For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view.
Stacy SchiffRead
Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights Cleopatra's unique position as a female ruler during a time when women held significant rights, which would not be seen for millennia.
Stacy Schiffβs quote emphasizes the advantage Cleopatra had in a historical context, where female rulers were not uncommon and women had rights that would later be suppressed for centuries. It suggests that Cleopatra can be viewed as an early feminist figure due to her prominent role and the rights enjoyed by women during her era, contrasting sharply with subsequent historical periods where womenβs rights were significantly curtailed.
Themes
CleopatraFeminismFemale LeadersWomen'S RightsHistory
In practice
Example use cases
In a women's rights seminar discussing the importance of historical figures, one might quote this to illustrate early female empowerment.
More from Stacy Schiff
All quotes βAnd in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
Stacy SchiffRead
It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.
Stacy SchiffRead
Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.
Stacy SchiffRead
Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented.
Stacy SchiffRead
A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.
Stacy SchiffRead
Similar quotes
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
Franklin D. RooseveltRead
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
Tom BrokawRead
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat - in the place of Jibta, Sarid - in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua - in the place of Tell Shaman. There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
Moshe DayanRead
The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.
Tom BrokawRead
The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people,' who created the government that Americans still live under.
Edmund MorganRead
It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master
Francis FukuyamaRead