Women Authors From The United States

"I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and classmates. I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it."

"People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy. Most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?"

"Naked, we needed protection, and the hospital protected us. Of course, the hospital had stripped us naked in the first place—but that just underscored its obligation to shelter us. And the hospital fulfilled its obligation. Somebody in our families had to pay a good deal of money for that: sixty dollars (1967 dollars) a day just for the room; therapy, drugs, and consultations were extra. Ninety days was the usual length of mental-hospital insurance coverage, but ninety days was barely enough to get started on a visit to McLean. My workup alone took ninety days. The price of several of those college educations I didn’t want was spent on my hospitalization."

"In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves."

"Is this the type of friend or lover I want to have? I ask myself every time I meet someone new. Charming but shallow; good-hearted but a bit conventional; too handsome for his own good; fascinating but probably unreliable; and so forth. I guess I've had my share of unreliable. More than my share? How many would constitute more than my share?"

"Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside."

"I've gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other -- the lady and her maid, the soldier, and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light -- that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light. Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom."

"Glamour is just sex that got civilized."

"Trump is the only hope to defeat the Kingmakers. Because everybody else will fall in line. The Kingmakers have so much money behind them."

"It's really dangerous for a guy to go to college these days. He's better off if he doesn't talk to any women when he gets there. The feminists are perfectly glad to make false accusations and then claim all men are capable of some dastardly deed like rape."

"There is a war on men, and [feminists] are very open about it. They don't conceal it; they brag about it. You read all of their material – they're always saying they want to abolish the patriarchy. They said that husbands are not necessary in a marriage, they're not necessary in raising children."

"What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother."

"American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth. We can do anything we want to do."

"By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape."

"Every country that has experimented with women in actual combat has abandoned the idea, and the notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth."

"People think that child-support enforcement benefits children, but it doesn't."

"Driver's licenses are a crucial national security issue."

"Many professors are Marxists or other varieties of radicals who hate America."

"When will American men learn how to stand up to the nagging by the intolerant, uncivil feminists whose sport is to humiliate men?"

"The cornerstone of the political correctness that dominates campus culture is radical feminism."

"Men should stop treating feminists like ladies, and instead treat them like the men they say they want to be."

"And the first commandment of feminism is: I am woman; thou shalt not tolerate strange gods who assert that women have capabilities or often choose roles that are different from men's."

"The worst censors are those prohibiting criticism of the theory of evolution in the classroom."

"It is long overdue for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect our children against the intolerant evolutionists."

"Minors are an intended audience for the highly profitable sex industry. Impressionable teenagers are easily persuaded to have abortions, and homosexual clubs in high school are designed for the young."

"The judges' obsession with smut is astounding."

"ERA means abortion funding, means homosexual privileges, means whatever else."

"The atomic bomb is a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God."

"Non-criminal sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for the virtuous woman except in the rarest of cases."

"The anti-slavery cause had come to break stronger fetters than those that held the slave. The idea of equal rights was in the air. The wail of the slave, his clanking fetters, his utter need, appealed to everybody. Women heard. Angelina and Sarah Grimké and Abby Kelley went out to speak for the slaves. Such a thing had never been heard of. An earthquake shock could hardly have startled the community more. Some of the abolitionists forgot the slave in their efforts to silence the women. The Anti-Slavery Society rent itself in twain over the subject. The Church was moved to its very foundation in opposition."

"The widening of women’s sphere is to improve her lot. Let us do it, and if the world scoff, let it scoff — if it sneer, let it sneer — but we will go emulating the example of the sisters Grimké and Abby Kelly. When they first lectured against slavery they were not listened to as respectfully as you listen to us. So the first female physician meets many difficulties, but to the next the path will be made easy."

"Anarchist-feminists would have concurred with Sarah Grimké's simple plea: "I ask no favor for my sex...All I ask our brethren is that they will take their heels from our necks and to permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.""

"Deriving their analytic framework from the work of an earlier generation of feminists, particularly such singular rebels as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Grimké, the anarchist women insisted that the humanity of women was all the justification their cause required."

"I came into the study of history through my work on a biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimké... I was fascinated with the lives and characters of these two women, who had not had a biography written about them since 1885... They spoke to me in a very personal way and I wanted to transmit what I received from these women of another century to readers of my day."

"Of Sarah and Angelina Grimke I knew but little personally. These brave sisters from Charleston, South Carolina, had inherited slaves, but in their conversion from Episcopacy to Quakerism, in 1828, became convinced that they had no right to such inheritance. They emancipated their slaves and came North and entered at once upon the pioneer work in the advancing education of woman, though they saw then in their course only their duty to the slave. They had " fought the good fight" before I came into the ranks, but by their unflinching testimony and unwavering courage, they had opened the way and made it possible, if not easy, for other women to follow their example. It is memorable of them that their public advocacy of anti-slavery was made the occasion of the issuing of a papal bull, in the form of a " pastoral letter," by the evangelical clergy of Boston, in which the churches and all God-fearing people were warned against their influence."

"Female anti-slavery networks, work on the Underground Railroad, club and church activities, and literary associations reflected a significant homosocial world. Some letters also reveal intimate, lifelong friendships that crossed racial lines. The Afro-American abolitionist, educator, and woman's rights advocate Sarah Mapps Douglass had such a relationship with Sarah Grimké; and Emma V. Brown, also an educator and an early graduate of Oberlin College, corresponded with Emily Howland, a white abolitionist and Quaker educator, for more than forty years. Given the taboo against interracial friendships, these personal alliances, and others like them, are notable…"

"the essay by the Southern-born abolitionist, Sarah Grimké, The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838), represented, in the opinion of historian Eleanor Flexner, the first serious discussion of woman's rights by an American woman. Sarah Grímké argued for social, political, economic, and legal equality between the sexes. She condemned the rape of Black women under slavery and observed the injurious effects of that system upon the white women of the South. Likewise, she pointed to the effects of inequality upon marital relations, portending the future content of the feminist claim: "That there is a root of bitterness continually springing up in families and troubling the repose of both men and women, must be manifest to even a superficial observer; and I believe it is the mistaken notion of the inequality of the sexes. As there is an assumption of superiority on the one part, which is not sanctioned by Jehovah, there is an incessant struggle on the other to rise to that degree of dignity, which God designed women to possess in common with men, and to maintain those rights and exercise those privileges which every woman's common sense, apart from prejudices of education, tells her are inalienable; they are a part of her moral nature, and can only cease when her immortal mind is extinguished.”"

""Thine in the bonds of Womanhood," the abolitionist and woman's rights advocate Sarah Grimké signed her letters."

"I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I l have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her — Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone — a long galaxy of great women. I have heard them speak, saying in only slightly different phrases exactly what I heard these newer advocates of the cause say at these meetings. Those older women have gone on and most of those who work with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop. There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause — I wish I could name every one — but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!"

"Thus far woman has struggled through life with bandaged eyes, accepting the dogma of her weakness and inability to take care of herself not only physically but intellectually. She has held out a trembling hand and received gratefully the proffered aid. She has foregone her right to study, to know the laws and purposes of government to which she is subject. But there is now awakened in her a consciousness that she is defrauded of her legitimate Rights and that she never can fulfill her mission until she is placed in that position to which she feels herself called by the divinity within. Hitherto she has surrendered her person and her individuality to man, but she can no longer do this and not feel that she is outraging her nature and her God."

"Many a woman shudders … at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians."

"[Girls] study under the paralyzing idea that their acquirements cannot be brought into practical use. They may subserve the purposes of promoting individual domestic pleasure and social enjoyment in conversation, but what are they in comparison with the grand stimulation of independence and self- reliance, of the capability of contributing to the comfort and happiness of those whom they love as their own souls?"

"Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?"

"It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul."

"The reason why women effect so little and are so shallow is because their aims are low, marriage is the prize for which they strive; if foiled in that they rarely rise above disappointment."

"I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise."

"I do deeply deplore, of the sake of the cause, the prevalent notion, that the clergy must be had, either by persuasion or by bribery. They will not need persuasion or bribery, if their hearts are with us; if they are not, we are better without them. It is idle to suppose that the kingdom of heaven cannot come on earth, without their cooperation."

"If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, were to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man."

"I want my sex to claim nothing from their brethren but what their brethren may justly claim from them."

"If the minds of women were enlightened and improved, the domestic circle would be more frequently refreshed by intelligent conversation, a means of edification now deplorably neglected, for want of that cultivation which these intellectual advantages would confer."