Daily Inspiration Quote by Margot Kidder

Kidder is doing something sly here: she’s praising Lois Lane not for being “strong” in the poster-ready way, but for being strategically inconsistent. Lois becomes a study in romantic code-switching, a woman adjusting her posture, voice, expectations, even her moral latitude depending on who’s in front of her. With Clark, she can perform competence and control, the colleague who doesn’t need rescuing. With Superman, she can indulge awe, vulnerability, desire for spectacle. Kidder frames that split as recognizable rather than shameful, which is both generous and pointed.

The intent isn’t to scold women for inauthenticity; it’s to name the negotiation. Falling in love often forces a kind of self-editing: you lean into the version of yourself that feels most legible to the person you want. Kidder’s “as women, we do that a lot” carries a quiet indictment of the conditions that make that adaptation feel necessary. When the world rewards women for being approachable but punishes them for needing too much, you learn to calibrate. Lois isn’t fickle; she’s reading the room.

Context matters: Kidder is speaking from inside a late-70s cultural machine that sold femininity in narrow lanes while dressing it up as liberation. The Superman romance is essentially a fantasy of male duality and female responsiveness: he gets to be two men; she gets to be two selves. Kidder’s observation exposes the trick. The myth isn’t just that men have secret identities. It’s that love asks women to have them, too.