Kiran Bedi Quotes

My family was, I think, a bit more radical than most Mormons, especially on the question of gender. So in my mind, growing up, there wasn't ever any question of what my future would look like. I would get married when I was 17 or 18. And I would be given some corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it, and we would have kids.

I believe in large families: every woman should have at least three husbands.

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.

Being born a girl in India, it matters a lot what family you are born into.

Weddings are such a microcosm of norms, of traditions, and in those traditions, there are a lot of things that have been sort of codified: misogyny and ownership and the patriarchy. So what happens when two very, very disparate families come together for one wedding?

Obviously, over the history of certainly the last 300 years, it was that men went out and worked, and women stayed home. Yes okay, that's the way it was. But certainly it isn't that women weren't able to do it.

There's always an assumption that when the girls get married they don't want to work.

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

My observation is that women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

As long as male behavior is taken to be the norm, there can be no serious questioning of male traits and behavior. A norm is by definition a standard for judging; it is not itself subject to judgment.

Black men don't like to be called 'boys,' but women accept being called 'girls.'

None of my sisters are in the movies, nor are my nieces going to be. That's how Dutt 'sahab,' my dad, brought up the girls in the family, and I am just carrying his thought forward.

My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion.

I think a woman gets more if she acts feminine.

In India, at the community level, young men are playing an absolutely essential role in changing the cultural norms and deeply held practices concerning women. They are doing this in a way that not only empowers women and girls, but really empowers the young men as well.

A woman should be pink and cuddly for a man.

But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.

Of course, women have long exercised influence behind the scenes. A few thousand years ago this drove Aristotle to distraction: 'What difference does it make whether women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.'

Tradition has made women cowardly.

I'm one of nine sisters. My parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin. My father didn't believe in girls doing farm work. Girls did housework, and he hired young men to do farm work. I would have preferred to be outside.

What I do know is that traditional gender roles are very real and flipping the norm is difficult for even the strongest, funniest, smartest men.

No woman in Afghanistan is in business without support from either her husband or her father or her uncle, someone.

For women raised in the '70s, high heels can still carry a stigma; they're associated with being stupid, with just wanting to please a man. Other women find them empowering.