Ayelet Waldman Quotes

There are lots of different ways for women to be a mom in this culture.

I have two children myself. I always laugh; they have you playing mothers pretty early, us women. You look at the television, the mothers get younger and younger, and the children get older and older, and you start to wonder when these people had these children. Were they breeding when they were 12?

I believe that all women should have children. I think women are made to have children and to be mothers. I also think women have to have an identity outside the home.

Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.

Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.

Having children is what a woman is born for, really.

A huge part of keeping women in their place has to do with creating a really limited definition of what a 'real' woman is like. And a ton of that what-makes-a-woman nonsense is attached to motherhood. Apparently, by virtue of having ovaries and a uterus, women are automatic mommies or mommies-to-be.

If I were like your mother, I would be a woman.

The word's out: I'm a woman, and I'm going to have trouble backing off on that. I am what I am. I'll go out and talk to people about what's happening to their families, and when I do that, I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother.

It is obvious that the role of the father as the central authority in the family has been considerably challenged in Western societies. Parental responsibilities, and I knowingly use the term responsibility instead of the term authority still used in the French Civil code, are nowadays shared equally between both parents.

It was actually having a son made me think about feminism.

I always had musicians in my band having children, and their wives were the ones at home taking care of the kids. So I never thought much of it. And then suddenly I'm the parent, but I'm the woman, and it's like, 'Ah, what happens now?'

I like a little chivalry; I like to receive flowers. I like taking care of a son and a husband, and in my judgment, those who recoil from these things don't know what they're missing.

Domesticity is a fact of how social structure works. So if you say, "Well being domestic as a female is a negative trait," then that would be like saying, "Having a family - because that's an economic unit designed to further the economic structures in the world - if you have a family then you're subjugated."

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.

Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.

I believe one should be a woman at home.

If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

I'm sure mothers are important across every culture, but particularly in Korean society, the role of the mother is of great importance.

I was so thrilled that I was having a girl, because I just am so girly myself, but I think the teenage years are going to be very interesting.

I'm a mom, but I don't always want to look just like that.

I'm a just a mom when I walk down the street.

In Sweden, we've moved away from the notion that mothers have some magical, special bond with children.

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.