The Mutual Admiration Society Quotes

“Women opposed women’s suffrage in surprisingly large numbers and for a variety of reasons, often to do with concerns that votes for women would lead to votes for everyone. In other words, it was better to go without a vote than to open the doors to mass democracy and an end to the dominance of a white, landed elite.”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“In moving to London, DLS joined Jim and Muriel in what Vera Brittain memorably described as “that slough of despond which lies just inside the gateway of every path to the literary life.”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“Then, the women left the theater to change out of their ordinary academic garb and into bachelor of arts gowns hooded with white fur. Thus attired, they returned and knelt before the vice-chancellor. He touched each woman on the head with the Holy Gospels—revealing his nerves only once, when he accidentally tapped one woman with his own mortarboard instead of the scriptures. At last the deed was done, with the Latin words pronounced in the ceremony for the first time in the feminine gender: domina, magistra.7 Some fifty women received degrees that day.”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“Decades after the war ended, a historian asked Charis how her generation felt about those who had died. The loss didn’t overshadow her, she said, but it was always present: “I think you always feel you owe a lot to them.”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“When she became a popular theologian in her own right, DLS would return to these ideas, insisting always that religion must stand up to the most thorough intellectual scrutiny.19”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“Even within Somerville, DLS was gently encouraged to dress a bit more quietly when she arrived at breakfast one morning “wearing a three-inch wide scarlet riband round her head and in her ears a really remarkable pair of ear-rings; a scarlet and green parrot in a gilt cage pendant almost to each shoulder and visible right across the hall.”26”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“DLS’s father, likewise, taught her Latin from the age of six.11”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“On one level, their story reveals the generative power of friendships, which create an intimate local space in which we can become something or someone quite different from our assigned social or familial categories. It also suggests the generative power of marginalization. This is not to argue that exclusion is a good thing, but to recognize that the experience of being marginalized can generate sharp insights, original approaches, and powerful solidarities alongside the toll of damage and loss.”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“Giving ordinary people unprecedented access to culture and mass democracy could look promising or dangerous, depending on your perspective. Was the new society a crowd of dupes, easily manipulated by advertisers or, worse, demagogues? Or was it a collective of citizens, able to be educated in improved, scientific ways of living and interacting? Was mass culture, in other words, a liberation or a trap?3”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

“Meaningful, creative work was the birthright of both women and men, they believed. In a pair of essays published in the journal Christendom in response to a special issue on “the emancipated woman,” DLS and Muriel made that case forcefully. They spent a summer writing back and forth to each other and to the magazine’s editor, working out their ideas about why it was so damaging to limit any human being to a narrow set of gendered characteristics.”
― Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women