Eavan Boland Quotes

Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.

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.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

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

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.

The industry is quite chauvinistic generally. Expectations of women, girls, what they should look like, how they should be, what they should say, what they should wear, how their hair should be, what colour their skin should be.

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

In the name of feminism, we denied some essential aspects of our authentic selves. While feminism should have been nothing if not a celebration of our own unique characteristics, we insisted that we had no unique characteristics... that gender differences were hogwash, and a feminine woman was nothing more than a plaything for men.

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

Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.

Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy… But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

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

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

Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn't very feminine.

I thought it was very important that femininity wasn't lost.

We're comfortable with women in certain roles but not comfortable with women expressing anger or fully accepting their power. The most daring question a woman can ask is, 'What do I want?'

You are a woman: you must never speak what you think; your words must contradict your thoughts, but your actions may contradict your words.

Everything about women is in perpetual crisis.

It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

I think a woman gets more if she acts feminine.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

There's a side of me that dislikes feminism. I think we surrendered something and women were unable to reveal any kind of vulnerability.

People don't want to see women doing things they don't think women should do.