I believe the author is trying to get her point out to all women and tell them to stand up for themselves in front of men and that we should stop doing all the work. "In conversations with men, we do almost all the work: sociologists have observed that in male-female social interactions it's the woman who throws out leading questions and verbal encouragements ("So how did you feel about that?" and so on) while the man, typically, says "Hmmmm."" (Ehrenreich 196). This quote shows how women obviously have enough intelligence to actually carry on a conversation. Ehrenreich responds to this with advice and suggests that we should withhold any unnecessary information in conversations to prevent the vague responses from the male gender.
In the beginning of this essay, the author starts with the fact that most women are raised to be ladylike but in her view, ladylike is simply another word for nice. "The essence of ladylikeness is a persistent servility masked as "niceness." For example, we (women) tend to assume that it