Louisa May Alcott Quotes

A woman, then, should not be a busybody, meddling with matters outside her household concerns.

Women always have to have this soft, maternal, sort of - I don't know - moral center.

Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.

The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!

In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.

My mother was a domestic goddess and Mother Earth figure. She was sweet and placid - just what the perfect wife was supposed to be and I was determined not to be.

But alas, I'd have to find a way to be opinionated without being too opinionated, authoritative without being a bitch about it, smart without being elitist, fair without being a pushover. If the boyfriends of my youth found me too authoritative when I should have been cheering on the sidelines as they kicked and tossed and smacked balls toward the vanguard, the male colleagues of my adulthood kept reminding me of my lack of authority as they unconsciously displayed theirs. I was always failing someone's standards of legitimacy, as a girlfriend, as a producer of opinions. It was an eternal no-win.

I was supposed to be a mother like my mother, who didn't work.

I think that women are raised to believe that they're supposed to want certain things, and so you feel like you're supposed to apologize when you don't want those things.

I love women, and I have a lot of really close girlfriends, but I'm not one of those women who's like, 'Ew - that's boy stuff.'

It was a reaction to when I was growing up, and women were supposed to be all blonde hair, gold suntan, and pink lips. It was a real black-and-white opposite of what was considered attractive. I was kicking against something I found really oppressive.

Housewives run the home and sacrifice a lot, but many people forget 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.

People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.

When men's lives become extremely hard, women learn how to deal with them and assist them but also develop quiet systems of coping and managing.

I had always been pegged for being feminine. People would always say, 'Ooh, that's a pretty little girl.' They would talk about my eyelashes or that I was sensitive or that I was crying all the time. I didn't want to play in the dirt outside with the boys.

I think sometimes men find it easier to be a carer than an accessory. I mean, most women I know in bands are pretty lonely. Guys don't want to travel around with you. I know loads of women who do it, but guys don't do it. They're not brought up for it.

Indian women usually tend to forget themselves once married.

I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology.

You have to be strong for people when you don't wanna be strong. You have to be clean-showered, clean, clean-cut for people. You have to set an example.

It's such a difficult thing for women, especially, to admit when we're not coping, because we're supposed to be all right with all the different roles we're born with and are piled on us later on.

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

They always said to me that I needed to be more feminine. I think it's so wrong. Being boisterous doesn't mean you are not feminine.

I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.

The great fault in women is to desire to be like men.