Parenting & Family Quote by Fay Weldon

The line bites because it treats "niceness" not as a virtue but as a social asset young women are trained to hoard. Weldon’s phrasing is deliberately transactional: "something invested" frames femininity as a portfolio managed for safety, approval, and upward mobility. Niceness becomes a kind of soft currency, rewarded in public, policed in private. The sting is that it’s not merely oppressive; it’s useful. That ambivalence is the engine of the quote.

Then she detonates the fantasy with motherhood. Children don’t just add stress; they expose the quiet coercions that were already there. Parenting forces daily decisions where someone else’s needs collide with your time, body, and autonomy. Under that pressure, "nice" turns out to be situational, a performance sustained when stakes are low and audiences are friendly. When Weldon calls the parent a "selfish bully", she’s not confessing individual cruelty so much as pointing to the built-in hierarchy of caregiving: you must control, you must impose, you must manipulate. Any honest parent recognizes the small tyrannies - bargaining, bribing, threatening, weaponized disappointment - that keep a household functioning.

The subtext is feminist and unsentimental: the culture demands women be endlessly agreeable, then hands them a role that requires authority and aggression, and finally shames them for deploying it. Weldon, a novelist with a satirist’s appetite for hypocrisy, uses provocation as diagnosis. The goal isn’t to scandalize mothers; it’s to puncture the moral romance around femininity and reveal the power dynamics we pretend aren’t there.