laws are included also with important original chapters by Miss Paul so that the juridical information is made easily understandable to all readers, whether familiar with legal terms or not. Comprehensive tables on nationality prepared by Miss Stevens and Miss Paul are another novel and important feature of this report which is as plain as daylight, as thrilling as an air race, and as fascinatingly involved as a detective story."

"Other evidences of changes in women’s status were more immediately apparent. The legendary ‘‘flapper’’ made her debut in the postwar decade, signaling with studied theatrical flourishes a new ethos of feminine freedom and sexual parity. The Nineteenth Amendment, enacted just in time for the 1920 presidential election, gave women at least formal political equality. The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed by Alice Paul of the National Women’s Party in 1923, sought to guarantee full social and economic participation to women. An organized movement for the promotion of birth control, founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921 as the American Birth Control League, heralded a growing feminine focus on reproductive control and erotic liberation. Countless women, especially if they were urban, white, and affluent, now used the new technologies of spermicidal jelly and the Mensinga-type diaphragm, both first manufactured in quantity in the United States in the 1920s, to limit the size of their families. This development worried the authors of Recent Social Trends, who feared that the old-stock, white, urban middle class would be demographically swamped by the proliferation of the rural and immigrant poor, as well as blacks."

"Alice Paul comes of Quaker stock and there is in her bearing that powerful serenity so characteristic of the successful Quaker. Like many another famous general she is well under five foot six, a slender, dark woman with a pale, often haggard face, and great earnest childlike eyes that seem to seize you to her purpose and hold you despite your own desires and intentions. During that seven year suffrage campaign she worked so continuously, ate so little and slept so little that she always seemed to be wasting away before our eyes... Indifference is harder to fight than hostility, and there is nothing that kills an agitation like having everybody admit that it is fundamentally right. If you can so frame your issue or so choose your method of attack as to precipitate discussion and difference of opinion among honest men, so that all your followers become passionate explainers, you have put life into a movement. Alice Paul knows this and she is a master at framing a meaty issue. As I look back over that seven-year struggle I sometimes suspect that many bold strategies were employed more to revive the followers than to confound the enemy...Alice Paul's active leadership in the American feminist movement was almost an accident. She was a student at an English university intending to pursue the career of a scholar when she was caught up in the English militant movement and served a brief apprenticeship in jail. It was during this experience that she began to plan what she would do for women suffrage in America. American women owe much to the English militants, but this above all."

"Alice Paul is a leader of action, not of thought. She is a general, a supreme tactician, not an abstract thinker. Her joy is in the fight itself, in each specific drawn battle, not in debating with five hundred delegates the fundamental nature of the fight. "The Executive Committee have provided a good enough phrase-To remove all the remaining forms of the subjection of women.' Let the delegates with the least possible debate adopt this phrase to serve for purpose, program and constitution." Of course she said nothing, but that, I believe, was Alice Paul's notion of what the Convention's action should be. "I will let you know what the first step is to be, how to act and when. Go home now and don't worry." These words were not printed in the program, but they seemed to be written between the lines...Is Alice Paul a radical? Is she even a liberal? Is she really a reactionary? These vague reformist terms are inappropriate in describing Alice Paul. Let us use the definite terms of the revolution. She is not a communist, she is not a socialist; if she is class-conscious at all her instincts are probably with the class into which she was born. But I do not think she is class-conscious. I think she is sex-conscious; she has given herself, body and mind and soul, to the women's movement. The world war meant no moment's wavering in her purpose, in fact she used the war with serene audacity to further her purpose. I imagine she could even go through a proletarian revolution without taking sides and be found waiting on the doorstep of the Extraordinary Commission the next morning to see that the revolution's promises to women were not forgotten! Alice Paul does not belong to the revolution, but her leadership has had a quality that only the revolution can understand."

"Woman suffrage is an almost forgotten issue today, and yet the battle is not won. Despite the capitulation of Congress last June, nearly three-fourths of the women of these States will be denied the right to vote in the Presidential Campaign of 1920, unless a miracle is accomplished in the next two months. The miracle will not fall from Heaven. If it occurs, it will be the result of hard work on the part of those same good fighters who picketed the White House and went to jail and finally wrung the Federal Amendment out of a distressed and embarrassed government,-Alice Paul's gallant band of militants."

"NAWSA opposed Paul's tactics, but many historians concur in the opinion that these militant actions helped to spur the urgency of the moment."

"(how would you describe your contribution to the struggle for women’s rights?) I always feel ... the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end."