For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean?
Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.
The future must not belong to those who bully women. It must be shaped by girls who go to school and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.
Nobody's cooler than my two girls. They just seem to take whatever comes with, you know - happiness and - steadiness. And they're loving school. They're making friends... and - they've already joined some clubs. And Sasha, you know - I think maybe to endear - myself to her, she - she decided she wanted to join a basketball team. So - what more could I want?
A man needs to be polite, not just to me but to everyone. I watch that. How does he treat the waiter? How does he treat the coat-check girl? How does he treat the driver?
The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it's educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they're going to fall behind.
Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
I was probably toward 8 1/2 when I actually joined the church and was baptized - and, my God, did I take it seriously! I was a zealot who irritated every one of my third-grade friends. They didn't beat me up, but I got labeled "the preacher girl."
So a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she dear to her own; when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.