Jill Lepore > Quotes

“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.”
― Jill Lepore

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“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.”
― Jill Lepore

“...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.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“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.”
― Jill Lepore

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, American wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print.”
― Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins

“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....”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," as one feminist explained.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“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.”
― Jill Lepore

“Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.”
― Jill Lepore

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since “the comics’ worst offense was their bloodcurdling masculinity.” He explained, A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing—love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl’s stuff!” snorts our young comics reader. “Who wants to be a girl?” 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, peaceloving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.14”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives,” Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.”
― Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

“Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. —William Moulton Marston, March 1945”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“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”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“the question of every rising and setting of the sun, on rainy days and snowy days, on clear days and cloudy days, at the clap of every thunderstorm. Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit? Is there any arrangement of government—any constitution—by which it’s possible for a people to rule themselves, justly and fairly, and as equals, through the exercise of judgment and care?”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“Wonder Woman’ is gifted with tremendous physical strength—but unlike Superman she can be injured.” Marston went on, “ ‘Wonder 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.”
― Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“That the revival of Christianity coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, an anniversary made all the more mystical when the news spread that both Jefferson and Adams had died that very day, July 4, 1826, as if by the hand of God, meant that the Declaration itself took on a religious cast. The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.”
― Jill Lepore

“In one of the most wrenching tragedies in American history—a chronicle not lacking for tragedy—the Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“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.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high. It is no accident that the Constitution does not mention God. Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush wondered, politely, whether this error might be corrected, assuming it to have been an oversight. “Perhaps an acknowledgement might be made of his goodness or of his providence in the proposed amendments,” he urged.27 No correction was made.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States