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Rheta Childe Dorr Quotes

...I swore I would battle not only for myself but for freedom and opportunity for everything living that wore chains, especially sex chains. It that meant poverty for myself and my boy then poverty we should have to

...I swore I would battle not only for myself but for freedom and opportunity for everything living that wore chains, especially sex chains. It that meant poverty for myself and my boy then poverty we should have to suffer. If it meant social ostracism, if it meant relinquishing the literary success that lay within my grasp, then let the success go.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Sex, Boys, Opportunity
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

The theory [before the twentieth century] ... was that all the jobs in the world belonged by right to men, and that only men were by nature entitled to wages. If a woman earned money, outside domestic service, it was because some misfortune had deprived her of masculine protection.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Jobs, Men, Wages

...feminism never harmed anybody unless it was some feminists. The danger is that the study and contemplation of "ourselves" may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Wall, Feminist, Feminism
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

There was never any question with me as to which I would choose, my boy or my work. I had to have both.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Boys, My Boys
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

...feminism differs from reform of any kind, even franchise reform. Feminists, I should say, are not reformers at all, but ratherintellectual biologists and psychologists.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Feminist, Feminism, Reform
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Fire, Boston, Order
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

...I knew I wanted to be permanently self-supporting and I vaguely thought I might work somewhere in the realm of ideas. I felt that 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.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Ambition, Self, Ideas
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

The artist alone among men knows what true humility means. His reach forever exceeds his grasp. He can never be satisfied with his work. He knows when he has done well, but he knows he has never attained his dream. He knows he never can.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Dream, Mean, Humility
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Years, Class, Knowing

At a tender age, I commandeered half a quire of foolscap from my father's desk and sat down to write a book. ...I had observed onprinted fly leaves the words "By the author of, etc." ...So under the title of my prospective work I wrote: By the author of "Les Miserables," "The Woman in White," "Dombey and Son," "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Our Life in the Highlands," the last-named being an opus of good Queen Victoria. I had not read all these works but they existed on our bookshelves, and I hoped to produce something worthy of comparison.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Queens, Father, Book

...a mind, if given only the best food never craves any other.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Food, Reading, Mind
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

I wrote a great deal of verse. In fact, every time I fell in love, which was rather often, I burst into the emotional sort of thing which is perennially salable.

Rheta Childe Dorr
Emotional, Poetry, Facts
Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

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