Katharine Whitehorn Quotes

What works for a man, still does not work for a woman - both in terms of how they see themselves and how we see them.

You think that being a girl is degrading, but secretly, you'd love to know what it's like, wouldn't you?

I grew up in a time when many people believed that men and women should not always be treated equally.

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

No one knows what women want!

Much-derided chick lit, chick flicks, and chick magazines have left ambitious women in a bind. Why is it that I, a young woman, can read 'GQ,' enjoy 'Fight Club,' and subscribe to 'Thrillist,' while the idea of a guy doing the same with 'Glamour,' '27 Dresses' and 'Daily Candy' is nearly unheard of?

Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.

Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.

I'd like to get to the point where I can be just as mediocre as a man.

It's okay for a guy to be a baddie, but a woman? No, we can't deal with that.

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

My general idea of the world is that I'm not different at all because I'm a girl. So I get blindsided sometimes because I forget that that's a thing.

There's still a narrower band of acceptable behavior for women than men.

There is a mindset that has to be changed - the sense of entitlement of the man. That happens when you are bringing up someone. If you are going to differentiate between a boy and a girl from age zero, then he is bound to grow up with the sense of entitlement.

I'm saying the excessive focus on what gender a person is, rather than what they do, does a disservice to women.

Boys are much more likely to objectify girls bodies, while boys are seen by girls as whole people.

Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.

I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything "girly" with vanity or stupidity. I also think it takes away from girls' agency to say that girls who are interested in that kind of thing only are because they don't know what's good for them.

People aren't comfortable thinking of women as people. Like we're not people, we're women, and that means something completely different, especially when you have power.

I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.

All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humor, of honor, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men.