What Happened to Paula Quotes

“We accept that our lives are so littered with land mines (unintended pregnancy, violence, abandonment, inadequate medical care, economic insecurity, the list goes on) that when we survive one we count ourselves lucky, because we know that things could have gone, indeed do go, another way for many many many women.”
― Katherine Dykstra, What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

“It wasn’t until the 1980s that it occurred to Republicans that they could lock in the religious vote by attaching themselves to the anti-choice movement. They abandoned the argument that abortion was an individual right and reframed the debate as one of the protection of fetal rights. The culture already treated women like vessels whose life purpose was the creation and carriage of babies. By prioritizing the welfare of fetuses, Republicans had turned women into second-class citizens and expendable ones at that.”
― Katherine Dykstra, What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

“A 1972 Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans (known for being proponents of individual rights) thought the decision to abort was best made by a woman with her doctor.”
― Katherine Dykstra, What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

“The periods of violent behavior by the husband,’ the doctors observed, ‘served to release him momentarily from his anxiety about his ineffectiveness as a man, while giving his wife apparent masochistic gratification and helping probably to deal with the guilt arising from the intense hostility expressed in her controlling, castrating behavior.”
― Katherine Dykstra, What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

“Coincidence is a word we created in order to explain holes in reality.”
― Katherine Dykstra, What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

“I have found that a central conflict of womanhood is the wish to be thought beautiful and simultaneously to go unnoticed.”
― Katherine Dykstra, What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

“Me at eighteen. Young, willful, curious, dizzy with excitement, on the brink of life, standing with everything, every possibility and every person before me. Me, overflowing with the confidence and bravado of youth, with the arrogance of ignorance. Me, not knowing enough to be wary of the world around me.”
― Katherine Dykstra, What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood