Time & Perspective Quote by Dorothy Fields

Fields’ line lands with the polite sting of someone who’s heard “why aren’t there more women in X?” one too many times and refuses to play along. The repetition - lady songwriters, lady doctors, lady accountants, lady lawyers - is doing double duty: it mirrors the rote way women’s ambition gets filed into a novelty category, and it widens the frame until the reader can’t pretend the problem is “the music business.” It’s structural. It’s domestic. It’s time.

The key move is her choice of “time” over “talent.” Fields doesn’t argue that women lack ability; she indicts the economy of attention that patriarchy quietly controls. “Not enough women have the time for careers” sounds almost mundane, which is the point. It names the unglamorous constraint that rarely makes it into celebration-of-genius narratives: who’s doing the unpaid labor, who’s raising children, who’s expected to be endlessly available, who gets a room with a door and a stretch of uninterrupted hours.

There’s also a sharp, era-specific irony in “lady,” a word that both flatters and cages. It turns professionals into exceptions and decorations, as if competence needs a gendered disclaimer. Coming from a woman who built a career in songwriting when women were routinely dismissed as muses rather than makers, the remark reads like a weary diagnosis and a strategy. Stop asking where the women are. Ask who has been granted the conditions to become one.