Mary Ritter Beard
Mary Ritter Beard
Mary Ritter Beardwas an American historian and archivist, who played an important role in the women's suffrage movement and was a lifelong advocate of social justice through educational and activist roles in both the labor and woman's rights movements. She wrote several books on women's role in history including On Understanding Women,America Through Women's Eyesand Woman As Force In History: A Study in Traditions and Realities. In addition, she collaborated with her husband, eminent historian Charles Austin Beard on several...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth5 August 1876
CountryUnited States of America
Mary Ritter Beard quotes about
Action without study fatal. Study without action is futile....
The origin of the labor movement lies in self-defense ...
the 'public' - a term often used in America to indicate the great metropolitan newspapers.
Every revolution has its counter-revolution.
Comfort, however, easily merges into license.
Leisure for reverie, gay or somber, does much to enrich life.
... the precedents for feminine self-expression run back through all the ages since the art of writing was invented. ... The era may witness the first female engineer, motor truck chauffeur, radio broadcaster, head of an aviation school, or federal prohibition officer, but it has not produced the first thinking, creative, and writing woman by any means.
To ignore [the] great social facts -- political facts, if you please -- and over-emphasize the old moral responsibility of the 'domestic' mother is a hollow mockery and betrays a hopeless ignorance of industrial and urban conditions in the Twentieth Century. ... Everything that counts in the common life is political.
In brief, we who write are all in the same boat, as if we are survivors of torpedoes, and we hope to reach the shores of thought with strength for more activity.
Could anyone fail to be depressed by a book he or she has published? Don't we always outgrow them the moment the last page has been written?
For hundreds of years the use of the word 'man' has troubled critical scholars, careful translators, and lawyers. Difficulties occur whenever and wherever it is important for truth-seeking purposes to know what is being talked about and the context gives no intimation whether 'man' means just a human being irrespective of sex or means a masculine being and none other.
The woman's bill of rights is, unhappily, long overdue. It should have run along with the rights of man in the eighteenth century. Its drag as to time of official proclamation is a drag as to social vision. And even if equal rights were now written into the law of our land, it would be so inadequate today as a means to food, clothing and shelter for woman at large that what they would still be enjoying would be equality in disaster rather than in realistic privilege.
The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind.
The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men ... [but] The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story.