Primates of Park Avenue Quotes

“Access to your husband's money might feel good. But the comparative study of human society and our primate relatives shows that such access can't buy you the power you get by being the one who earns it. And knowing this, or even having an inkling of it, just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separates your version of power from your man's, could keep a thinking woman up at night.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“You don't get your prebaby body back, ever, because you cannot go back to being a person who hasn't had a baby. Because you had a baby.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“One of the biggest shifts in the last decade of anthropology, one of the discoveries in the field that has changed everything, is the realization that we evolved as cooperative breeders. Bringing up kids in a nuclear family is a novelty, a blip on the screen of human family life. We never did child rearing alone, isolated and shut off from others, or with just one other person, the child’s father. It is arduous and anomalous and it’s not the way it “should” be. Indeed, for as long as we have been, we have relied on other females—kin and the kindly disposed—to help us raise our offspring. Mostly we lived as Nisa did—in rangy, multifamily bands that looked out for one another, took care of one another, and raised one another’s children. You still see it in parts of the Caribbean today, where any adult in a small town can tell any kid to toe the line, and does, and the kids listen. Or in Hawaii, where kids and parents alike depend on hanai relationships—aunties and uncles, indispensible honorary relations who take a real interest in an unrelated child’s well-being and education. No, it wasn’t fire or hunting or the heterosexual dyad that gave us a leg up, anthropologists now largely concur; it was our female Homo ancestors holding and handling and caring for and even nursing the babies of other females. That is in large part why Homo sapiens flourished and flourish still, while other early hominins and prehominins bit the dust. This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on one another for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever. The loss of your child weighs heavily on me in this web of connectedness, because he or she is a little bit my own.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“By chasing Birkins we’re not just making ourselves into chasers of Birkin bags. “These women are reminding men, society, and themselves that they inhabit a privileged, identificatory relationship to those bags.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“Relations among women on the Upper East Side are charged as they are perhaps nowhere else in the country or the world, and handbags, like cars, just might serve a lot of different functions all at once. A communication about where one stands in the inevitable hierarchy of Manhattan, a barometer of your wealth and connectedness and clout in a city where money and connections and clout are everything. A fashion statement. A security blanket, a way of self-soothing in a uniquely stressful town.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“This explained why Upper East Side mothers all wore tiny medallions engraved with their children’s initials around their necks. And stacking rings, one for each child, on their fingers. And entered the names of other mothers in their contacts under the names of their children, so that, on so many of my new friends’ phone and email lists, I came up not as “Wednesday Martin” but as “Eliot M/ mother, Wednesday M.” We were our children, utterly merged together.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

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― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“First, though, I had to find us a place. And I do mean I, because my husband promptly delegated the apartment-hunting project to me. This was ostensibly logical since, as the mother of a very young child, I had rearranged my work schedule as a writer to be “flexible” and “freelance”—I could put it on hold for days or weeks at a time. We also had a part-time nanny who could watch my son while I searched. But there was a deeper cultural logic at work, too: in Manhattan, the woman is in charge of finding a place for the family to live. She might also pay for it, or for half of it. But in heterosexual marriages, regardless of who does what, it’s usually the woman who finds the apartment.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“Manhattan has a funny way of turning your desires inside out so that you can see their seams, what they are really made of.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on one another for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“ONE OF the first gifts I received after my older son was born was a baby book from an old friend, a mom of two who still lives in the small Michigan town where she and I grew up. The gift both welcomed my son and acknowledged that I was living in New York City now, a place very different from the one where she and I spent our childhoods. Urban Babies Wear Black is a whimsically illustrated board book that lists, with the succinctness of a five-minute sociology lecture, exactly how urban babies are different—starting with their outfits (black”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“Do you like the idea of having your baby in warm, lazy summer, when Dad can more easily take a paternity leave? Does a yearly outdoor kiddy birthday party with cake at the picnic table sound nice? Not up here, sister! Summer birthdays, it turned out, were just no good. Especially if you had a boy. Boys, the thinking went, were more rambunctious, less compliant, and slower to develop fine motor skills—hence they needed to be”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“sorority rush at a Big Ten school—could rival it, or”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“Among human females, refusal to cooperate with someone, destruction of her reputation (so that others will refuse to cooperate with her), gossip, and social exclusion are all effective ways to devastate a potential competitor. And, because punishments are often delivered circuitously and simultaneously by several group members, there is no “defending” oneself. The nasty looks and holier-than-thou attitudes of the Queen of the Queen Bees and her acolytes in the school halls and playgroups went unconfronted because they were subtle, compared with a punch to the solar plexus. But they were similar in their effectiveness.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“while the kids watch TV makes you a Bad Mom. It’s hard to imagine anything further”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“Studies suggest that being unable to move your face empathically as you listen to someone speak reduces feelings of connection. In essence, numbing your face very likely numbs your emotions: Botoxed subjects show less brain-scan activity in key emotional regions than do the un-Botoxed.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“autochthonous or émigrés, island dwellers are believed by outsiders,”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue