Therese Oneill > Quotes

“Remember, the center of a woman is her uterus. Her crazy, crazy uterus.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“How much poorer history would be if there hadn’t been so many artistically talented perverts in days gone by.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Here, I think we have some old bedsheets - dye them black with the ashes of your self-respect and sew them together.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“I know. Gag me with a wimple.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“It's so much easier to accept your feminine role in this world if you don't struggle.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“But if my research shows anything, it's that if you should happen to have had a surplus of mellow marmosets and they got the job done, you would have darned well used marmosets.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Margaret Sanger, the visionary founder of Planned Parenthood who broke many laws in her efforts to give women the right to control how often they get pregnant, believed in eugenics, which troubles many who want to lionize her today. But lots of intelligent people believed in eugenics. They weren’t all evil, and they weren’t necessarily trying to breed a master race. Some of them just thought eugenics could help stem the endless tide of poverty, illness, and starvation that saturated the nineteenth century. They saw it as a way to stop a lot of suffering before it started.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“You serve many purposes as a wife, but the most important is incubating and extruding his biological legacy from your body.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“You're going to stink, but you can choose your stink.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Why spend money on something you intended to wipe your rear with and throw away? Take out the middle step and you’re literally throwing money down the pooper.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Is it a good idea to put more of me in the world? Would my offspring bring good to society, or would I just be mushing up all my own deficiencies, from my foul temper to my freckles, into a squalling eight-pound plague to unleash on civilization?”
― Therese Oneill, Ungovernable: The Victorian Parent's Guide to Raising Flawless Children

“Poverty, war, and abuse stalked the earth, and women got the worst of it.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“showing all the subjacent parts, are the effects of extreme thinness, with which, however great the regularity and beauty of the features may be, it is scarcely possible to be less than hideous.” And how did she get that way? Either physical labor, excessive thinking, or vice. It doesn’t matter which; you want nothing to do with women who dabble in any of those activities.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“These cages, which in their naked state are indistinguishable from something you trap wild dogs in, have a sensible use. Without one, you won't be able to walk.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“People don't want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Therese Oneill, Ungovernable: The Victorian Parent's Guide to Raising Flawless Children

“suggests you begin your hair-care routine in the same manner the modern fertilizer industry begins creating its product: with a good heavy rock of pure ammonia.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Of all the rights to which a woman is entitled, that of the custody of her own body is the most indubitable.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“having gobs of babies is just declaring your poor self-control to the neighborhood. It’s like putting out your booze bottles for recycling so everyone can see how much you drink, except it’s sex.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“For man is fearfully and wonderfully made. Women, mostly just fearfully.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“And imagine not dumping it into a sparkling magic fountain that makes all the horribleness disappear in one cleansing whoosh. No, imagine carrying it out to the outhouse with all the care you’d use in transporting sweating dynamite, and dumping it down that grievous hole, wondering if this would be the day levels had risen high enough to cause splash back. There were households in antebellum slave-holding families that found the task so repugnant that they actually paid the slave who had to perform such an odious task, Thomas Jefferson’s among them.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“And though you might have been treated like a lady, it would come at the expense of being treated like a woman.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Undue familiarity cheapens a girl even in her lover’s eyes and lays the foundation of future jealousy and possible murder. There is plenty of time for familiarity after marriage.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“[A woman] takes up just the right amount of space. Small is best. You need to prove yourself worthy of the molecules you displace, madam.”
― Therese Oneill, Unbecoming a Lady: The Forgotten Sluts and Shrews Who Shaped America

“Until well into the twentieth century “a lady’s toilet” was her beauty routine,”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“As Sperry tells us, dumb people are always the last to know of their condition.”
― Therese Oneill, Ungovernable: The Victorian Parent's Guide to Raising Flawless Children

“There's a special sort of anger humans have toward people who won't blend in, especially if they think it's by choice.”
― Therese Oneill, Unbecoming a Lady: The Forgotten Sluts and Shrews Who Shaped America

“Must a woman’s period be likened to an escaped mental patient wielding a shiv carved from a spoon?”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Sure”
― Therese Oneill, Unbecoming a Lady: The Forgotten Sluts and Shrews Who Shaped America

“Socializing is mandatory. After all, there are crazy cat ladies in every century, and you don’t want to be counted among them.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“So… stop being sad. Right now! “Feelings” are for artists and madmen.”
― Therese Oneill, Ungovernable: The Victorian Parent's Guide to Raising Flawless Children