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is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.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 DorrLiving 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 DorrI 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...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...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 DorrThe 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