Jan Morris Quotes

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do.

You sit men and women down and give them a maths test, and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set.

I think so many people give us ideas of what we are. I think as women especially, because we're sensitive by nature, we're more vulnerable, we absorb other people's ideas about what we're supposed to think or who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to act.

Men were only made into 'men' with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally 'a man' any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

I'm too tall to be a girl. I'm between a chick and a broad.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

And also I think particularly as a female, you're taught to be defensive your whole life. You're taught not to be aggressive.

Basically, women have to prove they are strong at all times. And then when they go on the attack, they have to not appear mean because those women often get the label of being catty.

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

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

I wanted people not to look at me as a little girl, but I was a little girl so how could I ask the world not to?

Women are often expected to be more amiable or more pleasing or more submissive than men generally.

I was very against pink and purple when I was young, because they were girls' colors. But that was only because I didn't want people to write me off for what I can do. When I got into my 20s, I decided that was stupid.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

By 12, my body had changed, although instead of blossoming into Cindy Mancini from 'Can't Buy Me Love,' I more closely resembled Chunk from 'The Goonies.' My inside world may have been filled with a poetic and vital feminine life force, but the outside world saw and told me otherwise.

People assume that I'm girly. But people who know me say I'm more boyish.

Like a lot of young women, I went through an entire period where I hated female characters - I didn't want to read about them! I thought I was going to be the cool girl who was not like other girls.

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

All my life I've always been so ashamed of being feminine.

Feminism wasn't really at the top of my vocabulary. I think what's been interesting for me - let me say this delicately - when I've been surrounded by men who don't believe women are equal, I didn't think women were equal, including myself.

As a woman, this is one of these areas where you have to walk a fine line: the classic, 'Are you soft and squishy, and you hug everybody, and you're a cheerleader?' versus, 'Are you the hard-nosed you-know-what female dog?'

Women are constantly taught to think about what other people are thinking, from those 'Jackie' magazine quizzes - 'What's he thinking?' - to being a grown adult.

We've been socialised and told that there is a way to describe people, and that way is by their gender or their sex.

The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.