Alice Munro Quotes

It was always the cliche of men leaving their wives for younger women. The playing field is sort of even now. Women make their own salaries. They can do the exact same thing and can have a younger man.

I think, with my own daughters, rather than preaching a feminine agenda, I just really try to help them understand what it meant to be a woman in the late 20th century and the consciousness of how to be a woman in the 21st century: What is working for you and what is working against you.

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

My parents had a wonderful marriage, but it was a very dependent relationship. My mother was entirely dependent on my father because that's how it was in those days.

My first book took five years to write and I made $1,000 on it. The second took three years and I made $3,000. All this time I was a housewife being supported by a husband. I was very lucky.

For so many generations, a woman's only career path was to marry well and to marry up. Those days have changed.

I think being ambitious, successful, powerful, making a lot of money - I don't care what color you are as a woman; it's difficult to find a mate. I think the natural order is that men want to be providers.

I've become a real housewife. Terry doesn't mind me working, in fact he loves me to be independent. But I only get an allowance of $15 dollars a week, which doesn't go very far.

My generation fought very hard for feminism, and we fought very hard to not be labeled as you had to have a husband or you had to be in a relationship, or you were somehow not a cool chick.

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

A divorcee is a women who got married so she didn't have to work, but now works so she doesn't have to get married.

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.

Most African women are taught to endure abusive marriages. They say endurance means a good wife but most women endure abusive relationship because they are not empowered economically; they depend on their husbands.

So many women are financially dependent on men. So why can't men be dependent on women? I'm totally okay with it.

People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.

... black women ... are trained from childhood to become workers, and expect to be financially self-supporting for most of their lives. They know they will have to work, whether they are married or single; work to them, unlike to white women, is not a liberating goal, but rather an imposed lifelong necessity.

I have been a chief only because my father wished it. I always would have preferred to be married and have a family like other women.

I'm really interested in women of different generations... I think there is no one female experience.

My father's generation of Saudi men are more liberal than the men of my generation. But with women, it's the opposite.

This transition of being a woman and a breadwinner - it took some time for my dad to get used that. It took some time for my husband. I was like, gosh, I've worked so hard to be here, and then all of a sudden I don't know if I feel comfortable being here.

Gold and precious gems are, in many places, the one form of wealth a woman can use to protect and enhance herself within the elaborate structure of patriarchy.

Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.

In marriage, a woman becomes the weaker sex, even if her husband doesn't want her to be. This happens because of the way society has built the institution.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.