Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

A woman should be good for everything at home, but abroad good for nothing.

Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.

A highly intelligent man should take a primitive woman. Imagine if on top of everything else, I had a woman who interfered with my work.

Gentlemen ... Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman?

A man is known by the company he keeps, but a woman is known by the company she keeps waiting.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

It's a rare man who can stand being around an intelligent woman, let alone married to her.

claims about what's 'natural' have long been used to reinforce traditional gender roles and values. ... Even the notion that women should have children at all is based on the idea that a woman's inherent and most important role is that of mother. Shockingly, men's 'innate' roles are a lot more fun than the ones bestowed on women.

Women, then, are only children of a larger growth

We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home.

I think a woman can have all of the ideas and mental pictures. She can be a real planner and a motivator. But in the end, I think a woman does best when she responds to a man.

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.

Once boys' and men's challenges are clear, the question 'why now' quickly becomes 'why didn't we see this sooner?' The answer? Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable.

And then also I think it's harder for women because comedy is so opposite of being ladylike.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men. And let's face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what's sexy. And men define what's feminine. It's ridiculous.

There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

I think that there's so many levels of what is appropriate for an Indian woman to do.

The only men who aren't in fear of women's reactions are usually men who aren't born or who are dead.

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

Though it's safe to say there are a whole lotta American gals who agree with the core ideals of feminism, they are somehow nevertheless watching 'Say Yes to the Dress' by the millions.

Perhaps some of the appeal of the dangerous-but-yummy paranormal anti-hero lies in his scorn for societal expectations. Yes, women have come a long way, but there are still some cultural stigmas more associated with women than men.