A Quote by Stephanie Allain

I come from a long line of strong and confident women out of New Orleans. My grandmother and great-grandmother were women who ran their homes and were leaders in their communities. I was never taught that there was anything that I couldn't do, and I believed that.
My grandmother, my mother and my aunts and their friends were all of southern Chinese ancestry, and they were all strong figures. Though if you asked them who was the head of their families, they would have said their husbands; and yet it was the women who ran everything.
My grandmother's house - she ran it just like her grandmother and her great-grandmother. They didn't have electricity. They had wood stoves that never got cold.
I grew up with all my cousins. The men worked, and the older women raised us - my mother, my aunt, my grandmother. My great-grandmother was the matriarch, and sometimes there were 30 of us.
I definitely come from a line of strong women. It's not only like my mother and my grandmother, but my aunties too.
For a period of time, my grandmother, Lenore Romney, and my mother, Ronna Romney, were the only two women in the Republican Party to ever secure the nomination for Senate. And they were leaders. They were pioneers in our party.
My mother was an extremely strong Pueblo woman. My grandmother was the same. I had strong women in my life. My aunties who were there for me every step of the way.
I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don't hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.
It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end.
When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60's and early 70's, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors - bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother - to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who'd gone before us.
My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky.
I was so lucky. I grew up with an incredibly strong grandmother, mother and sister. All three, independent, fierce, clever women who were hard workers, had goals and visions for themselves, and were really ambitious. And, they didn't apologize for those goals.
It's because of women like my grandmother Roberta - women who have lived their lives fearlessly, on their own terms - that I am who I am. I'm grateful to have such an inspiring woman as a grandmother.
My grandmother gave birth to 13 children and I come from a long line of women who gave birth in their 40s.
Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."
It was awesome growing up in New Orleans because there were great metal bands, there were great hardcore bands, there were great thrash metal bands in the middle '80s and what-not. But then, take me out of New Orleans, and I moved to Fort Worth in 1987, and there's a scene there, too. And Texas absolutely has a different sound.
When I grew up, it was a time when women were just supposed to be cute and not have many opinions. My mother and her friends were quite different. They were all the most beautiful women you've ever seen ... and they were very strong women.
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