Ambitious Female Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Ambitious Female. Here they are! All 26 of them:

Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)
At thirteen desperately watching TV, curling my long legs under me, desperately reading books, callow adolescent that I was, trying (desperately!) to find someone in books, in movies, in life, in history, to tell me it was O.K. to be ambitious, O.K. to be loud, O.K. to be Humphrey Bogart (smart and rudeness), O.K. to be James Bond (arrogance), O.K. to be Superman (power), O.K. to be Douglas Fairbanks (swashbuckling), to tell me self-love was all right, to tell me I could love God and Art and Myself better than anything on earth and still have orgasms.
Joanna Russ (The Female Man)
Whose interest does egg freezing serve? The woman's or that of an ambitious, still pretty unforgiving culture that doesn't really ever see childbearing for female employees as convenient?
Randi Hutter Epstein (Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank)
Be smart, but not too smart. Be beautiful, but not so pretty as to make other females mad. Be successful, but not bossy or overly ambitious. Nobody likes a mouthy brown woman. Be a declawed kitten.
V. Castro (Goddess of Filth)
Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.17
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat
Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time)
Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.19
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
In other words, both the descriptive (‘women are gentle’) and the prescriptive (‘women should be gentle’) elements of gender stereotypes create a problem for ambitious women. Without any intention of bias, once we have categorised someone as male or female, activated gender stereotypes can then colour our perception. When the qualifications for the job include stereotypically male qualities, this
Cordelia Fine (Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences)
The summits were about ambitious topics, such as, recently, leadership—leadership being something that everyone now wanted, as if the world could be made up entirely of leaders and no followers, the way children might crave an all-fireman, all-ballerina society.
Meg Wolitzer (The Female Persuasion)
Black female entrepreneurs don’t make excuses, we find solutions. We’re leaders, resourceful, ambitious, hardworking, and creative. We’re powerful, unstoppable, confident, smart, and fearless. We’re Exquisite Black Queens that represent Black Excellence… We are success! There’s no denying it… Black female entrepreneurs are resilient and we rock!
Stephanie Lahart
One of the Project’s more enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic, and inspirational characters, Ernest Lawrence found it impossible to believe what the District Engineer was saying: Those high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 were doing it better than his own team of scientists. In Berkeley, only PhDs had been allowed to operate the panels controlling the electromagnetic separation units. When Tennessee Eastman suggested turning over the operation of Lawrence’s calutrons to a bunch of young women fresh off the farm with nothing more than a public school education, the Nobel Prize winner was skeptical. But it was decided Lawrence’s team would work out the kinks for the calutron units and then pass control to the female operators.
Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II)
Cheeks are a measure of one's authority, and my high cheekbones indicate an assertive, ambitious nature. They were a gift from my mother, and I am proud of them, even though men shy away from women with that attribute.
Stacey Lee (Outrun the Moon)
hose watching Isabella process through the cold streets of Segovia could not know that they were witnessing the first steps of a queen destined to become the most powerful woman Europe had seen since Roman times. ‘This queen of Spain, called Isabella, has had no equal on this earth for 500 years,’ one awestruck visitor from northern Europe would eventually proclaim, admiring the fear and loyalty she provoked among the lowliest of Castilians and the mightiest of Grandees.4 This was not hyperbole. Europe had limited experience of queens regnant, and even less of successful ones. Few of those who followed Isabella have had such a lasting impact. Only Elizabeth I of England, Archduchess María Theresa of Austria, Russia’s Catherine the Great (outshining a formidable predecessor, the Empress Elizabeth) and Britain’s Queen Victoria can rival her, each in their own era. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving legacies that would be felt for centuries. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving Only Isabella did this by leading a country as it emerged from the troubled late middle ages, harnessing the ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to start transforming a fractious, ill-disciplined nation into a European powerhouse with a clear-minded and ambitious monarchy at its centre. She was, in other words, the first in that still-small club of great European queens. To some she remains the greatest.
Giles Tremlett
Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.17
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
make of Maria Lynch, with her freckled nose, inquisitive eyes and long hair tied up childishly in a ponytail, always dressed smartly. She looked eighteen, but having served fifteen years in the force, she was closer to thirty-five. Enthusiastic without overdoing it. She was aware that Lynch was super ambitious and Lottie had no intention of falling into the female rivalry trap. But she had to admit to a slight jealousy of the domestic stability her detective possessed. Lynch was married, she assumed happily. It was said her husband cooked, hoovered, brought their two small children to school before he went to work and all that shite. ‘It’s an absolute tip in there. I don’t know how the woman survived in such a dump,’ Lynch said, wiping dust from her pressed navy trousers. Lottie
Patricia Gibney (The Missing Ones (D.I. Lottie Parker, #1))
This, then, was the one thing Christina had not figured on–the deadly, far-reaching killer instinct beneath his blank, non-assuming stare. And to make matters worse, LaForche, like Christina, had intrigues and subversions of his own, He was completely normal in all ways except for one detail. He had an insidious delectable kink–an exactingly outrageous idée fixe, a driving monomaniacal purpose behind his ambitious riddling hatred. Very soon, he would turn his warped facilities against her, focusing his vast malignant energies to destroy the ridiculous self-deified woman who abused and humiliated him so. --Felipe LaForche, Villain. The Lady and the Samurai
Douglas M. Laurent
Human males, too, form alliances for gaining resources such as large game, political power within the group, ways to defend against the aggression of other coalitions of men, and sexual access to women.7 The survival and reproductive benefits derived from these coalitional activities constituted tremendous selection pressure over human evolutionary history for men to form alliances with other men. Since ancestral women did not hunt large game, declare war on other tribes, or attempt to forcibly capture men from neighboring bands, they did not experience equivalent selection pressure to form coalitions. Although women do form coalitions with other women for the care of the young and for protection from sexually aggressive men, these are weakened whenever a woman leaves her kin group to live with her husband and his clan. The combination of strong coalitions among men and somewhat weaker coalitions among women, according to Barbara Smuts, may have contributed historically to men’s dominance over women.9 My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate coevolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these coevolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources. The origins of men’s control over resources is not simply an incidental historical footnote of passing curiosity. Rather, it has a profound bearing on the present, because it reveals some of the primary causes of men’s continuing control of resources. Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources. These preferences are expressed repeatedly in dozens of studies conducted on tens of thousands of individuals in scores of countries worldwide. They are expressed countless times in everyday life. In any given year, the men whom women marry earn more than men of the same age whom women do not marry. Even professionally successful women who do not really need resources from a man are reluctant to settle for a mate who is less successful than they are. Women who earn more than their husbands seek divorce more often, although this trend appears to be changing, at least within America. Men continue to compete with other men to acquire the status and resources that make them desirable to women. The forces that originally caused the resource inequality between the genders—women’s mate preferences and men’s competitive strategies—are the same forces that contribute to maintaining resource inequality today. Feminists’ and evolutionists’ conclusions converge in their implication that men’s efforts to control female sexuality lie at the core of their efforts to control women. Our evolved sexual strategies account for why this occurs, and why control of women’s sexuality is a central preoccupation of men. Over the course of human evolutionary history, men who failed to control women’s sexuality—for example, by failing to attract a mate, failing to prevent cuckoldry, or failing to retain a mate—experienced lower reproductive success than men who succeeded in controlling women’s sexuality. We come from a long and unbroken line of ancestral fathers who succeeded in obtaining mates, preventing their infidelity, and providing enough benefits to keep them from leaving. We also come from a long line of ancestral mothers who granted sexual access to men who provided beneficial resources.
David M. Buss (The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)
I've also learned that culturally there's no "right" way to be an ambitious women. We don't have a lot of models for young female leadership, and many people's first instinct is to be suspicious of that kind of drive. I've never heard about any of my male coworkers being called entitled when asking for more money. I think if anything it probably gains them respect.
Gabrielle Korn
Certain members of anthropology and biology departments in the 1980s and 1990s wondered, What’s with all those women synchronizing their periods when they live together? That must have an evolutionary advantage, right? One ambitious fellow (published by Yale University Press, no less, in 1991) decided this meant that ancient women somehow evolved to go on collective sex strikes by synchronizing their periods, thereby enabling/encouraging men (less distracted by the pressing desire to screw) to go out and hunt and forage. This, the author theorized, was the root of all human culture. In effect, he argues that humans build cool stuff like the Pyramids and rocket ships because women get periods and therefore don’t have sex for a set number of days per month.
Cat Bohannon (Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution)
The greedy bastards of cinema become poster boys for masculine enterprise. Ambitious women, though, are usually pitted against each other or shown to be unhappy in some aspect of their life.
Anna Bogutskaya (Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate)
Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional—or worse, sometimes even a negative—for women. “She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.17
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Only a woman with great confidence and determination could manage to become the first- and only- licensed female physician in England. Garrett possessed both qualities in abundance. Since no medical school in England would admit a woman, she had studied the French language so she could earn a medical degree at the Sorbonne in Paris. Upon her return to England, she'd acquired her medical license by finding a loophole that the British Medical Association closed as soon as they realized she'd managed to slip through.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels, #7))
Let me start by saying a true sensual woman is a tastemaker. What do I mean by that? I mean she sets the standard of what is pleasurable, desirable, sophisticated, refined, intoxicating, elegant, classy, sexy, healthy, delicious, saucy. Women naturally possess the power to create ANY taste. "There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted" (Sun Tzu). The sensually awakened ones are cognisant of this and use it to their advantage while those who are not awakened often see it as some form of "female oppression." They say, "You're putting women under pressure." But what about men, Lebo? Well, men are not tastemakers like women are. Why? Because, unlike women, MEN CAN'T AND ARE NOT ALLOWED TO PLAY WITH THEIR INNER CHARACTER TOO MUCH. For instance, a man is essentially restricted only to pants. A man can’t wear a dress, high heels, lipstick and the list goes on. This limits a man from becoming a significant contributor in the tastemaking process of life and love, except financially of course. But it doesn’t limit a woman in any way, shape or form. Women can wear dressess, even men's pants, etc.. They can put on ANYTHING actually and still be celebrated. Marilyn Monroe wore a potatoe sack. Lady Gaga wore an infamous dress made of raw beef. That's why I believe being a woman is the greatest privilege of all. Marilyn Monroe said, "One of the best things that ever happened to me is that I'm a woman." Marilyn understood that women are THE REAL TASTEMAKERS IN LIFE and relationships, not men. BEING A MAN DOESN'T REQUIRE AS MUCH AMBITION AS BEING A WOMAN. Women are relationship navigators because they are naturally more ambitious than men. That's why again, Marilyn said, "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." Our ultimate quest as men, whether we realize it or not, is to live under a woman's spell. That makes us happy, and seem stupid at times. Sadly, most women are not sensually awakened enough to realize that. They don't know that the ultimate secret to keeping a man content with one woman lies in her sensuality.
Lebo Grand
Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional—or worse, sometimes even a negative—for women. “She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)