Catharine Quotes & Sayings

Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air. — Catharine Beecher

I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise! But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space. Poor Eve! — Catharine Sedgwick

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 aresold for prices that give monstrous prices to the capitalist, who thus grows rich on the hard labor of our sex. — Catharine Beecher

A large portion of those who demand woman suffrage are persons who have not been trained to reason, and are chiefly guided by their generous sensibilities. — Catharine Beecher

The Romans feared their dead. In fact, Roman funeral customs derived from a need to propitiate the sensibilities of the departed. The very word funus may be translated as dead body, funeral ceremony, or murder. There was a genuine concern that, if not treated appropriately, the spirits of the dead, or manes, would return to wreak revenge — Catharine Arnold

Eating highly seasoned food is unhealthful, because it stimulates too much, provokes the appetite too much, and often is indigestible. — Catharine Beecher

The tea-kettle is as much an English institution as aristocracy or the Prayer-Book ... — Catharine Beecher

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism. — Catharine MacKinnon

We now come to the grand law of the system in which we are placed, as it has been developed by the experience of our race, and that, in one word, is SACRIFICE! — Catharine Beecher

Talent and worth are the only eternal grounds of distinction. To these the Almighty has affixed His everlasting patent of nobility. Knowledge and goodness,
these make degrees in heaven, and they must be the graduating scale of a true democracy. — Catharine Sedgwick

We are now going through a period of demolition. In morals, in social life, in politics, in medicine, and in religion there is a universal upturning of foundations. But the day of reconstruction seems to be looming, and now the grand question is: Are there any sure and universal principles that will evolve a harmonious system in which we shall all agree? — Catharine Beecher

Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. — Catharine MacKinnon

[Nineteenth century American educator] Catharine Beecher is really associated with the idea that a mother works with children in the home and a teacher works with children at school, and that therefore women are almost biologically predisposed to do this job. — Dana Goldstein

As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right. — Catharine Beecher

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher. — Catharine Beecher

More than a hygienic method of disposing of the dead, cremation enabled lovers and comrades to be mingled together for eternity: — Catharine Arnold

So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn. — Catharine MacKinnon

Marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman. — Catharine Maria Sedgwick

The woman movement is one which is uniting by co-operating influences, all the antagonisms that are warring on the family state. Spiritualism, free love, free divorce, the vicious indulgences consequent on unregulated civilization, the worldliness which tempts men and women to avoid large families, often by sinful methods, thus making the ignorant masses the chief supply of the future ruling majorities; and most powerful of all, the feeble constitution and poor health of women, causing them to dread maternity as
what it is fast becoming
an accumulation of mental and bodily tortures. — Catharine Beecher

[W]hat is this state, from women's point of view? The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women ... The state's formal norms recapitulate the male point of view on the level of design. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in pornography and then go look for them other places in the world. — Catharine MacKinnon

Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children. — Catharine MacKinnon

To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

In civil and political affairs, American women take no interest or concern, except so far as they sympathize with their family and personal friends; but in all cases, in which they do feel a concern, their opinions and feelings have a consideration, equal or even superior, to that of the other sex. — Catharine Beecher

It is the right and duty of every woman to employ the power of organization and agitation in order to gain those advantages which are given to the one sex and unjustly withheld from the other. — Catharine Beecher

To Miss Cooper
Cousin,
Conscious of the Charming Character which in every Country, and every Clime in Christendom is Cried, Concerning you, with Caution and Care I Commend to your Charitable Criticism this Clever Collection of Curious Comments, which have been Carefully Culled, Collected and Classed by your Comical Cousin
The Author — Jane Austen

In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist. — Catharine MacKinnon

To open avenues to political place and power for all classes of women would cause [the] humble labors of the family and schoo1 to be still more undervalued and shunned. — Catharine Beecher

As liberty and intelligence have increased the people have more and more revolted against the theological dogmas that contradict common sense and wound the tenderest sensibilities of the soul. — Catharine Beecher

Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. — Catharine MacKinnon

The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance. — Germaine Greer

The arena of logic was made by men for men; it was expressly founded on the exclusion of what is not male, as well as what is not Greek, not Christian, nor Western, not Aryan. — Catharine MacKinnon

When the precepts and example of Jesus Christ fully interpermeate society, to labor with the hands will be regarded not only as a duty but a privilege. — Catharine Beecher

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted. — Catharine MacKinnon

What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense. — Catharine MacKinnon

believing, Jody Hotchkiss (Onward!), David Grossman, Helen Heller, and the tireless Chandler Crawford. I am grateful and indebted to every single person at Riverhead Books. In particular, I want to thank Susan Petersen Kennedy and Geoffrey Kloske for their faith in this story. My heartfelt thanks also go to Marilyn Ducksworth, Mih-Ho Cha, Catharine Lynch, Craig D. Burke, Leslie Schwartz, Honi Werner, and Wendy Pearl. Special thanks to my sharp-eyed copy editor, Tony Davis, who misses nothing, and, lastly, to my talented editor, Sarah McGrath, for her patience, foresight, and guidance. Finally, thank you, Roya. — Khaled Hosseini

It is thought that potato water is unhealthy; and therefore do not boil potatoes in soup, but boil elsewhere, and add them when nearly cooked. — Catharine Beecher

In the words of Euripides, 'those whom the Gods wish to destroy, first they make mad'. — Catharine Arnold

Man fucks woman; subject verb object. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

I regard the effort to introduce women into colleges for young men as very undesirable, and for many reasons. That the two sexes should be united, both as teachers and pupils, in the same institution seems very desirable, but rarely in early life by a method that removes them from parental watch and care, and the protecting influences of a home. — Catharine Beecher

Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, 'the cult of sepulchral melancholy' and 'graveyard gothic'. — Catharine Arnold

(the term 'lunatic' derives from luna, the Latin word for moon). Many writers, from antiquity onwards, maintained that the mad were directly affected by the phases of the moon, with the full moon being the cause of the greatest agitation. — Catharine Arnold

The principle of subordination is the great bond of union and harmony through the universe. — Catharine Beecher

Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power. — Catharine MacKinnon

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Men, permitted to put words (and other things) in women's mouths, create scenes in which women desperately want to be bound, battered, tortured, humiliated, and killed. — Catharine MacKinnon

Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

The physical and domestic education of daughters should occupy the principal attention of mothers, in childhood: and the stimulation of the intellect should be very much reduced. — Catharine Beecher

Coffee it is best to buy by the bag, as it improves by keeping. Let it hang in the bag, in a dry place, and it loses its rank smell and taste. — Catharine Beecher

Following directly behind the bier were the servants who would, in earlier times, have been slaughtered at the graveside, along with a warrior's horse. Musicians and torchbearers came next, with the rear taken up by the mimes- sinister, silent figures in wax masks modelled on dead members of the family. — Catharine Arnold

When institutions are endowed to train women for all departments connected with the family state, domestic labor, now so shunned and disgraced, will become honorable, will gain liberal compensation, and will enable every woman to secure an independence in employments suited to her sex. And when this is attained, there will be few or none who wish to enter the professions of men or take charge of civil government. — Catharine Beecher

Catharine Victoria Santoro di Valleria." Cat blinked. "Why are you 'full naming' me? — Marianne Knightly

All these many-coloured feelings fell... like light on a black surface, producing no change, meeting no return. — Catharine Maria Sedgwick

In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine, the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering. — Catharine Beecher

The people of this nation are eminently a trafficking people; and the present standard of honesty, as to trade and debts, is very low, and every year seems sinking still lower. — Catharine Beecher

Meanwhile, we have carved out a place for ourselves among the dead; the glittering pinnacles of commerce rise along the skyline, their foundations sunk in a charnel house; and the lost lie forgotten below us as, overhead, we persaude ourselves that we are immortal and carry on the business of life. — Catharine Arnold

So large a portion of those who hold much capital, instead of using their various advantages for the greatest good of those around them, employ the chief of them for mere selfish indulgences; thus inflicting as much mischief on themselves, as results to others from their culpable neglect. A great portion of the rich seem to be acting on the principle, that the more God bestows on them, the less are they under obligation to practise any self-denial, in fulfilling his benevolent plan of raising our race to intelligence and holiness. — Catharine Beecher

All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman. — Catharine MacKinnon

An individual's treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit. — Catharine MacKinnon

Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones. — Catharine Arnold

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

It is unnecessary to heighten the glory of day by comparing it with the preceding twilight. — Catharine Maria Sedgwick

A company attitude is rarely anybody's best. — Catharine Sedgwick

The ability to secure an independent livelihood and honorable employ suited to her education and capacities is the only true foundation of the social elevation of woman, even in the very highest classes of society. While she continues to be educated only to be somebody's wife, and is left without any aim in life till that somebody either in love, or in pity, or in selfish regard at last grants her the opportunity, she can never be truly independent. — Catharine Beecher

The care of a house, the conduct of a home, the management of children, the instruction and government of servants, are as deserving of scientific treatment and scientific professors and lectureships as are the care of farms, the management of manure and crops, and the raising and care of stock. — Catharine Beecher

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs. — Catharine MacKinnon

All women live in objectification the way fish live in water. - Catharine A. MacKinnon WHEN — Jessica Valenti

If all females were not only well educated themselves but were prepared to communicate in an easy manner their stores of knowledge to others; if they not only knew how to regulate their own minds, tempers, and habits but how to effect improvements in those around them, the face of society would be speedily changed. — Catharine Beecher

The school should be an appendage of the family state, and modeled on its primary principle, which is, to train the ignorant and weak by self-sacrificing labor and love; and to bestow the most on the weakest, the most undeveloped, and the most sinful. — Catharine Beecher

Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom, seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid. — Catharine Cox Miles

To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status. — Catharine MacKinnon

Instead of being lionized and admired for her genius, instead of being able to earn a decent living as a writer, Andrea Dworkin was misrepresented and demonized. — Catharine MacKinnon

Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the social and the moral. — Catharine Beecher

In other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention. — Catharine Arnold

In a policy shift which the historian Guy de la Bedoyere has compared with Western Imperialism, the Romans converted militant Britons to their way of life with consumer entincements, introducing them to the urbane pleasures of hot spas and fine dining, encouraging them to wear togas and speak Latin. — Catharine Arnold

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves. — Catharine Beecher

People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals. — Catharine MacKinnon

Half of the receipts in our cookbooks are mere murder to such constitutions and stomachs as we grow here ... in America, owing to our brighter skies and more fervid climate, we have developed an acute, nervous delicacy of temperament far more akin to that of France than of England. — Catharine Beecher

It's particularly hard to take being stabbed in the back close to home. There's always a feeling of betrayal when people of your own group oppose you. — Catharine MacKinnon

Pope has elegantly said a perfect woman's but a softer man. And if we take in the consideration, that there can be but one rule of moral excellence for beings made of the same materials, organized after the same manner, and subjected to similar laws of Nature, we must either agree with Mr. Pope, or we must reverse the proposition, and say, that a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold. — Catharine Macaulay

Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs ... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent you learn, in a word, femininity. — Catharine MacKinnon

Any men who would give up the law-making power to women in order to remedy existing evils, would surely be those most ready to enact the needful laws themselves. — Catharine Beecher

Power is being able to say complete and utter nonsense and have it be believed, powerlessness is where no matter how much cogent evidence and proof one has, to not be believed. — Catharine MacKinnon

The family state then, is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom...[The mother] is to rear all under her care to lay up treasures, not on earth, but in heaven. All the pleasures of this life end here; but those who train immortal minds are to read the fruit of their labor through eternal ages. — Catharine Esther Beecher

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable? — Catharine MacKinnon

Good manners are the expressions of benevolence in personal intercourse, by which we endeavor to promote the comfort and enjoyment of others, and to avoid all that gives needless uneasiness. — Catharine Beecher

A walk?" said Catharine.
"One foot in front of the other," said Newt, "through leaves, over bridges
— Kurt Vonnegut

The faithful clamoured to be buried alongside the martyrs, as close as possible to the venerable remains, a custom which, in anthropological terms, recalls Neolithic beliefs that certain human remains possessed supernatural properties. It was believed that canonized saints did not rot, like lesser mortals, but that their corpses were miraculously preserved and emanated an odour of sanctity, a sweet, floral smell, for years after death. In forensic terms, such preservation is likely to be a result of natural mummification in hot, dry conditions. — Catharine Arnold

Women are socially disadvantaged in controlling sexual access to their bodies through socialization to customs that define a woman's body as for sexual use by men. Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial. — Catharine MacKinnon

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism ... — Catharine MacKinnon

All education must be unsound which does not propose for itself some object; and the highest of all objects must be that of living a life in accordance with God's Will. — Catharine Beecher

More than a hygenic method of disposing of the dead, cremation enabled lovers and comrades to be mingled together for eternity:
The ashes of Domitian were mingled with those of Julia; of Achilles with those of Patroclus; All Urnes contained not single ashes; Without confused burnings they affectionately compounded their bones; passionately endeavouring to continue their living Unions. And when distance of death denied such conjunctions, unsatisfied affections concieved some satisfaction to be neighbours in the grave, to lye Urne by Urne, and touch but in their names. — Catharine Arnold

People sometimes say that we will know feminism has done its job when half the CEOs are women. That's not feminism; to quote Catharine MacKinnon, it's liberalism applied to women. Feminism will have won not when a few women get an equal piece of the oppression pie, served up in our sisters' sweat, but when all dominating hierarchies - including economic ones - are dismantled. — Lierre Keith

Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women. — Catharine MacKinnon

If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality. — Catharine MacKinnon

Women are raped and coerced into sex. — Catharine MacKinnon

Pure and intelligent women can be deceived and misled by the baser sort, their very innocence and experience making them credulous and the helpless tools of the guilty and bold. — Catharine Beecher

It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down. — Catharine MacKinnon