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.
A portable friend to all readers-especia lly but not only women-who need to learn that the Golden Rule works only if it’s reversible: We must learn to treat ourselves as well as we wish to treat others.
Given the expectations of society at large, men are generally correct in their assumption that it is important for a woman to have a man. What they do not understand is how pathetically little difference it makes what man.
Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.
I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had “crazy mothers.” We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.
The old languages – at least the ones I know – don’t have gender. They don’t have gendered pronouns. There’s no “he” and “she.” A human being is a human being.
No other form of violence is legitimate. It is never acceptable to use violence to solve a problem. Whether personal or political.