Quotes About Gender

A great business of body and heart seemed to join these women, and only a few questions separated them: Did each understand the rules of womanhood? Did she try to follow them? How hard did she try, and what did it cost her?

At the podium Faith said, "Whenever I give a talk at colleges I meet young women who say, 'I'm not a feminist, but...' By which they mean, 'I don't call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure. I want to have a fair and good life. I don't want to be held back because I'm a woman.

What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?" "Be a man, I guess," Ethan said...

All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies.

For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves: I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.

Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness.

Women in powerful positions are never safe from criticism.

All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman's experience could differ so greatly from another's that you never knew who you were talking to.

I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society," Ash said. "But girls, at least while they're still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while.

Men give women the power that they themselves don't want.

What are you asking me exactly?' Gudrun said. 'Why do I think the problems between the men and women of the world are the way they are today? You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel- will they follow you the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?' Goodman shifted in discomfort. 'Something like that,' he said. 'Yes,' said the counselor in a suddenly plangent voice. 'Always they will be acing.

Whenever I give a talk at colleges I meet young women who say, 'I'm not a feminist, but . . .' By which they mean, 'I don't call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure. I want to have a fair and good life. I don't want to be held back because I'm a woman.

But it had seemed, when Cory broke up with Greer, that she became like a piece of knotted wire. Where were the qualities he had loved in her? He had taken on some of them himself. Because of course everyone was soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. Maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.

Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate.

Their hands were on each other—on Zee with her curated boyish look and Noelle with her carefully feminine look that was slightly tempered by the nearly shaved head and prominent hipbones and the careful comportment, giving her the quality of one of those artist's mannequins. The arms and leges could be rearranged any way you liked, link by link, and this was what sex was too, when power was fluid. You could rearrange the other person, and the could rearrange you.

Why are we so hard on ourselves?" Asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it's not that I'm so hard on myself exactly, it's that I've learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own.

Good girls could go far, but they could rarely go the distance.

When a man speaks that way, people say he has authority. When a woman does, everyone resents her and thinks she's his mother. Or their nagging wife.

Because of course everyone was so soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.

I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society. But girls, at least while they're still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while. Seem to get the attention.

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.

But what happened to the talented women who lacked sharp cheekbones or an ease in the universe? The ones who had no attachments to powerful men?

She was bitter and difficult, a once-good-looking woman who had gotten a little too heavy and shouldered too much resentment to attract many people anymore, and yet Professor Castleman was taken with her. Maybe he was repelled by her, too, but still he was attracted. She was gifted; her gifts were strange and discomforting and sort of male.

There's only a handful of women who get anywhere. Short story writers, mostly, as if maybe women are somehow more acceptable in miniature.