Mitchell Baker Quotes

I never shared a room growing up because I was the only girl.

I rarely felt or noticed any real divide between girls and boys when I was growing up. Maybe it was because I was so involved in sports and competed with the boys. Maybe it was my mom and dad, who constantly instilled confidence in me and never made me feel as though there were boy activities and girl activities.

I'm one of nine sisters. My parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin. My father didn't believe in girls doing farm work. Girls did housework, and he hired young men to do farm work. I would have preferred to be outside.

I don't think my dad really knew what to do with me, as a daughter. He treated me like a boy; my brother and I were treated the same. He didn't do kid stuff. There were no kid's menus; you weren't allowed to order off the kid's menu at dinner - we had to try something from the adult menu.

I actually always say that I have a son and a daughter, but I work more for my son, because I want him to respect women when he gets into the real world like he respects his mom right now.

My parents never told me, 'You're supposed to wear pink,' or 'You're meant to do this because you're a girl.'

One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she's invited to a princess party, of course I'm not going to stop her going.

It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.

To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a woman as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character. Sitting at the conference table musing on these matters, I felt sad to think that we women didn't have the freedom to be unmarked that the men sitting next to us had. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

To be honest with you, I don't male-bash. I don't believe in male-bashing. I write about things that are natural, that happen in life.

I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men.

I'm an only child, so I never had sisters to tell me what I should like based on my gender. I liked what the boys were doing and thought: 'Why let them have all the fun?'

The way women today are treated in Saudi Arabia is a direct result of the education our children, boys and girls, receive at school.

Sadly, in any industry and in any work-related environment, females always strive to achieve a certain amount of perfection, whether that be skinny or pretty. It's a constant, in our society.

I learned early on how to treat women by the examples that were set around me.

My father always defined my gender to my brothers. He'd say, 'This is your sister; you must take care of her.'

I'm not telling women to be like men. I'm telling us to evaluate what men and women do in the workforce and at home without the gender bias.

I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles.

I have friends who have daughters and there's times I think I'm glad I have boys instead of girls.

Whenever anything went wrong at home, because I was the only boy, I would get blamed for it straight away. Girls stick together.

You become tyrannized by this notion that women must not only be treated equally, but they must never fail.

When I was born, some of our relatives came to our house and told my mother, 'Don't worry, next time you will have a son.'

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

Most of us believe that women can do what men do. The challenge is to convince employers, legislators, mothers, that men can do what women do.