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Herstory Quotes

Browse 38 quotes about Herstory.

Herstory Quotes

“The Dalai Lama says that the world will be saved by Western women. Not any women, perhaps not all women, but Burning Women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power. Angry women who love the world and her creatures too much to let it be destroyed so thoughtlessly for a moment longer. Burning Woman is the heart and soul of revolution – inner and outer. She burns for change, she dances in the fire of the old, all the while visioning and weaving the new.”

SilenceRevolutionAngerDalai LamaPriestessCultural ChangeHerstoryAngry WomenBurning WomanFeminine Archetypes
Book:Burning Woman
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“Often we can get caught in our own struggles, our own small stories, that we forget our place in the larger story arc – the way that our actions, our choices, our achievements can and will blaze trails for that who come after us, so that they do not have to spend their time and energy re-fighting the same battles. For sure we walk a spiral path, but for generations of women the spirals were so tightly packed that it seemed they were going round in circles – let us blaze trails so that the path we walk takes in wider and wider sweeps of human experience. Trail blazing is what we do when we find ourselves in the wilderness, with no path to guide us but our own intuitive understanding of nature and our destination. At times we must walk through the night, guided only by the stars. We know when to sit and rest, to shelter from storms, when to gather water, and what on the trail will sustain us and what will do us harm. We are courageous and cautious in equal measure, but we are driven forward, not only by our own desire to reach our destination, but also by the desire to leave a viable way for others who follow. Trail blazing is an art-form. It is how we find paths through what before was wilderness. We push aside braches, or cut them back, we tramp down nettles and long grasses, ford rivers and streams, through the inner and outer landscapes.”

FeminismEmpowermentFeministHeroinesWomen In HistoryInner JourneyCultural ChangeHerstoryTrailblazersTrailblazingWise WomanBurning WomanBurning TimesWomen S WisdomTrail Blazers
Book:Burning Woman
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“[Florence Nightingale's] sister's condition was all too common among many a well-off spinster, 'condemned to spend her days in a meaningless round of trivial occupations, which ate away at her vital strength.' Parthenope's illness, Florence thought, was simply caused by boredom, 'by the conventional life of the present phase of civilisation, which fritters away all that is spiritual in women.' Watching Parthenope lose her sanity, her strength, even the ability to walk, had left Florence aghast. She observed that all around her women were 'going mad for the want of something to do'. She was determined to avoid this fate for herself.”

HistoryFeminismMental HealthQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist IdealsFlorence Nightingale
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“There is no denying that these women had hard lives, but care needs to be taken with these articles about them because they were written in a Victorian genre known as 'slumming', a semi-salacious relishment of the misfortunes of lower-class people.”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“While Alice had played her part in watching, waiting and attending on her father, Victoria herself hadn't been much use. ... Alice wasn't a trained nurse, but ... tradition and convention insisted in any case that a daughter was better than the most professional nurse available. (Tradition and convention were wrong about this, as Victoria herself later admitted.)”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Victoria, who lacked a father, had long sought mentors or alternative fathers in Uncle Leopold, Melbourne and then in Albert himself. Yet she couldn't get him to listen to her. It was in any case, a vain hope. A Victorian man was failing in his masculinity if he failed to control his wife, and Albert could never quite control a wife who was also a queen. So they were doomed to clash.”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“What can appear to us twenty-first century people to be an unhealthy fascination with death and mourning in Victorian culture may in fact have been a source of powerful mental resilience. They were 'in touch' with birth and death. Today grieving and mourning are perceived as weakness, almost sickness, to be conquered and overcome. It might be better to accept bereavement, as the Victorians did, as an integral part of life.”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Victoria's former governess Laddle perceptively noticed that the queen's grief would be worse because 'she has no friend to turn to'. 'The worst, far the worst,' Laddle continued, 'is yet to come - the numberless, incessant wishes to "ask the Prince," to "Send for the Prince", the never-failing joy, fresh every time, when he answered her call ... he greatest delight was in OBEYING him.”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“A species of madness' had come upon her, [Dr Clark] claimed ... but these fears were greatly amplified by the fact that Victoria was approaching that time of life when Victorian women in general were believed to lose control of themselves: the menopause. ... Menopausal women, contemporary doctors hinted, would become sex maniacs.”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Before the twentieth century, to be a widow was perhaps to be in the most potent of a woman's life stages. For the first time, a widow was answerable to no one. For the first time, she could own property. For all women other than the queen, a woman's worldly goods, and even her children, had up to that point been not hers but her father's or husband's.”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Even at rock bottom, when her doctors had thought she would go mad with grief, Victoria had spoken of endurance. She was 'determined', she wrote, that as a widow 'no one person, may he be ever so good ... is to lead, or guide, or dictate to me'.”

HistoryFeminismQueensQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Historian Dorothy Thompson has pointed out the double standard at work here. A king's having a mistress was regrettable, but ultimately acceptable. The possibility, though, of a female ruler having a sexual relationship outside of marriage, causes dismay and prurient ridicule.”

HistoryFeminismQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Victoria's courtiers generally shared the views of her administrators and colonial staff in India, which were that Indians were decidedly inferior to Europeans. Victoria, however, perhaps having less cause to worry about her status being challenged, was less prone to this, 'There is no hatred to a brown skin - none,' she wrote, even in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.”

HistoryFeminismRacismQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“This bonnet, worn with resolution, had caused some upset. Her government had asked its queen to appear more ... queenly. 'The symbol that unties this vast Empire is a Crown not a bonnet,' complained Lord Roseberry. But Victoria stoutly refused, and 'the bonnet triumphed'.”

HistoryFeminismQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Many people envied her position as the winner of the Baby Race and the wearer of the crown. But when she discovered she was to be queen, Victoria already knew that it was the breaking, not the making, of her life. 'I cried much,' she said. Her mother had prepared her for the lonely royal trap in which bother of their lives would be lived, a trap that tightly clasped so many Victorian women but which squeezed and nipped at a queen perhaps most damagingly of all. 'You cannot escape your own feelings,' Victoire told Victoria, all those years ago, 'you cannot escape ... from the situation you are born in'. You cannot escape. It was true. You cannot escape.”

HistoryFeminismQueen VictoriaEnglish HistoryHerstoryEnglish MonarchyOppression Of WomenAnti Feminist Ideals
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Victoria may have been brought up by Lehzen to admire Elizabeth I, but she wasn't capable of emulating her. She didn't have the brains, the background or the dedication to remain on the throne alone. She also had the misfortune to live in an age that was beginning to expect less of women. The family had previously been an economic unit, with all its members working and contributing. But the Industrial Revolution had begun to provide working men with large enough wages to keep their wives at home.”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryEnglish MonarchyPatriachy
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“It was a passage fitting for a Victorian heroine, submitting herself to the greater goodness of her man. She made herself comfortable with the unwomanliness of her actions by convincing herself that it was Albert who was making a sacrifice. Subsuming herself to him was how she justified, in her mind, the two opposing roles of queen and wife.”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryEnglish Monarchy
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Victoria would in fact be the only married woman in the whole country who'd retain control over her own income and property. This was important. The reason Albert had nearly given up on the courtship was because it placed him "in a very ridiculous position. "Even now, everyone would know that he wasn't really the master in his own household. ... And then again, there was the distressing fact that she'd been the one to speak first. "Since the Queen did herself for a husband 'propose'," ran a London ballad, "the ladies will all do the same, I suppose: Their days of subserviency now will be past, For all will "speak first" as they always did last!”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryEnglish Monarchy
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“The papers were pleased. "She is kept by the nation as a spectacle," claimed the Penny Satirist, establishing a current of thought that would flow through Victoria's whole reign, "and it is right that she should be seen. In fact, it is her duty to come out and show herself, that we may have value for our money.”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryAnti FeminismEnglish Monarchy
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“The gradual change, from her [Victoria] dominance to his [Albert], was taking place not just in ballrooms but more widely in British society. The genders became more clearly and hierarchically distinguished as the 1830s gave way to the 1840s. A successful marriage, thought Sarah Ellis, writing in 1843, was founded on one important truth. "It is," she counselled her female readers, "the superiority of your husband as a man." "You may have more talent, with higher attainments," she advised them, "but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryAnti FeminismEnglish Monarchy
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Victoria started to chafe against the immobility and inconvenience of being pregnant again so quickly: "men never think, or at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often." But Albert insisted. Not only was it a royal duty, he could perhaps see that having the babies occupied his wife, weighed her down and allowed him to assume more and more of her responsibilities.”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryAnti FeminismEnglish MonarchyQueen Victorias Diaries
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“Victoria came to understand that her depression was a distinct malady that came and went, but which affected her particularly during and after pregnancy. ... Yet Albert made sure the babies kept coming. "It is too hard and dreadful what we have to go through," Victoria complained. Men ought to "do every thing to make up, for what after all they alone are the cause of.”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryAnti FeminismEnglish MonarchyQueen Victorias Diaries
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“In talking so proudly about her "happy domestic home", Victoria was prefiguring the words of John Ruskin, the commentator who'd make the best-known pronouncement on the proper role of a Victorian woman. Home, he thought, was a "woman's true place and power". While a husband had to go to brave the rough world's perils, a wife should remain behind, in a private realm where her "great function is Praise" and her great opportunity the "sweet ordering" of her household.”

HistoryFeminismVictorian EraQueen VictoriaHerstoryAnti FeminismEnglish Monarchy
Book:Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
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“In a more perfect world, that would’ve also been the moment when she’d say, “Look, honey, I know you resonate with the character of Pocahontas, but we already live on stolen land and you are not an indigenous person, so it would be very insensitive for you to wear someone else’s culture as a costume.” “Certainly, Mother,” I’d respond. “You’re absolutely correct. My teacher taught us about the land theft and subsequent genocide of Native American nations in kindergarten last week as part of our People’s Herstory class, so I shouldn’t go as Pocahontas. But could I go as another Disney princess instead?”

RecognitionSassHerstoryNative American Genocide
Book:Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story
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