Claire Messud Quotes

I'm really interested in women of different generations... I think there is no one female experience.

I want to be in the small percentage of women who don't settle for conventional roles.

Unfortunately, as obsessed as I am with all of those Grimm's slash Disney princesses, I do think women have evolved socially in so many ways.

My mother was born on a tiny farm in County Mayo. She was meant to stay at home and look after the farm while her brother and sister got an education. However, she came to England on a visit and never went back.

I've always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.

My generation fought very hard for feminism, and we fought very hard to not be labeled as you had to have a husband or you had to be in a relationship, or you were somehow not a cool chick.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

When I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say that for her the important thing was for me to become a doctor - a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. Sport was something to be set aside.

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.

I think that instead of feminism being a political thing, it should be an act of creativity. It's more of a rock n' roll thing.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' They would say, 'No.'

The need for women to have their own individual identity belongs to your generation, not mine.

Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.

That's one of the unintended consequences of the women's liberation movement - that, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be feminine, they would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children.

During the era when women were burning their bras - which, by the way, they never actually did - but when women were first becoming liberated, I was 23. And I met a woman who asked, 'Don't you feel bad because you're sort of acting like the stupid airhead blonde?' And I totally surprised myself. I said, 'Liberation can also come from the inside.'

I think, with my own daughters, rather than preaching a feminine agenda, I just really try to help them understand what it meant to be a woman in the late 20th century and the consciousness of how to be a woman in the 21st century: What is working for you and what is working against you.

Especially in our society, for a woman to be ambitious and controlling, that's a negative. Whereas me as a person, I don't think that's negative. If I wasn't ambitious and controlling to a certain extent, I wouldn't be where I am today.

As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl - how to be a good, pretty girl - from such an early age. Then, at the same time, we're told that well-behaved girls won't change the world or ever make a splash.

We came from an era when women normally did not rock.

The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.

You've already put more than enough energy into worry. That's all women have been allowed to do, historically.

I'm trying to encourage more women to be themselves, rather than what men want them to be. I don't believe in patronizing either sex.

There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.