Quotes by Women Historians

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

Indians still consider the whites a brutal people who treat their children like enemies - playthings, too, coddling them like pampered pets or fragile toys, but underneath always like enemies, enemies that must be restrained, bribed, spied upon, and punished. They believe that children so treated will grow up as dependent and immature as pets and toys, and as angry and dangerous as enemies within the family circle, to be appeased and fought.

The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

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.

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

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

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.

We are being governed by the dregs of the nation - and their brutality is so capricious that no one can feel certain that he will be safe tomorrow.

The temperament of a collector is an interesting one; after all, necessity is never the raison d'être of a collection. And since a collection can never be complete — there is always another item or a better version available — its creation requires a predatory love of objects and an endless appetite.

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

Londa Schiebinger

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

Margaret MacMillan

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.

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.

Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

Veronica Wedgwood

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

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Constance Rourke

As soon as you begin to say We have always done things this way -- perhaps that might be a better way, conscious law-making is beginning. As soon as you begin to say We do things this way -- they do things that way -- what is to be done about it? men are beginning to feel towards justice, that resides between the endless jar of right and wrong.

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.

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

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

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

Mary Frances Berry

Strabo, traveling in North Africa … [did not find] its women in the army but found that they ruled the country politically, while the men were still without significance in the state, occupying themselves largely with body care and hair-do, greedy for golden jewelry with which to bedeck themselves. The Berbers of our times....[,] near the Atlas Mountains, … have preserved a strong gynocracy. In some Tuareg tribes, the women perpetuate the old culture and know Old Libyan writing and literature. Their men wear veils and remain illiterates.

Wine is the liquid form of the Goddess Tara, who is the saviour of all living creatures, the mother of all enjoyment and Release, the destroyer of dangers and disease, who burns up all sins and purifies the worlds, O Beloved, who grants all success and increases knowledge, understanding and learning.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty

Without will, without individuals, there are no heroes. But neither are there villains. And the absence of villains is as prostrating, as soul-destroying, as the absence of heroes.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Often what is nearest is hardest of all to see - try asking a fish to define water. Distance opens a door to revelation. When the first great distances of space were conquered by technology, a camera altered the human perspective on the Earth as radically as Galileo did when he proved the sun was the center of the universe. The ecology movement was born from a photographically altered consciousness.