Time & Perspective Quote by Marguerite Young

Rage is a deliberately un-literary word here: blunt, bodily, hard to aestheticize. Marguerite Young isn’t diagnosing “bias” or “sexism” in the polite, sociological register; she’s naming something hotter and more personal, closer to resentment than to prejudice. That choice matters. It implies not just exclusion but appetite - a desire to punish, to reduce, to keep women in their place because their presence is felt as an affront.

The second sentence is the quiet pivot. “I’ve come to see that now” admits belated vision without theatrics, then lands the more cutting detail: “although at the time I did not notice it.” The subtext is that misogyny can be so ambient it disappears into the wallpaper, especially for someone trying to survive in work that demands absorption. Young sketches the bargain many ambitious women make: focus on the page, on the classroom, on the next sentence - and treat hostility as static you don’t have time to interpret.

“I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing” is not an apology; it’s an indictment of the conditions that force preoccupation. She hints at the cost of seriousness for women: you must be twice as intent just to hold your space, which can delay recognizing the forces arrayed against you. Coming from a 20th-century writer who moved through male-dominated literary and academic worlds, the line reads as late-life clarity and a warning: the culture’s anger isn’t always shouted. Sometimes it’s simply what you learn to work around until one day you finally name it.