Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality.

I think that society has a big issue with teenage girls and shame. Their magazines and their music and their interests and their views, I think we love to shame them.

Those girls were there because someone told them they were ‘beautiful,’ but in high fashion, beautiful isn’t enough.

My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all.

The way I dress, for the most part, is how most people would dress for a costume party. It would scare most people to death to look this cheap or whore-y, but to me, I’m comfortable. The way I look was really a country girl’s idea of what glamour was. I patterned my look after the town tramp. I thought she was the prettiest thing in the world, with all that bleached hair and bright-red lipstick. People would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash,’ and I’d think, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up.'

Wretched un-idea'd girls.

God forbid you be an ugly girl, 'course too pretty is also your doom, 'cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room

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.

Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!

How could such a pretty girl become known as the Hag, she wondered. It must be hateful to become old in face and body when you’re young at heart and still strong and tough — so unfair for a woman.

She was a southern girl, which is the same as saying she was insane. All southern women are insane. Some are cold blooded killers and some are harmless eccentrics, but the best of the breed exhibit both of these characteristics and always the one you expect the least at the time you least expect it.

The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their

She looks so haughty that I should have thought her a princess at the very least, with a pedigree reaching as far back as the Deluge. But this lady was no better born than many other ladies who give themselves airs; and all sensible people laughed at her absurd pretensions.

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.