Quotes from Jill Lepore

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.

The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can't be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.

we must be tolerant with ourselves and allow ourselves some deviations from the straight line we set up to follow. Even more we must allow others the same prerogative.

The most ignorant young man, who knows nothing of the needs of women, thinks himself a competent legislator, because he is a man," Pankhurst told the crowd, eyeing the Harvard men. "This aristocratic attitude is a mistake.

The fight for women's rights hasn't come in waves. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women's liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women's rights has been a river, wending.

The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone's.

History isn't only a subject; it's also a method. My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves. I've pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. Feminism is not a prejudice, she said, It is a principle.

Wonder Woman isn't only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She's the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism....

All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists, as one feminist explained.

All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," as one feminist explained. Feminists rejected the idea of women as reformers whose moral authority came from their differentness from men—women were supposedly, by nature, more tender and loving and chaste and pure—and advocated instead women's full and equal participation in politics, work, and the arts, on the grounds that women were in every way equal to men.

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception": if a woman isn't willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn't have sex.

And that's the point! Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force strength power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. —William Moulton Marston, March 1945

Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.

One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives," Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.

Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked.

Men talk of the Negro problem," he began. "There is no Negro problem," he said, his voice rising. "The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution."123

Wonder Woman' is gifted with tremendous physical strength—but unlike Superman she can be injured." Marston went on, " Ã¢â'¬ËœWonder Woman' has bracelets welded on her wrists; with these she can repulse bullets. But if she lets any man weld chains on these bracelets, she loses her power. This, says Dr. Marston, is what happens to all women when they submit to a man's domination.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.

And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.