Lou Doillon Quotes

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just housewives, they were community leaders.

women who once aspired to the image of superwoman now worry about becoming superdrudge. Those who wanted to have it all now ask whether they have to do it all.

the new mystique is that women can have it all. There's a whole new generation of women today, flogging themselves to compete for success according to the male model - in a work world structured for men with wives to handle the details of life.

It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

I believe that all women of working ages and physical capacity, regardless of income, should be expected to earn their livings either in or out of the home. Until this attitude prevails I believe the position of women will be uncertain and undignified, in spite of poetic rhapsodies to the contrary.

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.

I think women of a certain generation, mine in particular, feel like we can have it all because that's what we were fed. It's like, we reap the benefits of the feminist movement - they did all the legwork and now we're going to try to be parents and successful business people and great wives and good friends and take a cooking class and blah, blah, blah.

The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.

While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.

The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.

If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

Some mothers in today's world feel "cumbered" by home duties and are thus attracted by other more "romantic" challenges. Such women could make the same error of perspective that Martha made. The woman, for instance, who deserts the cradle in order to help defend civilization against the barbarians may well later meet, among the barbarians, her own neglected child.

Patience and endurance were not virtues in a woman; they were necessities, forced on her. Perhaps some day things would change and women would renounce them. They would rise up and say: 'We are not patient. We will endure no more.' Then what would happen to the world?

When I was young, I really identified with Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, particularly the character of Jo. The book was written at a time when there weren't as many options for women and girls as there are now. Jo really struggled with that. She wanted to write, to work, to help her family.

Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.

In the long run, only woman remains true to mankind's foremost mission. Whatever she achieves, she achieves through herself, and alone. Man's master is the--public.

You can't do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-orgasmic 'til dawn ... Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement.

The entrance of the woman with equal rights into practical modern life, her new freedom, her finding herself side by side with men in the streets, offices, professions, factories, sports, and now even in political and military life, is one of those dissolutive phenomena in which, in most cases, it is difficult to perceive anything positive. In essence, all this is simply the renunciation of the woman's right to be a woman.

But as to women, who can penetrate the real sufferings of their she condition? Man's very sympathy with their estate has much of selfishness and more suspicion. Their love, their virtue, beauty, education, but form good housekeepers, to breed a nation.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions.

As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

Consider the "new" woman. She's trying to be Pollyanna Borgia, clearly a conflict of interest. She's supposed to be a ruthless winner at work and a bundle of nurturing sweetness at home.

A strange alternative * * *Must women have a doctor or a dance?