Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 5

I argued that it would be better if that honor were based on achievement rather than gender, and he looked at me and said, dismissively, "You don’t know what you are talking about, you’re a small girl."

I also knew that victimhood is not a virtue. That being discriminated against does not make you somehow morally better.

But gender is always about context and circumstance.

If there is a lesson in this anecdote, apart from just telling you a story about my mother to make her happy that I spoke about her at Wellesley, then it is this: Your standardized ideologies will not always fit your life. Because life is messy.

The truth is that I learned so much more about feminism from watching the women traders in the market in Nsukka where I grew up than from reading any seminal feminist text.

Nowadays, at age 38, if I meet somebody who’s 41, I don’t conclude that friendship is impossible between us.

In short, the thing I wanted most in the world was to be an individual. I thought that’s what my graduation signified, that I had gone from being one of the many, to one of the few.

Are the fruits of our education a sort of gift, to be circulated generously through the world, or are we to think of ourselves as pure commodity, on sale to the highest bidder?

Your situation is more acute. You have so many large, collective tasks ahead, and you know that.

Mrs. Thatcher, who was such a genius at witty aphorism, once said, “A man who beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus, can count himself a failure.”