Читать книгу Wild Women Talk Back - Autumn Stephens - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

Self-Esteem: On Being the Bee's Knees

Along with a few million other Baby-Girl Boomers, I was fortunate enough to grow up in an era when it wasn't a crime for a young woman to call attention to herself. Scholastic achievement, in particular, was an okay way for a girl to get her props. Yet outright showing off, at least in my household of origin, remained taboo. I still squirm to recall my mother's reaction when, during the course of a Girl Scout meeting which she was leading, I fell histrionically to the floor and lay there flopping like a landed flounder. I no longer recall the reason for this bit of childish buffoonery (I was perhaps ten or eleven at the time), or the reaction of my cookie-selling compatriots. But my mother's disapproving face and stern admonition reverberate through my memory cells to this day. “Why, that's just like saying, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’” she scolded.

Okay, so I adore my (loving, funny, shockingly smart) mother; I really do. And in the early sixties, with the sweeping cultural changes of that decade scarcely spawned, no doubt her reaction to a crassly attention-seeking daughter was the norm. Yet why, I now wonder, in a world where the wind can so easily be knocked out of a woman's sails (whether deliberately and cruelly, or just by the sheer impersonal weight of accumulated experience), would we strive to diet down our daughters' egos? Wouldn't it make more sense to shore them up to the size of J. Lo's celebrated booty, so that they'd still retain a little buoyancy, a modicum of oomph!, despite the inevitable deflationary effects of life?

Happily, the parents of the outspoken Wild Women in this section seem to have been spectacularly enlightened . . . or, perhaps, merely spectacularly unsuccessful at inculcating the creed of mouse-like behavior in their daughters. For amplification of your own sassy Attitude—or perhaps just your own Amusement—read on.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

—Katherine Hepburn, icon of American theater

It's very expensive to be me

—Anna Nicole Smith, well-off widow

I thank God I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

—Elizabeth I, Queen of England

I will not be vanquished.

—Rose Kennedy, matriarch

Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?

—Tillie Olsen, political activist/award-winning short story writer

I belong to that group of people who move the piano by themselves.

—Eleanor Robson Belmont, nurse/playwright/founder of Metropolitan Opera Guild

Did you hear what I said? It was very profound.

—(Dr.) Laura Schlessinger, sharp-tongued radio shrink

In southern Spain, they made me eat a bull's testicles. They were really garlicky, which I don't like. I prefer to take a bull by the horns . . .

—Padma Lakshmi, actress

There's a very good reason why women live longer than men. They deserve it.

—Estelle Ramey, endocrinologist

So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex.

—Elizabeth Gould Davis, liberated librarian

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

—Agnes Repplier, essayist

When I fight, there is usually a funeral and it isn't mine.

—Henrietta Green, fearless financier of the nineteenth century

You show people what you're willing to fight for when you fight your friends.

—Hillary Clinton, lawyer, politician, and veteran presidential spouse

The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.

—Joan Borysenko, mind-body healer

A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men— and people in general.

—Lorraine Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun playwright

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

—Harriet Ann Jacobs, author of the autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Woman

Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle into the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the odds.

—Sally Kempton, journalist turned yoga guru

We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.

—Victoria, the velvet-gloved Queen of England

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

—Mignon McLaughlin, aphorist

Remember, if you write anything nasty about me, I'll come round and blow up your toilet.

—Courtney Love, macho musician

Passivity and quietism are invitations to war.

—Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist banned from Nazi Germany

You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way.

—Lena Horne, entertainer/civil rights activist

It is, indeed, a trial to maintain the virtue of humility when one can't help being right.

—Judith Martin, aka the venerable Miss Manners

It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, suffragist leader

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that.

—Pearl Bailey, entertainer of Hello Dolly fame

I came out of the womb a diva. All it means is you know your worth as a woman.

—Cindi Lauper, proud pop singer

Why is there so much pressure to spend Independence Day with other people?

—Betsy Salkind, comedienne

Get your cut throat off my knife.

—Diane di Prima, beat bard

I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.

—Sylvia Ashton-Warner, New Zealand writer

I'm so popular it's scary sometimes. I suppose I'm just everybody's type.

—Catherine Deneuve, femme fatale of many a French film

Some feminists feel that a woman should never be wrong. We have a right to be wrong.

—Alice Childress, actress/playwright/director

Prudent people are very happy; ‘tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think.

—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, world traveler and letter writer of the eighteenth century

In spite of honest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.

—Jane Welsh Carlyle, one-half of very literary nineteenth-century marriage

Do what you are afraid to do.

—Mary Emerson, the righteous aunt of Ralph Waldo

Nothing is so pleasant as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

—Ouida, luxury-loving novelist of nineteenth-century England

If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.

—Jessye Norman, opera singer

By whom?

—Dorothy Parker, toast of the Algonquin Table, on being told that she was “outspoken”

A real diva would never scream at her guests to get out. She would ask her assistants to make the guests get out. This is one of the rules of divadom.

—Donatella Versace, an expert in the ways of her kind

The world is wide, and I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.

—Frances Willard, nineteenth-century social reformer, on learning to ride a bicycle