Words Are My Matter

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.

Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?

All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior—women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light.

I began to think: If I’m a woman, why am I writing books in which men are at the center and primary, and women are marginal and secondary—as if I were a man?

Because editors expect me to, reviewers expect me to.

May it be a story men tell in order to be able to see themselves as the innovators

Again, the men’s teaching is likely to support the status quo, while the women’s teaching, being individualistic, is more likely to be subversive.

Women transmit the individual stories, men transmit the public history.

Social and moral change may begin with women, who have less invested in the hierarchy, as they try to teach their kids how to adapt to new circumstances.

Fathers often teach their children sex roles: the boys how to be manly, the girls how to be womanly. Men often take over the teaching of boys entirely as the boys grow up, while ignoring further education of girls.

The basic skills she teaches are largely genderless.