Bodies of Light Quotes

“In June, twenty-five of the country’s senior doctors signed a letter to The Times expressing their support for women doctors after Henry Maudsley published an article in the Fortnightly Review saying that it is well known among doctors that women become hysterical unless they have rest and seclusion during menstruation and therefore that simple biology prevents them following any kind of profession. Any kind except the oldest, May had said when Ally showed her this missive, and washing his clothes and cooking his meals. Even the most reasonable woman, he wrote and Fortnightly Review printed, is not sane for one week in every four, and in any case recent research has established once and for all that women’s brains are smaller than men’s, their intellectual capacities confined in the most elementary way. (And the gorilla, Miss Johnson wrote to the editor, has brains bigger than Dr Maudsley’s, not to speak of the elephant and the whale; in any case it is not widely observed that the men with the most capacious skulls are the cleverest. But her letter was not published.)”
― Sarah Moss, Bodies of Light

“Ladies’ compartments are for women who fancy themselves irresistible and cannot trust to a modest and sober comportment to repel certain attentions.”
― Sarah Moss, Bodies of Light

“Mamma is right; men dismiss women’s opinions because the woman expressing herself is pretty, or because she is plain, because she is young or old, single or married, because, in the end, all women’s speech is considered to be merely personal. It must then be the duty of every rational woman to demonstrate with every word that she is reasonable, measured, objective, to prove herself and therefore her sex capable of speaking without emotion.”
― Sarah Moss, Bodies of Light