Anne Helen Petersen Quotes

It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

few things enrage, confuse, and repulse audiences more than the suggestion that the primary visual purpose of a woman’s body is not the pleasure of men.

As she amassed more and more, she noticed a trend in the way the authors of the letters — almost always mothers — were framing their family’s lives: as an endless, packed, frenetic stream of busyness. She began to realize that they were, in fact, competing:“It’s about showing status,” Burnett told Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed. “That if you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life.”12 Busy-ness, in other words, as a very certain sort of class.

Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The impetus wasn’t on the company to provide stability but on the workers to amend their attitudes toward the absence of it.

To be an unruly woman today is to oscillate between the postures of fearlessness and self-doubt, between listening to the voices that tell a woman she is too much and one’s own, whispering and yelling I am already enough, and always have been.

Boundaries can, theoretically, work, but only for a privileged subset of your organization. They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You can’t 4-Hour Workweek your way out of this problem. You need something structural.

All the decisions and multitasking that are already hard to juggle when you’re well-nourished and have a safe and consistent place to live become immeasurably more difficult

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.

You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos, where you go on that vacation. It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon.

A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centered-ness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are. To emerge from burnout, and ultimately resist its return, is to remember as much.

But every step of Williams’s career has been shadowed with the sort of resentment that emerges whenever someone unsettles the status quo in an effective and unapologetic way. Put differently, when she stirred the pot, a whole lot of bullshit rose to the surface – and her refusal to try to perfume its smell has made her unruliness all the more potent.

The more you analyze what makes these behaviors transgressive, the easier it is to see what they’re threatening: what it means to be a woman, of course, but also entrenched understandings of women’s passive role in society. While the book centers around highly visible women, it also reveals the expectations surrounding every woman’s behavior — and why talking too loudly, acting too promiscuously, or exposing too much skin is so incredibly threatening to the status quo.

It’s an attitude shared by so many women of history, so many women of this book, and so many others reading it: a hope that someday, the only rules a woman will have to abide by are those she sets for herself.

It is the constant, unspeakable fear for the health of your family and your community. It looks like work spreading into every corner of your life. It’s being asked to do more than you are able every day, and then waking up and being asked to do it again.

Put differently, the rhetoric of Williams’ different body isn’t just sexist – it’s profoundly racist.