Margaret Mead Quotes

I grew up with my two sisters and my mom, so it's my lot in life to be surrounded by women.

What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'

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.

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.

I don't clean now, because I'm paralyzed. But let me tell you, I would clean. I cleaned, and I ironed. It's my inner femininity.

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

I've done enough for a while and people get fed up of seeing you, but apart from that, although I'm young, I need a bit of rest. You could say I have become a house husband. It's not a new man thing, it's just largely a boring man who doesn't mind staying in the house thing.

I come from a family of all women and one boy, my brother. We're all women and we're all precocious and opinionated and like to have fun and we always had friends in the house and we were always, like, half-naked.

I'm very domestic; I love cleaning. I love cooking. I like waiting on people. I just like to make things. I don't break that down to be weakness, or the only things women can do, or putting me back 20 years.

It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.

Young women from a very young age are taught that life will be easier if you can just turn on the charming smile and say very little and be complacent and docile and sweet.

Ageing is something that both men and women are utterly terrified about.

You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.

I grew up in a house full of women. I have two older sisters and my mum who is a very strong woman.

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

Nothing in a college education makes a girl either unfit for domestic obligations or masculine in her tastes..

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.

All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.

A lot of times people get to a certain age and they quit. I always felt sorry for the Frank Capras, the Billy Wilders, directors like that, because they quit in their sixties. Why would you quit? Think of the great work they could've done in their sixties, seventies, and on up.