America's Women Quotes

“The term “tomboy,” one nineteenth-century author recalled, looking back at the pre–Civil War era, “was applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“It took our entire history to actually change the rules of proper female behavior. But those rules were temporarily abandoned whenever the country needed women to do something they weren’t supposed to do.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“No matter what the ladies’ contribution, the Revolution was not fought to prove that all women were created equal.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“(Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Rape was a capital crime, and the defense reminded the men in the jury that if Bedlow was found guilty, the lives of all male citizens would be put “in the hands of a woman, to be disposed of almost at her will and pleasure.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Most émigrés arrived at Ellis Island in New York, invariably confused and exhausted from an unpleasant and dangerous voyage. Health inspectors checked every immigrant, and while the inspections were not particularly rigid, people were routinely refused entry. Often it was a child, leaving the mother with a sort of Sophie’s choice—whether to go back to Europe with the rejected son or daughter or stay with her husband and other children.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Ann Fowler was sentenced to twenty lashes in 1637 for defaming a county justice, Adam Thorowgood, with the somewhat undeferential suggestion that Captain Thorowgood could “Kiss my arse.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“In 1936, the federal court struck down all federal restrictions against birth control, in a case memorably named U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Tanned skin was also unacceptable, particularly in the South. “Remember…not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, demonstrating once again that he could always find just the wrong thing to say to a devoted daughter.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“But the Puritan women had crossed a large ocean in very small ships to get to America, and many of them were not feeling particularly deferential. When the residents of Chebacco, a town near Gloucester, decided they wanted to build their own meetinghouse, the men went off to Boston to petition the local authorities for permission. While they were gone, the women built the meetinghouse themselves.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“The first successful sanitary napkins went on sale in 1921, in what must have been one of the most important unheralded moments in the history of American women.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“As in Europe, the typical American witch-suspect was a woman, frequently middle-aged with few or no children and a reputation as a difficult personality.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“The near-universal message of television programming was that girls never got to do anything interesting, and then grew up to be women who faded into the woodwork completely.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice—many female abolition societies refused to allow black members.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Truth was one of the few public women of her day who did not pick favorites when it came to the claims of race and sex. “If colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before,” she said. Not all black women agreed with her.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Sanger was asked to write a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a daily newspaper with socialist sympathies. When she tackled the subject of venereal disease, her column was banned by Anthony Comstock, who had acquired censorship as well as prosecutorial powers. The paper ran an empty space with the title: “What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“It would be hard to find a more perfect example of the contradictions of nineteenth-century womanhood than the workaholic editor continually reminding her readers how lucky they were to be presiding over the hearth rather than engaging in “the silly struggle for honor and preferment” in the outside world.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Many of her male friends in the labor movement or politics found the crusade either strange or irritating. One night, Sanger and Bill Haywood, the famous labor leader, addressed a group of women strikers. An observer remembered that Sanger spoke of women’s right to limit the size of their families and “received a hearty response” from the audience. Haywood then followed, promising the women that in the glorious economy built by union labor in the future, they would be able to have “all the babies they pleased.” He was greeted by dead silence.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“And even in circumstances less critical, women were almost always welcomed in new enterprises that hadn’t yet become either prestigious or profitable—whether it was early radio or early cattle drives.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Eleanor was a member of one of America’s great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it’s surprising she survived her upbringing at all—one cousin called it “the grimmest childhood I had ever known.” Her father was an alcoholic who kept abandoning the family. One of her two brothers died when she was five years old, and her mother, who she remembered as “kindly and indifferent,” died when she was eight. Her father, who Eleanor worshiped despite his endless betrayals, died two years later. The orphan was sent to live with her grandmother, a stern woman with two alcoholic adult sons whose advances caused a teenage Eleanor to put three locks on her door. When she met Franklin, he was a student at Harvard and was known in the family as the not particularly impressive only son of a domineering widow. Eleanor got pregnant right after her wedding and spent the next ten years having six children and wriggling under her mother-in-law’s thumb. (“I was your real mother; Eleanor merely bore you,” Sara Roosevelt told her grandchildren.)”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“The bottle of morphine is wrapped up and passed to the child over the counter,” a Tennessee doctor wrote. Doctors and pharmacists had little compunction about dispensing narcotics. “Young women cannot go to a ball without taking a dose of morphine to make them agreeable,” a druggist said in 1876. A North Carolina doctor claimed he had given one patient between 2,500 and 3,000 shots over eighteen months “and so far see no signs of the opium habit.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“The aggressive use of new medical tools went beyond castration. Dr. Marion Sims discovered a condition called “vaginismus,” in which a woman felt such pain from intercourse she was unable to bear penetration. He prescribed surgery, but another treatment was to put the woman under anesthesia so her husband was able to have sex with her. Sims described one case in which a physician had to visit the couple two or three times a week to anesthetize the woman before lovemaking.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“One pioneer remembered seeing “an open bleak prairie, the cold wind howling overhead…a new-made grave, a woman and three children sitting near by, a girl of 14 summers walking round and round in a circle, wringing her hands and calling upon her dead parent.” Janette Riker was only a young girl when she headed for Oregon with her father and two brothers in 1849. Late in September they camped in a valley in Montana, and the men went out to hunt. They never returned. While she waited, Janette built a small shelter, moved the wagon stove in with all the provisions and blankets, and hunkered down. She killed the fattest ox from her family’s herd, salted down the meat, and lived alone through the winter, amid howling wolves and mountain lions. She was discovered in April by Indians who were so impressed by her story that they took her to a fort in Washington. She never found out what happened to her family.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Many were like Amy Clarke, who enlisted so she could remain with her husband when he joined the Confederate Army. Amy continued to fight after he was killed, and she was wounded herself and taken prisoner.”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Lewis B. Norwood, a wealthy North Carolina planter, was killed by two of his slaves. A husband and wife, they held him down, shoved a funnel into his mouth, and poured scalding water down his throat. (Norwood had just sold the couple’s baby and was preparing to sell the wife.)”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“Women also wore extremely tight corsets that covered much of the body, and shoes with very high heels, usually made of wood. When they were outdoors, they balanced their shoes on pattens—leather or iron or wooden clogs mounted on rings of iron. The pattens kept the thin-soled shoes out of the mud, but they made a stroll down the street as challenging as stilt-walking. When women went outside in daylight, they also wore masks to protect their complexion, as well as gloves to keep their hands smooth. (It’s hard to imagine how someone encumbered with a body-length corset and huge hoop skirt would be able to get involved in any activity conducive to nail breakage, let alone chapping.) Well-born little girls wore the same clothes as their mothers. Their stiffness in colonial portraits may reflect the fact that they had already been bound up in corsets. The”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

“The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it. I”
― Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines