When I was growing up, you were supposed to marry and therefore didn't plan ahead. Planning ahead is one of the few reliable measures of class in the sense that rich people plan for generations forward and poor people plan for Saturday night, and by that measure, women have been lower class. We were less likely to plan ahead because we're more likely to think that who we marry and our children are going to dictate our plans.
When I was growing up, you ...
Quotes from the same author
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
I think we spend a lot of time denying our mothers. We understand other women earlier than we understand our mothers because we're trying so hard to say, "I'm not going to be like my mother" that we blame her for her condition. If we didn't blame her for her condition, we would have to admit that it could happen to us, too. I spent a long time doing that, thinking that my mother's problems were uniquely her fault.