Badass Women Give the Best Advice. Becca Anderson

real love, you want the other person’s good. In romantic love, you want the other person.

      —Margaret C. Anderson, literary magazine founder, editor, and publisher

      In our minds, love and lust are really separated. It’s hard to find someone that can be kind and you can trust enough to leave your kids with, and isn’t afraid to throw her man up against the wall and lick him from head to toe.

      —Tori Amos, radically insightful singer-songwriter

      Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.

      —Amy Bloom, writer and psychotherapist

      There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

      —Iris Murdoch, Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher

      The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

      —Anais Nin, erotic author extraordinaire

      Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.

      —Rose Franken, playwright and author

      I’m not good at being alone. Especially at the end of the day when my finances are a mess, my car is falling apart, [and] I can’t find my shoes. That’s when I need a big strong guy to hold me close, so I can look deep into his eyes and blame him.

      —Simone Alexander, funny woman who tells it like it is

      Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

      —Iris Murdoch, Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher

      I have no patience for women who measure and weigh their love like a country doctor dispensing capsules. If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.

      —Marie Dressler, stage and screen actress of the silent film and Depression era

      You’ll discover that real love is millions of miles past falling in love with anyone or anything. When you make that one effort to feel compassion instead of blame or self-blame, the heart opens again and continues opening.

      —Sara Paddison, writer on human potential

      …Dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems, or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love—which is to transform us.

      —Bell Hooks, revolutionary author, feminist, and social activist

      Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.

      —Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist

      The greatest science in the word, in heaven and earth, is love.

      —Mother Teresa, philanthropic missionary nun

      Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.

      —Barbara Johnson, feminist literary critic, translator, and scholar

      Badass Clare Boothe Luce: Luce Cannon

      Clare Boothe Luce, “the woman with the serpent’s tongue,” was the anti-Eleanor Roosevelt, a sort of alternate universe doppelganger who used her razor-sharp wit to oppose while “faintly praising” the First Lady and other unrepentant New Dealers. A virulent Republican and FDR basher, Clare was both a smart and tough cookie, albeit not to everyone’s taste. Clare, however, had a wholly unique way of asserting her woman power. As a young woman, one of her summer jobs during college was dropping feminist tracts out of an airplane for some elderly but unstoppable suffragists. Her next job was writing photo captions for Vogue; there, the renowned beauty quickly ascended to the position of managing editor at Vanity Fair. She was the first woman to hold this post for the glamour glossy and soon proved she could hold her own with the boys, even managing to be welcomed in to their cigarettes and brandy ritual.

      Then she met Time and Fortune magnate Henry R. Luce, married, and quit the day job to write plays, starting with the stinker Abide with Me and then surprising everyone with the all-female To the Women, a take-no-prisoners satire of snooty society ladies, which went on to become a very successful movie. Clare became an international cause célèbre with the success of To the Women, penning a few more stage plays including Kiss the Boys Goodbye before she pulled another switcheroo: war correspondent for Life magazine on the battle fronts of Burma, India, and China during the early years of World War II. She even interviewed Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Prime Minister Nehru.

      Clare’s next incarnation was as a politician, and she went on the stump, dissing FDR, Winston Churchill, and a herd of other such sacred cows. She stunned everyone with her gift for rhetoric of the biting, stinging sort. Her next move was to run for a seat as one of Connecticut’s representatives in Congress with a very hawkish platform—her slogan was “Let’s Fight a Hard War Instead of a Soft War”—and she campaigned for the rights of women, blacks, and workers. Easily winning a seat, she served for four years and then retired while she was ahead. Clare then took her domestic campaigns abroad, convincing the Italian Prime Minister to give Italian women the vote! Her good relations with Italy garnered a post for Clare as the ambassador to Italy in 1953, becoming the United States’ second woman ambassador and the first woman chief of mission to a major European power. In 1953, she was fourth in the Gallup poll of the most admired women in the world.

      Clare became the grande dame of the Grand Old Party from the Goldwater sixties until her death of cancer in 1987. Clare will be best remembered for her quick wit and verbal virtuosity. She was absolutely one of a kind; she never luxuriated in her husband’s great wealth, but instead worked her behind off for many causes and left a legacy of great strides for women in her wake.

      Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say “She doesn’t have what it takes.” They will say, “Women don’t have what it takes.”

      —Clare Boothe Luce, politician and first U.S. woman in a major post as ambassador

      Luce Lips

       From the diary Clare kept her psychedelic-inspired musings in when she and hubby Henry