Parenting & Family Quote by Teresa Wright

A Hollywood star calling her own contract "antiquated" is a polite way of saying the whole system is rigged - and everyone knows it. Teresa Wright’s line lands because it pairs legal language ("contract", "abstract in concept") with barnyard brutality ("trade us like cattle") and parental condescension ("boss us like children"). That escalation is the point: she’s exposing how the studio-era promise of glamour was built on a workplace model that treated adult professionals as property.

The specific intent here is reformist, not merely resentful. Wright isn’t complaining about a bad boss; she’s indicting an industrial arrangement where employment terms were deliberately vague, elastic enough to justify control over everything from roles to reputation. "We have no privacies" is the quiet dagger. It signals the way studios policed personal lives - romance, morality, press narratives - because an actor’s off-screen self was part of the product. The invasion isn’t incidental; it’s the business plan.

The subtext is also gendered without needing to announce itself. For an actress, the "children" framing carries extra sting: paternalism doubles as discipline, keeping women marketable, compliant, and replaceable. Wright’s diction ("I feel") performs restraint, but the imagery refuses restraint. She’s describing a labor economy that pretends to be civilized while operating like ownership.

Context sharpens the critique: Wright came up in the height of the studio system, when long-term contracts and morality clauses gave producers enormous leverage. Her complaint anticipates today’s debates about image control, surveillance, and who really owns a performer’s life - just with the old machinery still visible.