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Time & Perspective Quote by Alice Roosevelt Longworth

"Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay"

About this Quote

Alice Roosevelt Longworth lands this line like a jeweled hatpin: glittering, cruel, and perfectly aimed. By framing Dorothy Parker as "the only woman in history" to monetize a biological milestone, she’s not praising Parker’s resilience so much as teasing the whole culture that made a woman’s aging both spectacle and liability. The barb works because it yokes two taboos that polite society preferred to keep separate: female physiology and female ambition. Longworth pretends to be scandalized, but the real scandal is that Parker had to turn her own body-and the social penalties attached to it-into material.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a high-society dig at Parker’s brand: the sharp-tongued writer whose self-deprecation and frankness became a marketable persona. On another, it’s Longworth asserting social dominance. As Theodore Roosevelt’s famously acid daughter, she cultivated a role as Washington’s unofficial commentator, someone who could summarize reputations in a sentence. Calling menopause "in public" reduces Parker’s visibility to something almost indecent, as if the mere fact of an older woman taking up cultural space is an offense.

The subtext is also about capitalism’s appetite for intimacy. Parker’s era-the Algonquin Round Table, magazine humor, celebrity column culture-rewarded writers who could package private pain as public performance. Longworth’s line pretends Dorothy is uniquely shameless; it’s really pointing at an audience that paid to watch women be brilliant as long as they bled a little on the page.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
Source
Later attribution: Last Call at the Hotel Imperial (Deborah Cohen, 2022) modern compilationISBN: 9780525511205 · ID: nI4zEAAAQBAJ
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Alice Roosevelt Longworth made the rounds . " Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay . " By the way , had she heard that remark ? Jimmy asked Dorothy one day . Of course she had ...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Longworth, Alice Roosevelt. (2026, February 21). Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dorothy-is-the-only-woman-in-history-who-has-had-131694/

Chicago Style
Longworth, Alice Roosevelt. "Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay." FixQuotes. February 21, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dorothy-is-the-only-woman-in-history-who-has-had-131694/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay." FixQuotes, 21 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dorothy-is-the-only-woman-in-history-who-has-had-131694/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

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About the Author

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Alice Roosevelt Longworth (February 12, 1884 - February 20, 1980) was a Author from USA.

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