Time & Perspective Quote by Dorothy Fields

A line like this lands today as a small, perfectly preserved fossil of how exclusion used to sound when it was trying to be polite. Dorothy Fields, a major lyricist who made her name in the collaborative machine of Broadway and Hollywood, frames the industry as a neutral fact: film and theater require “many people,” and “many women” supposedly lack the time. The move is strategic. It shifts the burden away from gatekeepers and onto women’s calendars, turning structural barriers into a personal scheduling problem.

The subtext is less about hours and more about permission. “Time” stands in for unpaid domestic labor, childrearing expectations, and the social penalties that followed ambitious women who stayed late, traveled, networked, or simply occupied professional space. By presenting the obstacle as practical rather than ideological, the quote softens the sexism while keeping its outcome intact: women’s absence from certain roles appears natural, even rational.

Fields’ context complicates the intent. She succeeded in rooms that were overwhelmingly male, which can produce a hard-earned cynicism: not every barrier is a villain twirling a mustache; some are just the accumulated friction of norms, contracts, and who gets assumed “available.” Read one way, she’s describing the industry’s cold math. Read another, she’s rehearsing it, repeating the alibi that kept collaboration-coded-as-masculine and caretaking-coded-as-feminine. The chilling part is the casualness: the exclusion is delivered as production logistics, not politics.