A Quote by Ruth Benedict
So much of the trouble is because I am a woman. To me it seems a very terrible thing to be a woman. There is one crown which perhaps is worth it all--a great love, a quiet home, and children. We all know that is all that is worthwhile, and yet we must peg away, showing off our wares on the market if we have money, or manufacturing careers for ourselves if we haven't.
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[After her 18-day disappearance in 1974:] I love my husband very, very much, but he didn't ask me when he ran for mayor and he didn't consult me about running for governor. It would be nice to be asked. ... You know, I've been my mother's daughter, my father's daughter, the wife of my husband, the mother of my six children, and grandmother to my eleven grandchildren, but I have never been me. But I am now because I went away. I am a changed woman.
It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman - who is much of a woman - is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.
Why don't I have enough money? The answer is obvious. Money is how people are measured. What you are worth is what you are worth. The reason I am not worth very much is because I am not worth very much. Nothing could be simpler.
I know that the only completely happy life for man and for woman is their life, first together, and then with their children. I am a firm believer that no marriage can be really happy, and no home a happy one for the children as well, unless man puts woman first and woman puts man first, each for the other the giver of every good gift. Children are the fruit of this total love.
I want my daughters to see me and know me as a woman who works. I want that example set for them... I am a better mother for it. The woman I am because I get to run Shondaland, because I get write all day, because I get to spend my days making things up, that woman is a better person - and a better mother. Because that woman is happy. That woman is fulfilled. That woman is whole. I wouldn't want them to know the me who didn't get to do this all day long. I wouldn't want them to know the me who wasn't doing.
And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women, as they alwayshave done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it's because she doesn't quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man's picture of woman to live up to.
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.
Perhaps I am better prepared to create a certain amount of integrity in the character because I know so much about the parts of those universes. So perhaps it goes hand in hand, and I don't shy away from it certainly. I think I have a great facility for it, so it seems to work.
People look at me as an exotic person, which is great, because whatever Hollywood is, it seems very dogmatic to me, especially when you're a woman. But I always get excused because I'm German.
We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.
One thing I've been happy as peach pie about - because I'm all about the children and the happiness of a woman because that makes the happiness of the home - is that nannies, day cares and babysitters are all collapsing, which is forcing moms and dads to raise their children at home.
The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.
Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!
One thing about being a children's poet or a versifier, is that there is a large market for your wares. These things really made the rounds. I would meet people and they'd quote my poems to me. It's great.
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
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