When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them were collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it. Hilary Mantel
About This Quote

It is so hard to be born a woman, for society has set you up to fail. Society has made it so that you are not supposed to have the same capability as men, but instead must try to compete. Women are made to feel that they are objects of desire and that they can only be successful if they objectify themselves. The more women try to present themselves as men do, the less successful they are.

They will always have some element of their being that makes them different from men. If women were not made to feel different from men, they would not try to be like them or compete with them. The problem arises when society does not allow for this difference.

When women are told to compete with men, they are forced to compete with them on their own terms instead of the way that should be accepted - that they are different and that requires a different approach.

Source: An Experiment In Love

Some Similar Quotes
  1. I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother. - Martha Gellhorn

  2. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."" Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes,... - Jane Austen

  3. There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. - Audre Lorde

  4. The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-, ’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to... - Mary Daly

  5. Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it. - George Carlin

More Quotes By Hilary Mantel
  1. I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not...

  2. If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go...

  3. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

  4. Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it — information is not knowledge. And history is not the past — it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s...

  5. When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them were collars and ties. It was a...

Related Topics