But I see no reason why a woman should not grow and develop in all those outlets which are suited to her nature, it matters not at all what they may be.
AGNES SMEDLEYFor the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.
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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant–one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.
AGNES SMEDLEY