Debora Spar Quotes

I think one thing that women can do is to just be more honest, with themselves and with their friends, and be more willing to say I'm really excited about this part of my life, but I'm screwing up over here, or this is a mistake I've made, or this is something I've given up on.

Rather than seeing the opportunities that feminism created they very easy morph into expectations.

We must ... forge partnerships with those around us, and begin to dismantle the myth of solitary perfection.

I think what women are doing to themselves is that they're seeing these different images of perfection - the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect career person, the perfect movie star - and they're somehow thinking that they should be all of these things, and that's the problem.

Strive not for perfection..but for lives and loves that matter.

It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying.

I really don't see any men sitting in the corner office plotting to keep women out. All the men I know are actively trying to promote women, to get more women involved. These men have wives they care about; they have daughters they desperately care about. So I don't think it's fair to blame men - or I don't think it's accurate to blame men anymore.

We've reached the point where the demand for rules is about to replace the demand for chaos.

I think sometimes by portraying our lives as being too perfect, as being too balanced, we're actually selling younger women a bill of goods that's not true.

If two people have a couple of kids, somebody does have to take care of the kids. Somebody does have to cook dinner; somebody does have to do garbage duty. We need to take some time and give some thought, without being angry, to just thinking about what these new structures are going to look like.

Don't take too much credit for your children - or too much blame!

'Maybe' is what gets us into trouble, because I think constantly women are saying I'll try to do it, maybe I'll do it, I'll do it if I can, and then they're feeling guilty when inevitably they can't do everything.

I certainly wouldn't go back and blame feminism, because all that feminism was really trying to do, which was huge, was to create a new set of expectations, a new set of opportunities for women, and they did.

They're coming out of high school exhausted. The pressure in high school is killing these kids. By the time they get to college, they have been fighting for three or four years to get the perfect SAT scores and get into A.P. classes.

Women are racing all the time to try to have a perfect house and perfect kids and be a perfect cook. Men, somehow, for whatever reason, seem to be better able to pick and choose, to focus on things they like and that are important to them, and let the other things go.

We need to have honest conversations among women and men to say how do we stop blaming each other? Because I'm not saying that every woman wants to be a corporate CEO. We need so that the women who are corporate CEOs get supported and they're not looking askance or down at women who make other choices in life.