Anne Helen Petersen Quotes

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.

...the difference between cute, acceptable unruliness and unruliness that results in ire is often as simple as the color of a woman's skin, whom she prefers to sleep with, and her proximity to traditional femininity.

Of course, there have been unruly women for as long as there have been boundaries of what constitutes acceptable “feminine” behavior: women who, in some way, step outside the boundaries of good womanhood, who end up being labeled too fat, too loud, too slutty, too whatever characteristic women are supposed to keep under control.

Just because inequality is not as dire does not mean that it is not felt.

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.

We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system - of American capitalism and meritocracy - or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.

This was, and remains, the dystopian reality underlying the redesign and automation of the office. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you must now do more tasks, for the same pay.

[T]hat’s the thing about American governmental intervention: When it’s effective, it’s enveloped in a narrative of “American ingenuity and hard work”; when it’s ineffective, it’s proof of the fundamentally immoral nature of government assistance.

Organizations of every size and shape are always trying to figure out the most desirable, most effective perks their budgets allow, when the easiest one is right there in front of them. They can give their employees the immeasurable gift of a schedule and flexibility that will permit them a world away from work and lift the psychological burden of that second family from their shoulders.

A healthy work culture creates the circumstances for all employees to do their very best work. But a sustainable, resilient one understands and eagerly invites them to have lives outside it.

We tried to work harder, and better, more efficiently, with more credentials, to achieve it. And everyone, including our parents, seemed to agree on the first and most necessary stop on that journey: college, the best one possible, no matter the cost.

One of the refrains of the current moment is “I don’t know how to make you care about other people.” And one of the most straightforward solutions could be giving people the time and mental freedom to actually care about things that aren’t themselves and their immediate families.

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.

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

But that lie – whose purpose was to allow white people to continue to think they weren’t racist, even when their actions and words indicated otherwise – was one in which the Williams sisters, like their father, refused to participate. They rejected the idea that they would assimilate to the white codes of the tennis world. Instead, they posed the question of their difference over and over again – in every clack of their densely beaded hair, in every powerful serve.

...a far more palatable - and, in many cases, more successful - form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom...they've built tremendously successful brands by embracing the 'new domesticity,' defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first century gentility.