Women In The 1940s Quotes

I cant take it like this much longer, Milt," Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.
"I cant take it much longer," she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect [ ... ] That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they
just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, as if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other? ~ James Jones

And let me tell you something else, my friend," she said in the precise enunciation of a trained nurse talking to a worried patient. "It is all very easy for a man to talk about living in the present. Much more so than for a woman, who is liable to get knocked up higher than a kite every time the man enjoys himself in the present. Thats one thing I dont have to worry about, thank God. But there are a lot of others: such as what I am going to do when my husband kicks me out and then my lover throws me over when he has to support me, and me not being trained for anything but to be somebody's wife and having to do all my politicking and achieving and gain what little success I can by getting behind some stupid man and pushing him. ~ James Jones

In England you learn only to compete with your men in the world and it's not enough to be loved for yourselves because you are women. I shall try to learn of you, but you must try to learn from me, convenido? ~ Elizabeth Hunter

Memory"

I've memorized all the fish in the sea
I've memorized each opportunity strangled
and
I remember awakening one morning
and finding everything smeared with the color of
forgotten love
and I've memorized
that too.

I've memorized green rooms in
St. Louis and New Orleans
where I wept because I knew that by myself I
could not overcome
the terror of them and it.

I've memorized all the unfaithful years
(and the faithful ones too)
I've memorized each cigarette that I've rolled.
I've memorized Beethoven and New York City
I've memorized
riding up escalators, I've memorized
Chicago and cottage cheese, and the mouths of
some of the ladies and the legs of
some of the ladies
I've known
and the way the rain came down hard.
I've memorized the face of my father in his coffin,
I've memorized all the cars I have driven
and each of their sad deaths,
I've memorized each jail cell,
the face of each new president
and the faces of some of the assassins;
I've even memorized the arguments I've had with
some of the women
I've loved.

best of all
I've memorized tonight and now and the way the
light falls across my fingers,
specks and smears on the wall,
shades down behind orange curtains;
I light a rolled cigarette and then laugh a little,
yes, I've memorized it all.

Charles Bukowski

When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it. ~ Gail Collins

I propose that the phenomenon of love is the psychological pivot in the persecution of women. ~ Ti-Grace Atkinson

Girls have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much, be polite,but be yourself, be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don't comment on the sexism ... Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become. ~ Mary Pipher

Yes. Laugh. But there's sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.' He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. 'What position?' - I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. ~ Doris Lessing

There are men, and women, Haung, who are possessed of skills beyond the ordinary. Some of these men can seem to be invisible, some to pass through walls, some are assassins of incredible skill, some swordsmen of incomparable greatness, some wise and peaceful. But each is special and I have ensured that each duke knows who they are and where they are. I am content to let these men live in peace, and to go about their business without any undue interference. There are times, in the past, and there may be again in the near future, when I will call upon them to do the Empire a service. I expect them to come and serve with all duty and honour. I have never been let down by them. In return, they are free to live and to be outside, within reason, the law of the Empire. This is the list of forbidden men, Haung. ~ G.R. Matthews

I think country music is a champion of women. That stuff coming out of Nashville now wants to see a woman looking good in the kitchen whipping up some biscuits. ~ Ketch Secor

If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings. ~ Melinda Gates

Here is the holy message coming from the bridges: Help people in silence without asking anything in return! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women - that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture or love. ~ Bell Hooks

Like many in the intelligence field, Rockford had heard of the Program during his time as Director of the CIA. No matter how
deep you tried to bury a special missions unit, there was no such thing as a vacuum. Eventually bits and pieces of the unit
made their way out of the shadows. The Program was no different. Once Rockford was sworn in as Vice President he was granted
access to the Program, but most of what he knew about Eric Steele came directly from President Cole.


Rockford knew that the Program did their own recruitment and assessment of the men and women they wanted. The recruiters had
watched Steele for seven months, and while he was everything the Program was looking for, it was originally determined that
after only ten years in Special Forces he was still too untested for consideration ~ Sean Parnell

There's a sorry history of these kinds of charges of bias being leveled at women and judges of color, and also gay and lesbian judges. The theory being that they're going to be incapable of a disinterested judgment on matters that involve their own identity groups. And it came up famously for Constance Baker Motley who was one of the first African American federal judges in a case involving sex discrimination. ~ Deborah Rhode

The founders of that ancient empire were robbers and women stealers, and made laws favoring monogamy in consequence of the scarcity of women among them, and hence this monogamic system which now prevails throughout all Christendom, and which has been so fruitful a source of prostitution and whoredom throughout all the Christian monogamic cities of the Old and New World, until rottenness and decay are at the root of their institutions both national and religious. ~ Brigham Young

Mr. Dennis received this part of the scheme with a wry face, observing that as a general principle he objected to women altogether, as being unsafe and slippery persons on whom there was no calculating with any certainty, and who were never in the same mind for four-and-twenty hours at a stretch. ~ Charles Dickens

Those smutty books sell because women wish their husbands had half the balls the men in those books do. ~ Tara Brown

The words written down are dirty, carefully and selectedly filthy. But there was something far worse here than dirt, a kind of frightening witches' Sabbath. Here was no spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage. Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women, with their little hats and their clippings, hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience. ~ John Steinbeck

It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie. ~ Neil Gaiman

There is a phenomenal amount of pressure on women in this industry: they are considered vintage by the time they hit their mid-30s. ~ Tori Amos

And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else: Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success had done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man's game before she showed up. Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj's press coverage, outside of the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt. ~ Sady Doyle

Women make men their slaves in return for the occasional use of their vaginas. It's an unspoken barter system and it's flawless. ~ Jack Dancer

These women are, quite simply, alive; they know that the source of true values is not in external things but in human hearts. This gives its charm to the world they live in: they banish ennui by the simple fact of their presence, with their dreams, their desires, their pleasures, their emotions, their ingenuities. The sanseverina, that 'active soul' dreads ennui more than death. To stagnate in ennui 'is to keep from dying, she said, not to live'; she is ' always impassioned over something, always in action and gay too '. Thoughtless, childish or profound, gay or grave, daring or secretive, they all reject the heavy sleep in which humanity is mired. And these women who have been able to maintain their liberty- empty as it has been- will rise through passion to heroism once they find an objective worthy of them; their spiritual power, their energy, suggest the fierce purity of total dedication ~ Simone De Beauvoir

The 'crazy' thing about life is...
People keep 'imprisoning' themselves in the name of 'freedom'.. ~ Abha Maryada Banerjee

Some women tend naturally to be Warriors and Seekers, and some men to be Caregivers and Lovers in spite of their cultural conditioning. The point is for both to take their journeys in such a way as to find their own way to be male or female, and eventually to achieve a positive kind of androgyny, which is not at all about unisex, neutered behavior, but is about gaining the gifts both gender energies and experiences have to offer us. ~ Carol S. Pearson

...Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, "Make me a healthy animal." But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, "the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on... ~ George Bernard Shaw

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married. ~ Robert K. Massie

I can empathize with women who feel that [sexism]. I personally haven't experienced it, and I'm grateful for that. I feel very appreciated on the show I'm on, but I do empathize. My concern is less the entertainment industry specifically, and more the general problem that women don't get paid as much as men in any industry. ~ Danielle Panabaker

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them. ~ Doris Lessing

I've had to wonder if people like Shina and other spawns of third world immigrants have felt the need to purchase so much expensive couture in order to feel acceptable and insulated enough in (white) American upper-class society. But why purchase so much costly shit when you're not even that rich or ever going to wear half of what your husband has had to pay for anyway? At least more upper-class white women in America have had better things to spend their money on, like Botox, fillers, and online dating sites. ~ Jean Bergman

I know what women look good in. I don't think the rules ever change. ~ Michael Kors

Yes, she was a scandal.
Her brother simply didn't know it.
"I fell in the Serpentine today."
"Yes, well, that doesn't usually happen to women in London. But it's not so much of a scandal as it is a challenge. ~ Sarah MacLean