Isabel Allende Quotes

But, alas! what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?

The common man thinks that the marriage is like appointing one to do his work. The husband thinks so! The husband’s family thinks so. Every one thinks that a girl is coming to the family to do work. Even the girl’s family trains the girl to do the household work

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time.

There is something revolting about the way girls' minds often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means.

In the '50s, a lot of girls never saw beyond the wedding day.

It is ironic that it doesn't matter how successful I am in any other capacity: ultimately, my parents' marker is 'Do you have a wife?' and 'Do you have children?'

The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn't have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I'm not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way.

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.

Some people are sure to say that women who spend their time with philosophers are bound to become self-willed and arrogant, deserting their households for the company of [other ] men, practicing speeches, talking like sophists, when they ought to be sat at home spinning

When I was a young kid, girls were taught that their role in life was to get married and have children. It was the 1950s. Those were the rules.

In our world marriage was the best option for any woman. No girl ever chose to have a career unless she couldn't get a man. It was very much a tertiary life.

Girls and boys also face the societal pressure to get married which I find wrong.

It's hard to imagine what the Bronte sisters' lives would've been like had they been men. Different things would've been expected of them, and maybe they wouldn't have ended up writing because they would've been packed off to do something else.

'Who Fears Death' addresses the push and pull in African culture that powerful women face when their culture has certain duties and beliefs that can stifle them.

The ultimate end of your education was to make you a good wife.

I'm not that big a fan of marriage as an institution and I don't know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.

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.

On the whole, the experience that the activity of the soul obeys the law of least resistance has been verified even in regard to women's social morals. As a rule, these have been focused on the family and on charity - among other reasons, because woman's sense of duty seldom finds means of expression in other directions.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

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.

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.

As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do.