Quotes by Women Historians

Barbara W. Tuchman

Agnes Strickland

Jung Chang

Frances Yates

Iris Chang

Marjorie Bowen

Mary Ritter Beard

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.

Alice Morse Earle

She was an Amazon. Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed along the wilder shores of love. For her, each new affair was an encampment set up along the way; sometimes a palace, sometimes a tent, but always the supreme refuge.

A totally unexpected development followed; the Queen and the Irish people fell in love with each other. The affection was brief, the participants unsuited, the episode soon forgotten and the course of history uninfluenced, but for a few days in August, 1849, the attraction was a reality.

Cecil Woodham-Smith

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

Objectivity in science cannot be proclaimed, it must be built.

Londa Schiebinger

Although it is tempting to imagine an ancient era innocent of biochemical weaponry, in fact this Pandora's box of horrors was opened thousands of years ago. The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories.

When it comes to the cause of justice, I take no prisoners and I don't believe in compromising.

Mary Frances Berry

Some friendships in life sustain themselves only at a particular life stage, products of some mutual developmental problem to be resolved together, or of some external circumstance, like being housed in the same dormitory in boarding school. Others grow out of a deeper spiritual and philosophical affinity, which continues throughout life.

Jill Ker Conway

I think sometimes - do not we all? - that perhaps the present year is my last year and that all my busyness is foolish.

No transformation in men's attitude to Nature — in their "common sense" — has been more profound than the change in perspective brought about by the discovery of the past. Rather than take this discovery for granted, it is almost preferable to exaggerate its significance.

And last, we must bear in mind that the relationships between perception, thought, emotion, and behavior are neither automatic nor consistent. In many cases they are demonstrably affected or directed by culture and socialization. We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.

Extending over more than a century and including most nations of the globe, the cause of woman suffrage has been one of the great democratic forces in human history.

Women owe Friedan an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Leaders are indispensable, but to produce a major social change many ordinary people must also be involved.

Anne Firor Scott

My father said he was going to write to the Jinzhou City Party Committee asking for permission to 'talk about love'...My mother supposed it was a bit like asking permission from the head of the family...the Communist Party was the new patriarch.

Jesus Christ rose from the grave.' With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

Margaret MacMillan

Until women can visualize the sacred female they cannot be whole and society cannot be whole.

Since the earliest times it is as the exploiter that the Jew has been known amongst his fellow men of all races and creeds. Moreover, he has persistently shown himself ungrateful... The Jews have always formed a rebellious element in every state.

Nesta Helen Webster

If Veblen failed to develop an evolutionary methodology, he also failed to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory to explain in detail how institutions evolve in the cultural environment and what sorts of interaction occur between economic activity and institutional structures. Veblen was something of an intellectual butterfly, and he often lacked the patience to elaborate his ideas into a coherent system. But he teemed with fragmentary insights, and these can be pieced together to suggest the outlines of a Veblenian scheme of cultural evolution - what might be called a 'pre-theory' of cultural change.

Cynthia Eagle Russett

I believe it is crucial to consider the degree to which one woman's possession of reproductive choice may actually depend on or deepen another woman's reproductive vulnerability.

Rickie Solinger

Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics.

Mary Ritter Beard

Give me a well-cooked, well-served meal, a bouquet, and a sunset, and I can do more for a man's soul than all the cant ever preached. I can even do it without a sunset!

Ann Ellis Hanson

The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.