Parenting Quote by Megan Marshall

““It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.” Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,” but rather a “mother of men . . . an abettor,” captured the very reasons Margaret quickly warmed to the tall, unkempt newspaperman, whose thick wire-rimmed glasses, settled unsteadily on his ruddy baby face, were the only hint of erudition in a carelessly rustic ensemble that usually included an old white coat of Irish linen, heavy boots, and baggy black trousers.””

Megan Marshall

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Horace Greeley Parenting White coat

More by Megan Marshall

“At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow…

Megan Marshall

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“The expansion of their dyad to include the “young people” gave both Margaret and Waldo hope of more: “of being often & often shined on & rained on by these influences of being steeped in this light & so ripened to power whereof I yet dreamed not,” Waldo rhapsodized, “suddenly uplifted” by the notion, foreign to him since Ellen’s death,…

Megan Marshall

“A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.”

Megan Marshall

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“Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic…

Megan Marshall

“And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.”…

Megan Marshall

“It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary…

Megan Marshall

“She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,”

Megan Marshall

“Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted…

Megan Marshall

“long as man “has the physical power, as well as the conventional” to treat a woman “like a play-thing or a slave,” she’d written…

Megan Marshall

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“But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these…

Megan Marshall

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“Elizabeth Bishop wrote love poems, and poems about lovemaking, and one of the best poems ever written in English about the loss of love, but she had made her way through life as an orphan, a solitary. Reticence wasn’t the reason she’d become a poet of the self—of a singular “mind in action,” as she’d once described the effect she…

Megan Marshall

“am caught in such a net of ties here.” Again she almost revealed her secret: “if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself.” But she would not. “Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there…

Megan Marshall

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