People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart -- but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.

Adelle Waldman
About This Quote

When I was in grade school, I heard what people meant when they said, “Girls are so smart.” Some girls had good handwriting, others had neat lockers, and still others were on time to their classes. However, the vast majority of girls were not considered smart because they had no idea how to write an essay or solve a math problem. They had no clue how to do their homework, and they got into trouble for not doing it on time. And while most of us know what “smart” really means, it is often interpreted in different ways depending on our upbringing. The more we grow up under the influence of our parents and the more we learn to please them, the more we learn to think about others instead of ourselves.

Source: The Love Affairs Of Nathaniel P.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. - Friedrich Nietzsche
  2. We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are. - Stephen Jay Gould
  3. Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy, " said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this? - Orhan Pamuk
  4. He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more. - P.g. Wodehouse
  5. Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did? Calvin: No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty. Ms. Wormwood: See me after class, Calvin. Calvin: [retrospectively] I'm not dumb. I... - Bill Watterson
More Quotes By Adelle Waldman
  1. His intelligence was just something he'd been born with. Luck of the draw, like being beautiful. It was a rationalization to say that he'd worked hard. It was like being given a fine knife and taking the trouble to polish and sharpen it: it's great...
  2. People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart -- but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way...
  3. If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.
  4. He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.
  5. When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.
Related Topics