Success on the front of women's rights will look like a world not only with obvious advances - where no girl is denied access to education, for instance - but also one with more subtle changes in how we regard gender and gender stereotypes.
Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.
Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
I'm an ugly girl, My face makes you hurl, Sad I have it, I should bag it. Acne everywhere, Unwanted facial hair. I'm a relation to Frankenstein's creation.
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
...The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life’s morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?
If a girl breaks up with me, I want her to just die, just be dead. Not 'cause I hate her so much as it's just easier for when my friends go, 'Hey, what happened?' 'Oh, she's dead. I'd still be with her, but she's dead. What can I do? She was loving me, but she's dead.'
Children have a natural antipathy to books- handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.
I’ve been around many girls who have been super outgoing. And a lot of times, they would say to me, “Why are you so quiet? What’s wrong with you?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. That’s just the way I am.” So if I found the perfect girl she would totally get that and say, “You’re quiet, and that’s the way I love you.
The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated. The girls, we say, do not have to earn; so why should they be educated? As long as such ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education.
At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.