Stronger Than You Think: Why a broken world leaves us dissappointed

Girls have been long trained to be feminine at considerable cost to their humanity. They have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much; be polite but be yourself; be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don’t comment in the sexism. Another way to describe this femininity training is to call it false self training. Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what culture wants of its young women, not what they want themselves to become.
-Mary Pipher