Women, In Case You Need Inspiration

Ecstasy by Maxfield Parrish

"A mother who dedicates her life, body and soul, to her husband and her family is loved and cherished - and despised. Though the word would never enter their minds.

Thousands of years have brainwashed men into believing women are in the the world to take care of them. Anything else is treason and unwomanly.

A nun who has lived a full, adventurous, intellectual life is considered to have wasted her existence. An unmarried woman must be a trifle odd.

For the sake of the sons - and even for the sons' future wives - a woman must keep a part of her mind and heart entirely for herself. Every family is better off with a wife and mother who can astonish and occasionally bewilder."

-Pam Brown, 1928


Before Bedtime, Robert Gemmell Hutchinson (If my grandmother was alive, I would send her this picture because I would believe that she loved it and that she would possibly paint it.)

"...none of us is Superwoman. We are by turns industrious woman, harried woman, organized woman and sometimes cunning woman, because we all agree that one can always find time, in the most hard-pressed life, to do what one really wants to do, whether it is dancing the tango, playing the harp or writing a book."

-Valerie Grove, from "The Compleat Woman"



"Women...think that perhaps whatever they achieve is at the expense of their personal world and will somehow destroy their personal world. They never thought that whatever they became was in turn poured back into the personal world and enriched it, that they were enriching their children, they were enriching their husband, they were enriching their neighbors. We stopped really believing that the enrichment of the individual is actually what enriches our collective life. We forgot that. And for woman it was worse because she was not expected to produce in the first place. She was not expected to create. Culture didn't demand it of her; it didn't demand of her to become the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best painter or the best writer; it didn't demand anything of her except the fulfillment of her personal duties. So this was not an incentive for woman to develop whatever gift she had.

-Anais Nin (1903-1977), From "A Woman Speaks"



After the Bath, Joaquin y Bastida Sorolla