I can't earn my own living. I could never make anything turn into money. It's like making fires. A careful assortment of paper, sh...avings, faggots and kindling nicely tipped with pitch will never light for me. I have never been present when a cigarette butt, extinct, thrown into a damp and isolated spot, started a conflagration in the California woods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of indep...endence and security is very sweet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence.... As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there was always the assumption, even when I was getting a graduate degree in education, that any work I did was temporary, so...mething to do until I assumed my principal role in life which was to be the perfect wife and mother, supported by my husband. As it turned out, I never had children, and I've supported myself for thirty years. If I'd known I was going to have to do that I would have made some very different decisions. I would have approached work with more seriousness and purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not claim that all women, or a large portion of them, should enter into independent business relations with the world, but I ...do claim that all women should cultivate and respect in themselves an ability to make money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I knew I wanted to be permanently self-supporting and I vaguely thought I might work somewhere in the realm of ideas. I felt th...at I had within me an undeveloped fount of ideas. I did not know exactly what my ideas were, but whatever they were I wanted to convert people to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men will say that in supporting their wives, in furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving the women as muc...h money as they could ever hope to earn by any other profession. I grant it; but between the independent wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is the difference between the free-born and the chattel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I complacently accepted the social order in which I was brought up. I probably would have continued in my complacency if the happy... necessity of self-support had not fallen to my lot; if self-support had not deepened and widened my contacts and my experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »