Phoebe Waller-Bridge Quotes

It is very difficult for girls. They're told to look one way, but to act another way.

Our culture has created two almost irreconcilable descriptions of a 'good woman.' The first is the individual achiever; the second, the self-sacrificing domestic goddess.

I think we're socialized out of being women, and then we have to find our way back to it. That's hard to do.

Four of my children are daughters, and I've watched them devote themselves to reading books about how little girls learn to become women - how they learn to deal with boys and men, and the different hurdles females have to go over.

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.

What does it mean, being a woman?

Young women from a very young age are taught that life will be easier if you can just turn on the charming smile and say very little and be complacent and docile and sweet.

We try to do too many things that used to be in the men's domain, and we try to do them like men's. I'm a prude - I guess you can tell that - but I think, 'Why would you do that?'

I grew up in an era where you had to find your own way as a woman. When I was a kid, there was this whole physical and emotional neatness and purity that a woman was supposed to have, and I didn't fit into that.

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.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

No man can understand why a woman shouldn't prefer a good reputation to a good time.

Women have been brought up to be passive, accepting, not come forward and play a major role in life. And with age, there's a tendency to revert to that - to pull back, recede. I don't think it's advisable or admirable.

Women spend their lives trying to look good for men. So a woman who feels she's sending the right visual signals is pleased with herself.

I'm fascinated by how much we, as women, have to subjugate and hide ourselves in order to get on in the world.

If I could have gotten my way at an early age, I would have entered the priesthood, but my mother informed me that I could not become a priest because I was a girl. It really was the biggest blow to my ego, because it was my calling. When she told me I'd have to be a nun, I looked at her and said, 'I'm not following anyone.'

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.

There was that feminist myth that we can do everything. I don't think you can.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

Most women seem to be required to pit themselves against men in dramatic situations, and the men got to pit themselves against ideas or God.

The corporate woman has been defined as the 'liberated woman' and I see that as the exact opposite. I think she now is more enslaved, maybe even more than the housewife was; because she's so out of her power, and imitating male power is not female power.

There are some strong female performers out there. But the industry's pre-occupation with the packaging of how a woman looks has gone completely the other way, back to almost the 60s, early 70s.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

I think when it comes to women who write or who fancy ourselves 'hip downtown literati', there is a certain contempt for being overly sexual or really looking for boyfriends. We tend to be marginalized as some 'Sex & The City' Carrie Bradshaw chick-lit dummies who just want shoes and a ring.

From a male perspective, you don't think about how much outward pressure and importance you put on how women look.