Anzia Yezierska Quotes

Women do feel like they're in a box. Society, Hollywood, some men-they want to wrap women up in a neat little package.

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

Growing up in Texas, you were either pretty or smart. Smart didn't get you very far, because there weren't too many job opportunities for women. I wondered why you couldn't be both.

It's hard for women every single day; we have to be nice, but not too nice, ambitious, but not too ambitious. It puts a lot of pressure on what we should and can be.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.

I think there are a lot of rules for women. We have a lot of expectations and a lot of rules for women. So we're expected to march in a straight line, and when we don't, all hell breaks loose.

Basically, women have to prove they are strong at all times. And then when they go on the attack, they have to not appear mean because those women often get the label of being catty.

Women are the harshest critics of other women.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Men weren't always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

Whenever a female takes a strong stand for herself, the majority of the time they have to really, really narrow it down to being feminine and wearing dresses and just being lipstick chic.

Female ambition is such a complicated thing to play because it is an aggressive quality, and people respond very badly to women exhibiting any kind of aggression.

Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees.

I realized early on that I always hated girls who used their femininity to get what they wanted.

I think being a woman celebrity is the hardest thing in India... People will ask many things, what you wear, how you speak, when you will have a baby and other things.

There is a sense that women are more anchored than men in our society.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

There are certain restrictive parts of a woman’s constitution that that were given her by nature and which forbid us from applying the same standard of expectation to women as to men.

Many of us were raised with the 'be a lady' thing, and all those kind of things that can be used against you and strip you out of opportunity and power.

All this talk of equality remains merely on paper. In real life, women are still bound by several psychological shackles and emotional boundaries imposed on them by their families and others. If a girl comes home late, she is asked 100 questions, whereas boys are not answerable for anything. And this prevails across segments.

We live in a culture that does not encourage women to be epic heroes of their own Big Stories but the mothers and lovers and wives and mistresses and muses and personal assistants, the femme fatales and fantasies and manic pixie dream girls, in someone else's Big Story, and this someone else is usually a dude.

Women are allowed to exist in this very narrow lane, but as soon as you step out of that lane, people want to stone you.

There's something about a woman's life choices that invites commentary, whether it's been invited or not.