Nancy Rubin Stuart > Quotes

“Like others who had once enjoyed an elite lifestyle, Lucy craved its return and whenever opportunity arrived, attempted to recreate it...By then no one questioned Lucy's role as the reigning hostess of celebrations, a role she continued to hold in public celebrations during the early Federal period.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“The suburban dream began innocently enough one and a half centuries ago, with a weariness of city life and a craving for all things green bright and pure.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“Those who abuse political power create a debt of hatred that almost certainly brings them to a bad end.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen

“Her life was expected to be as anonymous as the era's needlework.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

“We have made cities out of our suburbs, and now, with the corporate drift form urban centers, are beginning to make suburbs out of our cities.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“Swept along by the religious revivalism known as America's Great Awakening, scores of charismatic preachers had descended upon the communities surrounding the Erie Canal to win the souls of its citizens and convert them to a variety of evangelical and radical sects.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“To some "housewife" has become a dirty word.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“The "Bouwerie" as the Dutch once called it, was a country road surrounded by grain fields, gardens and wildflowers. A retreat for well-heeled New Yorkers in the summer, the Bowery was far less populated in the winters.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“one of Marjorie's boats, they were inevitably”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post

“Rhythms. You can almost feel them on suburban streets, divine the hour of the day without consulting a clock from the sounds heard in the cool, leafy neighborhoods.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“If Peggy's personal star was on the rise, Arnold's was in freefall as their respective ships headed into the high seas.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“While trances had long been associated with biblical figures and medieval saints, American audiences of this era had become familiar with a new type of dream state, the mesmeric or hypnotic trance first noted by the eighteenth century Austrian doctor Friedrich Anton Mesmer.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“... Women's impulse to change her own rhythms in the face of an environment constructed to retain her as guardian of the suburban hearth.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“Spiritualism, born out of the same discontent with social restrictions and punitive theologies as the suffrage movement, ended up even sharing the same table. The subsequent meeting, at the Seneca Falls Universalist Wesleyan Church on July 19-20 would ignite the woman's suffrage movement, setting the stage for a seventy-two year battle that resulted in the 1920 passage of the Twenty-First Amendment.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“The soldiers became desperate. 'We were absolutely, literally starved,' noted Private Joseph Martin in his diary. After four days without food, he gnawed a piece of black birch bark off a stick. Then, 'I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“In a rare moment of self-awareness, the young woman even understood that her dependence was probably unhealthy. Henry, she declared, was a man 'whom I love too much for my peace.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“Penwoman to Posterity.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

“American spiritualism -- a movement that at its peak claimed more than a million followers -- was born out of the basic human longing for contact with a loved one lost to death. but to literalists, spiritualism's true spark came in 1848 from something no more or less powerful than a bored teenage girl.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart , The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“On April 30 Lucy cheerfully reported that, after three days' illness, she was on the mend. Although she had no mirror, she could feel twenty pockmarks on her face. 'I am almost glad you do not see it.," she wrote, "I don't believe I should get one kiss and yet the doctor tells me it is very becoming.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“The aborigines were a source of wonder and amusement to be alternately fed, clothed, teased, educated, and petted.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen

“Waling the lush grounds overlooking the Potomac, sipping tea, or engaged in needle work in one of Mount Vernon's wainscoted parlors, the two matrons must have made a remarkable contrast; Martha, its soft-spoken mistress, and Lucy, her warm but high-strung 'northern' guest.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“...a later scene...was perhaps Mercy's strongest indictment of the colonial disregard for women and families.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

“All disease, she {Mary Baker Eddy}, asserted in her 1876 first edition of 'Science and Health,' the bible of her new faith, was a fiction of the soul. Neither disease nor matter existed. Both were creations of the soul which symbolized the universal mind, of Jesus Christ, at work.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“The accused were considered guilty unless proven innocent.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen

“Motherhood, as our nation, has always know it, was being practiced in a bold new way, preempted by the priority of the regular paycheck.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Mother Mirror: How a Generation of Women Is Changing Motherhood in America

“I find it amazing that suburban women work at all, but work they must. For a new factor has been added to the old suburban formula; the need for ever-increasing amounts of cash.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“Women did not yet have the vote, but suffrage was clearly in the wind”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post

“Modern woman have discovered that living through another's reflection is simply not human enough.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Mother Mirror: How a Generation of Women Is Changing Motherhood in America

“Temporarily at least, thoughts of war were dispelled by those of love. Before long, that timeless knot would entwine General Arnold and 'the handsomest woman' in America in a union whose intrigues remain controversial.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

“Who, after all, was to say, what was the 'right side' of the war, especially after the turmoil, the food shortages, and scarcity of luxuries?”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart , Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married