When I started out as a nurse I did so with the highest ideals.... But I found that steady work in my profession--like every woman...'s work in the world--depended upon the giving of myself.... Two-thirds of the physicians I met made a nurse's virtue the price of their influence in getting her steady work. Is it any wonder that I determined to become a member of this privileged sex, if possible?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women should have equal pay for equal work and they should be considered equally eligible to the offices of principal and superint...endent, professor and president. So you must insist that qualifications, not sex, shall govern appointments and salaries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Work of all kinds is got from poor women, at prices that will not keep soul and body together, and then the articles thus made are... sold for prices that give monstrous prices to the capitalist, who thus grows rich on the hard labor of our sex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, th...ey do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is the problem of women's freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, wit...h a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity--housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was danger at times that women might not be judged by the highest standards, but more leniently because of their sex. "She i...s a remarkably good chemist--for a woman," you might hear a man say. It seemed to me essential, if the ablest young women scholars were to achieve the best work of which they were capable, that they should be held to the most rigorous standards. ...To advance, a woman must do at least as good work as her male colleagues, usually better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she shoul...d pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men!... the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The chief thing about a woman--who is much of a woman--is that in the long run she is not to be had.... She is not to be caught by... any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation--none of them--not in the long run. In the long run she only says "Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly unsatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me." And if there is some unsatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You have a chance to define a new kind of manhood. If you do it well, it will be a manhood in which men do not cheapen themselves ...and the women around them by the kind of casual, brittle talk that turns women into objects and sex into sport. It will be a manhood in which men see the effects of their gestures and words and most well-intentioned actions. . . . It will be a world where we can love together, laugh together, and work together without fear and without judgment; a world of celebration, not a world of accusation and apology and unexamined assumptions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... social roles vary in the extent to which it is culturally permissible to express ambivalence or negative feelings toward them.... Ambivalence can be admitted most readily toward those roles that are optional, least where they are considered primary. Thus men repress negative feelings toward work and feel freer to express negative feelings toward leisure, sex and marriage, while women are free to express negative feelings toward work but tend to repress them toward family roles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »