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Motherhood Quote by Elizabeth Moon

"Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women"

About this Quote

The line lands with the quiet force of lived evidence: feminism not as ideology, but as upbringing. Elizabeth Moon doesn’t frame her belief in women’s access as a conversion, a debate won, or a moral revelation. It’s simpler and sharper than that. If your mother designs aircraft, the cultural story that women “naturally” belong elsewhere starts to look like bad engineering: flimsy assumptions that fail under real-world stress.

The specific intent is almost disarming. Moon isn’t making an abstract demand; she’s pointing to an existence proof. One woman in a historically male technical field is enough to rearrange a child’s sense of what’s normal. The subtext is a rebuke to the way opportunity often gets defended as meritocracy while being quietly rationed through expectation. “Convinced me” implies that doors close not only by law or policy, but by imagination. The mind learns the limits it’s taught.

Context matters here: Moon came of age when engineering was still aggressively gendered, and her work as a science fiction writer sits inside a genre long fascinated by “possibility” while often replicating old hierarchies. The sentence is a miniature origin story for a writer who understands that futures are political. “More things should be open” is intentionally broad; it doesn’t beg for a single concession, it challenges the entire architecture of exclusion. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a calibration.

Quote Details

TopicMother
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Moon, Elizabeth. (2026, January 17). Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/having-a-mother-who-had-been-an-aeronautical-78551/

Chicago Style
Moon, Elizabeth. "Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/having-a-mother-who-had-been-an-aeronautical-78551/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/having-a-mother-who-had-been-an-aeronautical-78551/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Elizabeth Moon (born March 7, 1945) is a Author from USA.

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