Barbara Cartland Quotes

It's possible that you have been told a time or 10 that you don't appreciate how tough your elders had it. It's true that, if you had been coming of age back in, say, 1960, you would probably be feeling more restricted, if only because you were doomed to spend your days in a skirt, nylon stockings and girdle.

I was raised in a very Middle Eastern household, and modesty was very important, and dressing to not be desirable or provocative was very important.

I think jazz guitar isn't very ladylike in general. Not that it shouldn't be.

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.

Perhaps some of the appeal of the dangerous-but-yummy paranormal anti-hero lies in his scorn for societal expectations. Yes, women have come a long way, but there are still some cultural stigmas more associated with women than men.

She belongs to a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.

But we're still in somewhat a Puritanical society in a lot of ways.

Culturally, it is commonplace for African women to work.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

I don't think men realize that when a woman walks out every single day, there's an unconscious way we cater to making some man comfortable. That's our experience.

An African man should not do anything called housework or cooking.

My dad is this typical orthodox, narrow-minded Punjabi man in front of whom you can't even utter the word called 'boyfriend.'

At a certain point the family moved to Jaipur, where no woman could avoid the doli or purdah. They kept her in the house from morning to night, either cooking or doing nothing. [My mother] hated doing nothing, she hated to cook. So she became pale and ill, and far from being concerned about her health, my grandfather said, 'Who's going to marry her now?' So my grandmother waited for my grandfather to go out, and then she dressed my mother as a man and let her go out riding with her brothers.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.

Public opinion actually applauds the young woman venturing into the business world, but it still obstinately (and quite illogically) protects the young man in his sacred right to know nothing of housework.

Women are not allowed to be [complicated] in our society. We're comfortable seeing women as great mothers, and then we're comfortable seeing them as hookers, but there's no in-between.

The conventions of society are all in the interests of morality. If you're conventional, you'll be good, in a negative sense, of course.

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

Young men often laugh at the sensible girls whom they secretly respect, and affect to admire the silly ones whom they secretly despise, because earnestness, intelligence, and womanly dignity are not the fashion.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.

Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted. I think a lot of women are contained within the parentheses of shoulds and role-play. It's all about entitlement and history. It's all about upper-body strength - and exacting your will.