FGP Quote of the Week: Madonna On Her Catholic Childhood

In the December issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Madonna appears on the cover alongside actress Andrea Riseborough, who stars as Wallis Simpson in the Madonna-directed film W.E. Feminist author Naomi Wolf (whose books Misconceptions and The Beauty Myth are necessary additions to your reading list) gets into some well-trodden-but-still-interesting ground, discussing Madonna’s Catholic upbringing and how it affected her music (“Like a Prayer,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” etc). Madonna said:

The fact that I didn’t have a mother helped me in some respect, and that I didn’t have a female role model. I was always very aware of sexual politics, growing up in a Catholic-Italian family in the Midwest, seeing that my brothers could do what they wanted but the girls were always told that they needed to dress a certain way, act a certain way. We were told to wear our skirts to our knees, turtlenecks, cover ourselves and not wear makeup, and not do anything that would draw attention.