Motherhood Quote by Anzia Yezierska

Meritocracy, Yezierska suggests, is a staircase built for men and a funhouse mirror built for women. The line starts with an American promise: a man can climb as far as his effort and ambition allow. Then it snaps shut. The narrator has "style and pep" - the bright, modern, self-invented qualities that ought to translate into social mobility - yet she can't "get a man my equal" because the evaluation isn't really of her. It's a family background check.

The phrasing is doing double duty. "Free to go up" sounds like liberty, but it's also literally vertical: class ascent, respectability, the right neighborhoods and the right futures. Yezierska, writing from the immigrant experience, knows how often that ascent is policed by invisible committees. For men, the committee pretends not to exist; for women, it has a name and a face: Mother. The punch is that even a woman's most personal asset - her desirability, her romantic prospects - is treated as a referendum on lineage.

Under the hood is the gendered math of assimilation. Men can be imagined as self-made; women are made to stand in for the family's "quality", the household's cleanliness, accent, manners, reputation. "A girl is always judged by her mother" is both complaint and diagnosis: society uses mothers as a proxy for class, ethnicity, and moral worth, then uses daughters as the billboards. Yezierska isn't just describing unfair dating economics; she's exposing how America sells individual freedom while quietly enforcing heredity - especially on women's bodies and choices.