Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a gre...at honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm always on the lookout for research "proving" that women who work are a) in the majority (because misery loves company); b) rai...sing more, not fewer Nobel Prize winners or Olympic medalists; and c) not handicapping children for life, because they need or want to work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents can fail to cheer your successes as wildly as you expected, pointing out that you are sharing your Nobel Prize with a coup...le of other people, or that your Oscar was for supporting actress, not really for a starring role. More subtly, they can cheer your successes too wildly, forcing you into the awkward realization that your achievement of merely graduating or getting the promotion did not warrant the fireworks and brass band.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To become a token woman--whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters--is to become so...mething less than a man ... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The person who designed a robot that could act and think as well as your four-year-old would deserve a Nobel Prize. But there is n...o public recognition for bringing up several truly human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of ali...enation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their po...litical programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe--not empirically, alas, but only theoretically--that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts--especially texts by black women. A working-class Jew...ish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we could produce one or two more Madame Curies, that would accomplish far more for the advancement of women than any amount of ...agitation, argument and legislation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »