Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You don't understand, and you'll never understand!' The mother stamps her foot in aggravation, but in this case the daughter is right: the mother doesn't understand. She merely remembers, and memory is separate from experience.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.