"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself"
About this Quote
Nin’s line lands like a reprimand, but it’s really a jailbreak note. She’s not scolding women for wanting partnership; she’s attacking the social script that trains women to outsource authorship of their lives to male labor, male permission, male “provision.” The sting is in the phrase “how wrong” - moral language aimed back at a morality that has long policed women’s desires. Nin flips the charge: the error isn’t female ambition, it’s the expectation that a man should be the instrument of it.
The subtext is distinctly Nin: creation as identity, not just productivity. “Build the world” evokes institutions and infrastructure - marriage, career paths, status, the respectable container. “Create it herself” shifts from architecture to art, from living inside a structure to generating one. It’s a demand for agency that isn’t limited to earning power, but extends to erotic and imaginative autonomy: the right to want, to design, to narrate.
Context matters. Nin wrote in a century when women were being told they could have emancipation, but only if it looked tidy, and only if it didn’t threaten men’s centrality. Her diaries and fiction are obsessed with how easily desire gets domesticated into dependency. Read that way, the quote is less a self-help mantra than a critique of romantic capitalism: the fantasy that the right man will deliver the right life. Nin insists the cost of that fantasy is authorship. And for a writer who made her own life into material, authorship is the whole point.
The subtext is distinctly Nin: creation as identity, not just productivity. “Build the world” evokes institutions and infrastructure - marriage, career paths, status, the respectable container. “Create it herself” shifts from architecture to art, from living inside a structure to generating one. It’s a demand for agency that isn’t limited to earning power, but extends to erotic and imaginative autonomy: the right to want, to design, to narrate.
Context matters. Nin wrote in a century when women were being told they could have emancipation, but only if it looked tidy, and only if it didn’t threaten men’s centrality. Her diaries and fiction are obsessed with how easily desire gets domesticated into dependency. Read that way, the quote is less a self-help mantra than a critique of romantic capitalism: the fantasy that the right man will deliver the right life. Nin insists the cost of that fantasy is authorship. And for a writer who made her own life into material, authorship is the whole point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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