Victoria Smith > Quotes

“Misogyny is not just hatred enacted on women, but the means of defending stories about what women are in order to entrench male dominance.”
― Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“Noting that when she occasionally tells her feuding daughters to ‘be nice’ what she really wants is for them to be quiet, Hewitt suggests that this may be the broader cultural subtext of ‘#BeNice and #BeKind’: ‘Aren’t girls and women really being told to “just shut up”?”
― Victoria Smith, (Un)kind: How Kindness Culture Punishes Women

“Are women complete
human beings, with our own socialised and embodied experiences, our stories forever changing as we move through time? Or are we a cobbled together, pick-and-mix range of woman-y offerings, most of which fall into decay as we age? Is a woman really a woman when there’s nothing more for men to take from or project onto her? When she might, in fact, seem to
be on the verge of living for herself?”
― Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“You may need to witness several false dawns fully to understand that all women are, in patriarchal terms, the losers. That is our role; it is baked into patriarchal understandings of history, progress, success, failure, creativity, genius, what really matters, what doesn’t. Insisting yours is the cohort of women who will finally smash the patriarchy, whereas the one that preceded it represents its last stand, is itself patriarchal.”
― Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women