Meghan Daum Quotes

And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses.... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread.

In the '50s you had to wear pink ribbons if you were a girl, and you were supposed to become a hairdresser or a secretary. I couldn't stomach it. Later on, when I fell in love with my husband and had children, that's when my mother's earthiness or sense of femaleness kicked in.

There's such a crazy social expectation now that we put on ourselves and on each other about what motherhood is supposed to look and feel like. And it's impossible to live up to those standards. You're setting yourself up for failure at every possible turn.

When you grow up with a name like Brad Thor, people expect you to be 6-foot-4 and a pile of muscles.

Certainly, being a 'perfect' mother is unachievable.

If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it's false and useless.

When I decide to become a mother I will just be that. That will be really important to me.

Marry good men and bear good sons.

Nothing really prepared me for the amount of work, or the amount of rewards, that came with being a new mom.

I wanted to talk to a lot of women about their experiences along the path to motherhood - or along the path to not being a mother.

I have so much advice for men. They need to know that their mother is not their wife... and their wife will never be their mother.

As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

What least makes a mother is biology.

Never expect women to be sincere, so long as they are educated to think that their first aim in life is to please.

We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

Some mothers in today's world feel "cumbered" by home duties and are thus attracted by other more "romantic" challenges. Such women could make the same error of perspective that Martha made. The woman, for instance, who deserts the cradle in order to help defend civilization against the barbarians may well later meet, among the barbarians, her own neglected child.

No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.

So much of being a woman is telling lies

My mother is convinced that yellow is a happy color and that a happy girl would get a husband. -Penelope Featherington

For men, the answer was always the same and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.

Whether you're playing a mom on-screen or you're in a car pool lane driving your child to school in the morning, there are similarities that are undeniable. And once you're a mother, there are certain things that are instinct. You just have a better understanding of what it means to be a mother.

All mothers are working mothers.

Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.

claims about what's 'natural' have long been used to reinforce traditional gender roles and values. ... Even the notion that women should have children at all is based on the idea that a woman's inherent and most important role is that of mother. Shockingly, men's 'innate' roles are a lot more fun than the ones bestowed on women.

Women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.