Caitlin Flanagan > Quotes

“At every turn, girls - even the most carefully raised and deeply loved - are surrounded by a popular culture that exhorts them to think of themselves as sexually disposable creatures.”
― Caitlin Flanagan

“There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Girl Land, and this paradox makes the emotional experience of female adolescence more intense and difficult than ever. On the one hand, never in history have girls had so many opportunities, or shared so fully in the kind of power that was only recently reserved for boys. Girls now outperform boys on the SAT; women outnumber men in college, and we are nearing a point at which women will outnumber men in the country’s law and medical schools.”
― Caitlin Flanagan, Girl Land

“Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention; Girl Land is the place and time in which all of this is worked out…there is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Girl Land, and this paradox makes the emotional experience of female adolescence more intense and difficult than ever. On the one hand, never in history have girls had so many opportunities, or shared so fully in the kind of power that was only recently reserved for boys. Girls now outperform boys on the SAT; women outnumber men in college, and we are nearing a point at which women will outnumber men in the country’s law and medical schools.”
― Caitlin Flanagan

“words from a Davison Jeffers poem taped up on the refrigerator door. Here they are: There is no reason for amazement; surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life’s end is death.”
― Caitlin Flanagan, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife

“There’s only one thing we know about death: It comes for all of us, the famous and the obscure, and after it does, we pretty quickly disappear from memory.”
― Caitlin Flanagan