“No. No way. That name is reserved for females with grace and elegance, not this girl. This girl is...beastly.”

“Dante, thisis Annabelle.”No. No way. That name isreserved for females with graceand elegance, not this girl. This girlis…beastly. “Annabelle,” I say.“It suits you.”

“There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Girl Land, and this paradox makes the emotional experience of female adolescence more intense and difficult than ever. On the one hand, never in history have girls had so many opportunities, or shared so fully in the kind of power that was only recently reserved for boys. Girls now outperform boys on the SAT; women outnumber men in college, and we are nearing a point at which women will outnumber men in the country’s law and medical schools.”

“Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention; Girl Land is the place and time in which all of this is worked out…there is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Girl Land, and this paradox makes the emotional experience of female adolescence more intense and difficult than ever. On the one hand, never in history have girls had so many opportunities, or shared so fully in the kind of power that was only recently reserved for boys. Girls now outperform boys on the SAT; women outnumber men in college, and we are nearing a point at which women will outnumber men in the country’s law and medical schools.”

“Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.”

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.”