Emma McLaughlin Quotes

When I was younger, I was a complete tomboy. Then in college I started emerging out of the tomboy stage and dressing differently.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?'

I think you do a lot of your growing as a human being between the ages of 13 and 18.

I come from this macho Italian neighborhood. When I was thirteen, during those real vulnerable, impressionable years, and a boy starts becoming a man, to make that transition, and you start making decisions, and you start developing virtue and principles - I never made the transition.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

It's very difficult in our society. You cannot impose certain behavioral changes. Education can do it at the right time, probably by high school. After that it is too late.

I was so thrilled that I was having a girl, because I just am so girly myself, but I think the teenage years are going to be very interesting.

There's so much to becoming a woman.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

Dating and getting attention from boys was something that came later to me.

Adolescence as the time when an individual 'recapitulates' the savage stage of the race's past.

It's hard enough to be a middle-school kid, because you're dealing with so many facets of your identity - you're changing socially, you're changing physically, you're changing emotionally, everything is in flux, and to put race on top of that as well and have to figure out your racial identity is extremely hard.

The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.

Young men are crazy strange emotional beings.

I'm a feminist, of course, and I feel as if I'm very politically correct, although I do question what's P.C. and what's not - I don't just accept what I'm told.

We think of feminism as an academic subject, but it's not. If you think feminism is academic, you think there's a right or wrong.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I got really good input up until the age of 11, which is perfect. That's when adolescence starts, when I would have really wanted to rebel. Up until that point, though, it didn't feel like doctrine, and it gave me a great moral structure.

No one told me about boys. I had to figure it out myself. The first thing I learned was that sometimes they grow slower than women mentally.

I think it was really entering my 30s that I began to embrace feminism and call myself a feminist.

I was a pretty shy, lonely kid. I blossomed about age 17, when I went to college.

A man can't pass on, like a mother could, an awareness of your body, or sensuality, or what it means to be a woman. I was never taught what femininity was. I learnt it - or rather I invented it - on my own. I tended not to talk at all, if people were staring at me.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man and the man in every woman.