Time & Perspective Quote by Dorothy Kilgallen

There is a delicious sleight of hand in Kilgallen framing her globe-trotting stunt as both a spectacle and a small act of gendered defiance. “A race against time and two men” sounds like pulp adventure copy, but the line’s real engine is the hierarchy she builds and then flips. Time is the cosmic antagonist, the one opponent no one beats. Men are supposedly the practical obstacle. Then she casually declares the impossible task doable (“I know I can beat time”) and treats the supposedly easier task as the uncertain one (“I hope I can beat the men”). It’s a jab disguised as optimism: men, she implies, are the more unpredictable hazard, not because they’re faster but because the game is rigged.

The quote sits in the mid-century moment when women in public life were expected to be charming, not competitive, and certainly not loud about it. Kilgallen’s intent reads twofold: sell the drama (a race needs rivals), and stake a claim to competence without tripping the era’s cultural alarms. She doesn’t say, “I will beat them,” which would trigger backlash; she says “I hope,” a socially acceptable softness that still lets the challenge land.

Subtextually, this is about visibility. Racing “around the world” is movement, access, and modernity. Beating time is performance - a promise of headlines and deadlines met. Beating the men is legitimacy: not being treated as a novelty act in someone else’s contest. The line works because it smiles while it sharpens the knife.