By Any Other Name

by Jodi Picoult

“Do you have any clue what it’s like to be a woman?” “Is that a trick question?” “It’s being judged constantly. For your clothes. For your curves. It’s being told every time you turn on the TV that you have to be thinner or more beautiful. It means doing the same job as a man and getting paid less for it. It means if you age naturally you’re letting yourself go, and if you get work done, you’re trying too hard.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Being a woman means being told to speak up for yourself in one breath, and to shut up in the next. It means fighting all the fucking time.”

Men believed that women were meant to exist on the fringes of their lives, instead of being the main characters in their own stories. But why would God have given her a voice if it wasn’t meant to be used?

Overnight, it seemed, the Puritans had multiplied. Led by Philip Stubbs, always wearing stark black, they were an unkindness of ravens on a crusade to make the Church of England even more authentically Protestant. One of their missions was to shut down the dens of iniquity known as theaters.

Emilia understood the true motivation: a play might make its viewers think. And when people thought, instead of blindly following the Gospel, they escaped from your control.

She did not understand why a woman’s accomplishment had to come at the price of a man’s worth—as if there were a finite amount of success in the universe, as if letting another into that sacred space meant someone already there would be evicted.

Love was a religion all its own, one that could damn you or save you or turn you into a zealot.

True art is creating something that lingers in the minds of the audience.”

Thirty years earlier the position of Saturn in the night sky—passing through parts of the constellations of Cancer and Leo—had been credited as the cause of the disease. Now, the same pattern was in the heavens, and no one believed that London would escape unscathed.

The pious saw the rampant illness as a punishment from God. But it was hard to follow that logic when priests—who were often among the only ones who would attend someone sick or dying—found themselves infected as well.

I’m Daya, I have the honor of playing Emilia, I have a pet hedgehog named Quillary Clinton.

“I can’t undo what I’ve already done,” Melina said. “But I’m not the first author to pretend to be a man just to get traction in her career. The Brontës did it. George Eliot. George Sand. J. K. Rowling.” “Maybe that’s why she doesn’t understand gender,” Andre muttered.

Is anything written even real, until it is read by another?

like lines that are never forgotten, you were meant to outlive me.

My mind used to be as arrogant as yours, my heart as great, my reason perhaps even more. I used to exchange word for word, and frown for frown. But now I see our swords are only straws, our strength is weak, our weakness beyond compare so that we seem to be most what we are not.

What was it about a woman’s voice that was so terrifying to a man? Was it the thought that a lesser creature might have intelligence or agency? Or was it simpler than that? If she took herself seriously, others might do the same. Other women. Scores of women. And that just might erode the power men had always effortlessly held.

was the headiest feeling, to think you might change the world under the guise of entertainment.

Jealousy is a green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds on.”

had to accept their unfavorable opinion of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions…. Thus I preferred to give more weight to what others said than to trust my own judgment and experience.”

you didn’t dream, if you didn’t feel…you could not be disappointed.

“Give sorrow words,

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Did they fear the blank canvases of women’s minds could be filled with thoughts of something other than them?

Opioids. Nuclear weapons. None of them could hold a candle to hope, the most dangerous commodity in the world.

What was the most frightening thing one could possibly say to a man? That a woman’s dreams, hopes, desires, flaws, and foibles were no different from his. That men and women were equals.

what really irked me (and stuck like a splinter in my mind) was that Shakespeare had created some of the most clever, fierce, protofeminist characters in all of literature—Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Katherine, Cleopatra—but he never taught his own daughters to read or write. They both signed with a mark.