Herstory Quotes

“Psychotherapy is the art of finding the angel of hope in the midst of terror, despair and madness.”
― Cloe Madanes

“The musician has the most brothers, and the dancer the most sisters.”
― Alexandra Chauran, HerStory: Fiction Honoring Women's History Month

“Surely Victoria's mental health suffered because all the men around her expected it to.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“She no longer followed fashion; she had created a fashion all her own.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“The next draft of a bill outlining the punishments for homosexuality must omit all mention of females; it was unnecessary for 'women don't do such things'.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“She who tells the story makes history”
― Robin Stevens Payes

“In among all these little stories are two extraordinary tales of women who were neither acquitted nor convicted in their trials. Each woman is unnamed because the Romans try to avoid naming women if they can help it. One annoying walking uterus is much the same as another to the Romans.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Victoria came to understand that her depression was a distinct malady that came and went, but which affected her particularly during and after pregnancy. ... Yet Albert made sure the babies kept coming. "It is too hard and dreadful what we have to go through," Victoria complained. Men ought to "do every thing to make up, for what after all they alone are the cause of.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“In talking so proudly about her "happy domestic home", Victoria was prefiguring the words of John Ruskin, the commentator who'd make the best-known pronouncement on the proper role of a Victorian woman. Home, he thought, was a "woman's true place and power". While a husband had to go to brave the rough world's perils, a wife should remain behind, in a private realm where her "great function is Praise" and her great opportunity the "sweet ordering" of her household.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“[Florence Nightingale's] sister's condition was all too common among many a well-off spinster, 'condemned to spend her days in a meaningless round of trivial occupations, which ate away at her vital strength.' Parthenope's illness, Florence thought, was simply caused by boredom, 'by the conventional life of the present phase of civilisation, which fritters away all that is spiritual in women.' Watching Parthenope lose her sanity, her strength, even the ability to walk, had left Florence aghast. She observed that all around her women were 'going mad for the want of something to do'. She was determined to avoid this fate for herself.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Victoria had been encouraged to believe that she was weak, inadequate and unable to cope without [Albert].”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“There is no denying that these women had hard lives, but care needs to be taken with these articles about them because they were written in a Victorian genre known as 'slumming', a semi-salacious relishment of the misfortunes of lower-class people.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“While Alice had played her part in watching, waiting and attending on her father, Victoria herself hadn't been much use. ... Alice wasn't a trained nurse, but ... tradition and convention insisted in any case that a daughter was better than the most professional nurse available. (Tradition and convention were wrong about this, as Victoria herself later admitted.)”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Victoria, who lacked a father, had long sought mentors or alternative fathers in Uncle Leopold, Melbourne and then in Albert himself. Yet she couldn't get him to listen to her. It was in any case, a vain hope. A Victorian man was failing in his masculinity if he failed to control his wife, and Albert could never quite control a wife who was also a queen. So they were doomed to clash.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“What can appear to us twenty-first century people to be an unhealthy fascination with death and mourning in Victorian culture may in fact have been a source of powerful mental resilience. They were 'in touch' with birth and death. Today grieving and mourning are perceived as weakness, almost sickness, to be conquered and overcome. It might be better to accept bereavement, as the Victorians did, as an integral part of life.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Victoria's former governess Laddle perceptively noticed that the queen's grief would be worse because 'she has no friend to turn to'. 'The worst, far the worst,' Laddle continued, 'is yet to come - the numberless, incessant wishes to "ask the Prince," to "Send for the Prince", the never-failing joy, fresh every time, when he answered her call ... he greatest delight was in OBEYING him.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“She had clasped his cold body because she could not bear to let him go. And something else Victoria could not easily bear to relinquish was the hold Albert had had over his wife's life.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“A species of madness' had come upon her, [Dr Clark] claimed ... but these fears were greatly amplified by the fact that Victoria was approaching that time of life when Victorian women in general were believed to lose control of themselves: the menopause. ... Menopausal women, contemporary doctors hinted, would become sex maniacs.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“[Alix, Princess of Wales] had been taught to think that her beauty was her greatest achievement, and at heart was a simple, straightforward person.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“To Victoria's evident distaste, [Prime Minister William] Gladstone made no concessions to her femininity. He treated her just like a man, or else 'as a competent and intelligent head of state'.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Before the twentieth century, to be a widow was perhaps to be in the most potent of a woman's life stages. For the first time, a widow was answerable to no one. For the first time, she could own property. For all women other than the queen, a woman's worldly goods, and even her children, had up to that point been not hers but her father's or husband's.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Even at rock bottom, when her doctors had thought she would go mad with grief, Victoria had spoken of endurance. She was 'determined', she wrote, that as a widow 'no one person, may he be ever so good ... is to lead, or guide, or dictate to me'.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“With Bertie's illness, Victoria's return to her best self, the self she had lost in Albert, had begun.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“The daily contents even of her bin 'would be more interesting than a year's file of The Times'.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Historian Dorothy Thompson has pointed out the double standard at work here. A king's having a mistress was regrettable, but ultimately acceptable. The possibility, though, of a female ruler having a sexual relationship outside of marriage, causes dismay and prurient ridicule.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Victoria's courtiers generally shared the views of her administrators and colonial staff in India, which were that Indians were decidedly inferior to Europeans. Victoria, however, perhaps having less cause to worry about her status being challenged, was less prone to this, 'There is no hatred to a brown skin - none,' she wrote, even in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“This bonnet, worn with resolution, had caused some upset. Her government had asked its queen to appear more ... queenly. 'The symbol that unties this vast Empire is a Crown not a bonnet,' complained Lord Roseberry. But Victoria stoutly refused, and 'the bonnet triumphed'.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Many people envied her position as the winner of the Baby Race and the wearer of the crown. But when she discovered she was to be queen, Victoria already knew that it was the breaking, not the making, of her life. 'I cried much,' she said. Her mother had prepared her for the lonely royal trap in which bother of their lives would be lived, a trap that tightly clasped so many Victorian women but which squeezed and nipped at a queen perhaps most damagingly of all. 'You cannot escape your own feelings,' Victoire told Victoria, all those years ago, 'you cannot escape ... from the situation you are born in'. You cannot escape. It was true. You cannot escape.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“After all, well-behaved women rarely made history.”
― Kim Harrington, Revenge of the Red Club

“So when I see a bright, promising young woman with a desire to enter the field, I try to help pave the way for her, the way Dad did for me. Somewhere down the road, maybe you’ll help pave the way for somebody else. That’s how the world gets better, Bitsy. One generation helping the next.”
― Marie Bostwick, The Book Club for Troublesome Women