What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman
Danielle Crittenden
Top 10 Best Quotes
“By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age.”
“Young feminists often speak of finding a third way between feminist extremism, on the one hand, and social conservatism on the other. Like Katie Roiphe or Naomi Wolf, they insist that women don't - or shouldn't have to compromise their independence in marriage or when they become mothers. We should be able to keep all the perks of modern female life along with all the perks of the traditional. But this notion is not sustainable. We must understand the trade-off of every action we take. If we want to be heart surgeons or presidents, we will have to accept that we may not be the mothers we want to be, or may not be mothers at all. If we are unwilling to trust men, we might not have the marriage we want. If we refuse to give ourselves over to our families, we cannot expect much from our families in return. If we wish to live for ourselves and think only about ourselves, we will manage to retain our independence but little else.”
“When we graduate, our first thought is not, Whom will I marry? but, What will I do? And when we do marry, we take for granted that our husbands will treat us as equals, with dreams and ambitions like theirs, and not as creatures uniquely destined to push a vacuum or change a diaper.”
“When we do get married, we congratulate ourselves that our marriages are much more fair and equal than those of our parents and then wonder why our marriages don't last. Puzzled by this mystery, we read articles and listen to experts, who advise us to demand ever more fairness, ever more equality, ever more autonomy in our relationships. In fact, of course, the only mystery here how we have managed to make ourselves so blind. If good marriages seem more unattainable than ever before, it is because of our determination to remain as separate and distinct individuals within an institution that demands the opposite from us, that insists upon the merging of identity - of both husband and wife - if it is to be sustained.”
“Two people in a relationship are like two stars who rotate around each other, attracted by each other's energy, but not dependent on each other.”
“Thirty years ago, the problem was that too many people failed to see that while women were women, they were also human, and they were being denied the ability to express and fulfill their human potential outside the home. The modern problem with no name is, I believe, exactly the reverse of the old one: While we now recognise that women are human, we blind ourselves to the fact that we are also women. If we feel stunted and oppressed when denied the chance to realise our human potential, we suffer every bit as much when cut off from those aspects of life that are distinctly and uniquely female.”
“Our grandmothers didn't agonize over such existential questions as to whether marriage was ultimately "right" for them as women or if having a baby would "compromise" them as individuals. Yet we do. We approach these aspects of life warily and self-consciously: A new bride adjusts her veil in the mirror and frets that she is selling out to some false idea of femininity; a new wife is horrified to find herself slipping into the habit of cooking dinner and doing the laundry; a new mother, who has spent years climbing the corporate ladder, is thrown into an identity crisis when she's stuck at home day after day, in a sweatsuit, at the mercy of a crying infant. It is because of feminism's success that we now call these parts of our lives into question, that we don't thoughtlessly march down the aisle, take up our mops, and suppress our ambitions. But feminism, for all its efforts, hasn't been able to banish fundamental female desires from us, either - and we simply cannot be happy if we ignore them.”
“It will be even tougher for a woman to take time out from her job to stay home with her kids if, before giving birth, she's been especially adamant about the fairness and equality of her marriage. Asking her husband to shoulder the whole burden of being the breadwinner will not necessarily strike him as "fair" or "equal". If she hasn't been willing to accept any of the traditional duties of a wife - indeed, if she's rejected them at every turn - how can she suddenly expect him to assume the traditional role of husband?”
“If previous generations of women were raised to believe that they could only realise themselves within the roles of wife and mother, now the opposite is thought true: It is only outside these roles that we are able to realise our full potential and worth as human beings.”
“Age eventually catches up and forces a person to reckon with what is important in life and what counts as achievement.”
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Book Keywords:
mothers-and-daughters, parenting, christian-living
