Quotes About Cultural norms

I realized I would be forced to run away from home if someone tried to arrange a marriage for me. I didn't want to think about it.

But I knew the first question Mom asked Gail was, Is it a boy or a girl? Because, for some reason, that is the first thing everybody wants to know the minute you're born. Should we label it with pink or blue? Wouldn't want anyone to mistake the gender of an infant! What is that so important?

He'd never seen a lady's hair down in a public place, and here was Miss Jerningham - Gabby - blithely shaking her curls, as if the crowd of stevedores, sailors, and boatmen around her were naught. 'A lady does not groom herself in public!' 'I'm afraid I'm used to being on display,' she said brightly. 'In the village, my father and I were the only Europeans. My hair was considered to be a good-luck charm-

It is likely that the woman normally brought a dowry and that the man contributed a certain sum, and that both were the personal property of the woman in the marriage.

It seems insane now that no one even raised an eyebrow, when you consider what I was wearing and doing onstage, but it was a different world then.

In our house we repeated the pattern of thousands of other homes. There were a few books and a lot of music. Our food and our furniture were no different from our neighbors'.

Under normal circumstances it would have been unheard of for women to be deployed in terrorist cells with men, since there were strict rules and tribal customs forbidding unrelated men and women from being around each other. However, it had become quickly evident that Muslim men were almost always placed under heavy scrutiny in America, whereas Muslim women were given much more leeway.

Nothing about sex ever shocks women. At least, men's kind of sex.

In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris.

If a man would have the right to make stepping-stones of all the heads which crowd a drawing-room, he must be the lover of some artistic woman of fashion.

If women are choosing not to run the world, it's partly because men are choosing not to run the washer and dryer.

One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

El honor, en fin, constituye un gran impedimento porque para lograrlo es preciso vivir según la manera de ver de la gente, es decir, huir de lo que ella huye y buscar lo que ella busca.

With corsets, it's interesting when you put them on, realizing that's what women actually wore. They're just so constricting.

For me, saying 'I love you' is the same as unbuttoning the heroine's kurti.

As for queueing-up, during the past five or ten years it has become what the psychologists call a conditioned reflex. If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue almost instinctively.

Vauxhall. 'I did not scruple to accept, my

We are still behaving as if a worker really doesn't have a family because the work pattern really was meant for men who really were the financial support but weren't looking after their families. We need to change this, and we can easily do that.

There's this working-class guilt - you don't want to be flashy.

I mean, when we did 'Families At War,' on Saturday night prime time, people said we were mainstream then. But it wasn't in the least mainstream. The fact that we got that on BBC1 at that time with those ridiculous things, that's as mainstream as we get. We do what we do and people can think that it's mainstream or avant-garde.

I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.

I became the toast of London. A lot of people I met came from these really decadent families where the married men were gay and no one thought anything about it.

If shrewdness and sharpness be a just cause of separation between man and wife, I think few men in England would keep their wives long.' The