We do what we see and what we’re told. If we haven’t been raised in a family or in a community where women are treated as full human beings and men don’t have to be superior anymore, we continue to think that it’s not only natural but inevitable.
Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.
Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.
In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.
Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it’s not worth doing, or if they’re not superior to women in one way or another, they’re not really masculine.
The ends and means are a seamless web.
The point is less what we choose than that we have the power to make a choice.
Work is valued by the social value of the worker.
Anyone who has ever experienced dehumanized life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member.
Transformation happens in small groups. Each person can speak and all listen.
A different world can be created or re-created-but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide.
If you love your work, I’m not sure you have hobbies. I try to say no to things that other people could do and only say yes to things that only I could do.
Superwoman is the adversary of the women’s movement.
Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.
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.