Time & Perspective Quote by Jessamyn West

A whole social order is smuggled into that parenthetical: “(and in my soul).” West isn’t only reporting the rules of her “time and neighborhood”; she’s admitting how thoroughly those rules colonized her inner life. The line lands with the cold efficiency of a yardstick: success reduced to a single, external measurement, administered by men and internalized by women. It’s not melodrama; it’s the banality that makes it brutal.

West’s specific intent is diagnostic. She names the mechanism by which patriarchy keeps itself running: not just through laws or sermons, but through everyday accounting. “Only one standard” signals scarcity, a rigged market where women compete for validation that’s defined as male desire. The question “did some man want her?” is deliberately blunt, almost transactional. Not “love,” not “respect,” not “choice” - “want,” the verb of appetite. That word quietly strips away personhood, turning a woman into a wished-for object and turning her life into a referendum she doesn’t get to vote in.

The subtext is shame and complicity without self-exoneration. By placing the metric “in my soul,” West indicts the psychological afterlife of these norms: even when the neighborhood changes, the scorekeeping persists. Context matters: West came of age in early-20th-century America, when women’s horizons were widening on paper while respectability culture still tethered status to marriageability. The sentence doesn’t romanticize the past; it shows how neatly a society can teach someone to mistake being chosen for being whole.