"It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl, as opposed to some other, different kind. And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward"
About this Quote
There is a quiet radicalism in calling it "a very cool thing" to be a smart girl. Elena Kagan isn’t romanticizing grit or selling a bootstrap myth; she’s naming how status works. Cool is social permission. It’s the difference between intelligence as a liability you have to sand down and intelligence as a kind of currency that buys you room to expand.
The line "as opposed to some other, different kind" is doing heavy lifting. It nods to the narrow set of acceptable girlhoods on offer: the pretty one, the agreeable one, the effortlessly charming one, the one who performs competence without threatening anyone. Kagan’s phrasing is careful, almost judicial in its restraint, but the subtext is blunt: cultures don’t merely reward certain talents, they rank identities. When smart is framed as attractive rather than suspicious, a girl doesn’t just achieve more; she risks less.
As a jurist who rose through elite academic and institutional pipelines, Kagan is also implicitly crediting an ecosystem: teachers who praised her mind, peers who didn’t punish it, a broader moment when women’s intellectual ambition was increasingly legible as ambition rather than aberration. She’s pointing to a formative alignment between personal aptitude and public validation. That "made a great deal of difference" isn’t sentimentality. It’s a causal claim about how early social cues harden into life trajectories: confidence, audacity, and the willingness to compete for power without apologizing for wanting it.
The line "as opposed to some other, different kind" is doing heavy lifting. It nods to the narrow set of acceptable girlhoods on offer: the pretty one, the agreeable one, the effortlessly charming one, the one who performs competence without threatening anyone. Kagan’s phrasing is careful, almost judicial in its restraint, but the subtext is blunt: cultures don’t merely reward certain talents, they rank identities. When smart is framed as attractive rather than suspicious, a girl doesn’t just achieve more; she risks less.
As a jurist who rose through elite academic and institutional pipelines, Kagan is also implicitly crediting an ecosystem: teachers who praised her mind, peers who didn’t punish it, a broader moment when women’s intellectual ambition was increasingly legible as ambition rather than aberration. She’s pointing to a formative alignment between personal aptitude and public validation. That "made a great deal of difference" isn’t sentimentality. It’s a causal claim about how early social cues harden into life trajectories: confidence, audacity, and the willingness to compete for power without apologizing for wanting it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Confidence |
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