Writing is always harder than talking.
Unless we include a job as part of every citizen’s right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else’s idea of what need is.
I’d like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I’d have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.
The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example.
If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It’s empowering, in the sense of feeling like you’re a part of something really important.
A man can be called ruthless if he bombs a country to oblivion. A woman can be called ruthless if she puts you on hold.
We all have good instincts unless they’re beaten out of us or shamed out of us in childhood.
We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.
Women fear endangering men’s approval so much, we don’t even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.
The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.
So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?
Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.
My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.
Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.
We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.
Romance is a means to the end of self-completion, but love is an end in itself.
The point of the journey is not just healing. It’s also recovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves.
Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.
I think of the future in two ways – survival plus moving forward. Under survival, I would put all the efforts to save the female half of the world from violence directed at us specifically because we are female.