We have some of the meanest spirits among us on earth. The net has halled in good and bad, - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Everything in arms. Did not find time to sit down till 2 pm.” The phrase is idiomatic, of course, yet it suggests an attitude. A house could be an adversary. Turn your back, and it rippled into disorder. Chairs tipped. Candles slumped. Egg yolks hardened in cold skillets. Dust settled like snow. Only by constant effort could a woman conquer her possessions. Mustering grease and ashes, shaking feather beds and pillows to attention, scrubbing floors and linens into subjection, she restored a fragile order to a fallen world.

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care.