Education Quote by Joan Baez

Baez is not offering a polite self-help tip; she is taking a scalpel to the cultural script of gendered power. The provocation sits in that first move: "Instead of getting hard ourselves". Hardness here isn’t ambition, it’s armor - the emotional deadening historically marketed as the entry fee to male-coded authority. She’s arguing that if the only way women can "compete" is by adopting the same numbness, the competition itself has already won.

The subtext is both generous and unsettling. "Give their best qualities to men" frames softness as a kind of reparative gift, as if men are emotionally underdeveloped and women are the designated tutors. That reads like classic second-wave essentialism: women as naturally tender, men as trained for stoicism. It also risks smuggling caretaking back in through the front door - women changing the world by fixing men, one tear at a time.

Yet in Baez’s voice and era, this isn’t naive. Coming out of the 1960s peace movement, she treats vulnerability as political technology. "Teach them how to cry" is less romance than anti-militarism: tears as an antidote to the kind of hardness that makes violence feel ordinary. She’s wagering that emotional literacy isn’t private therapy; it’s social infrastructure.

The line lands because it flips the usual hierarchy. Softness isn’t weakness, it’s influence. Baez is betting that changing what men admire in themselves changes what society rewards - and that might be a more radical contest than "competing" on the terms patriarchy already wrote.