Bootstrapped Quotes

“Day care was intended from the start to be a weak system, as scholars of the history of childcare tell me, like a punishment for needing care because a woman didn’t have a husband or some other means of support.”
― Alissa Quart, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream—Exposing the Myth of the Self-Made and the Rugged Individualist, From “Little House” to Horatio Alger

“There are in the world no such men as self-made men. The term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “SELF-MADE MEN”
― Alissa Quart, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream—Exposing the Myth of the Self-Made and the Rugged Individualist, From “Little House” to Horatio Alger

“Americans think their odds of success, and of rising from the bottom to the top, are much higher than they are,”
― Alissa Quart, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream—Exposing the Myth of the Self-Made and the Rugged Individualist, From “Little House” to Horatio Alger

“The more I researched Alger, the more I believed “bootstrapping” was a story line emerging out of the ashes of Alger’s own personal shame for his pedophilia and the trauma he inflicted on others. His life story morphed from his longing for young boys into the ultimate story of young boys’ exerting mastery over the adults and the world around them, perhaps his own identification with his powerless victims.”
― Alissa Quart, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream—Exposing the Myth of the Self-Made and the Rugged Individualist, From “Little House” to Horatio Alger