Agnes Smedley Quotes

There is a sense that women are more anchored than men in our society.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

The majority of the film industry is, like, obsessed with a ridiculous gender binary and keeping with this stupid social binary. Like, who cares?

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

Girls are supposed to dance. That's why god gave them parts that jiggle.

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.

Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn't very feminine.

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

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

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

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

I think a woman gets more if she acts feminine.

Woman's at best a contradiction still.

Tradition has made women cowardly.

Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees.

American men are like women.

We are people, individuals comprising a variety of sexes, races, shifting sexualities and all the rest of it. Every convention that tries to reinforce this difference is a step back. Notions of gender pointlessly separate men from women, but also mothers from daughters and fathers from sons.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Man was created to frame the woman.

I can't write - I can't think like a woman... it's not natural, but I've tried.

What we're doing is we're chipping away at what it is to be a woman and to be feminine. And what it is to be a man and be masculine. We're chipping away at that. I wish we could go back to 'Mad Men' days. I love those days. Men were men. And I love them.

I believe women should be feminine.

An African man should not do anything called housework or cooking.

We're really taught to be followers from a very young age - men lead and women follow.

I used to hate to be a girl.