Quotes about gender-roles
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl. 'Because you are a girl' is never reason for anything. Ever.
Charles Dickens -
A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.
bell hooks - All About Love: New Visions
the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving
Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies
Also the fact that he's a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she's like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he's doing what boys do.
Lauren Groff -
a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.
Samantha Hunt - The Invention of Everything Else
Women will one day rule the world, and when they do, their brains will be so finely tuned from all the years of quiet that I anticipate they will be far superior rulers to men.
Anastasia Aukeman - Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association
This not to say that the men and women associated with the Rat Bastard Protective Association had freed themselves from the powerful hold of established gender roles on their lives. Shirley Burman, Joan Brown, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Joanna McClure most frequently provided the practical component of the vision they shared with their spouses; that is, the women all worked for a living... As Càndida Smith observed, the 'contradictions of this imaginary society fell most acutely upon the women,
Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies
I like a bit of spunk in a lady
Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies
she'd played mother and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
Mary Wilkins Freeman - The Complete Works of Mary Wilkins Freeman
You 'ain't found out yet we're women-folks, Nanny Penn," said she. "You 'ain't seen enough of men-folks yet to. One of these days you'll find it out, an' then you'll know that we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an' how we'd ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence an' not complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather.
Virginia Petrucci -
It's my choice to be beautiful. It's my choice to be ugly. And it's my choice to decided what those words actually mean.
Liu Cixin - The Three-Body Problem
A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything.
Colette Dowling - The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
While we avoid taking credit for success, women leap at the opportunity to take responsibility for failure. Men tend to externalize the reasons for their failure, putting it off on something or someone else. Not so women, who absorb blame as if they were born to be societys doormats. (Some women like to speak of their willingness to take blame as if it were a form of altruism. It isn't. Women take the blame because they find it scary to confront those who are actually culpable of wrongdoing.)
Colette Dowling - The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
The psychological need to avoid independence - the "wish to be saved" - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues
Colette Dowling - The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children.
Colette Dowling - The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
(...) psychiatrists today recognize the contortionist's act that was required of women in an age when they were expected to stifle their own healthiest impulses. (...) "To be able to renounce your own achievements without feeling that you were sacrificing requires constant effort. To be lovely and unaggressive, a woman spends a lifetime keeping hostile or resentful impulses down. Even healthy self-assertion is often sacrificed since it may be mistaken by hostility. Therefore, [women] often repre
Pam Houston - Cowboys Are My Weakness
And even though I knew in my head there’s nothing a man can do that a woman can’t, I also knew in my heart we can’t help doing it for different reasons. And just like a man will never understand exactly how a woman feels when she has a baby, or an orgasm, or the reasons why she’ll fight so hard to be loved, a woman can’t know in what way a man satisfies himself, what question he answers for himself, when he looks right at death.
Moderata Fonte -
Don’t we see that men’s rightful task is to go out to work and wear themselves out trying to accumulate wealth, as though they were our factors or stewards, so that we can remain at home like the lady of the house directing their work and enjoying the profit of their labors? That, if you like, is the reason why men are naturally stronger and more robust than us — they need to be, so they can put up with the hard labor they must endure in our service.
Margaret Thatcher -
In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke - The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows tha
Carol Ann Duffy - Selected Poems
Then he started his period.One week in bed.Two doctors in.Three painkillers four times a day.And later a letter to the powers-that-bedemanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.
Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works
Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, “natural” in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don’t want it.
Katelyn Beaty - and the World
When we have to make a list of exceptions to apply a model of womanhood, it is good to ask whether that model holds much meaning.
Stephanie Coontz - a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage
The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.
Rachel Held Evans - A Year of Biblical Womanhood
The Christian versions of the household codes were clearly progressive for their time, but does that mean they have the last word, that Christians in changing places and times cannot progress further?
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King
What do you fear, lady?" [Aragorn] asked. "A cage," [Éowyn] said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.
Colette Dowling - The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
Given our socialization into dependency, women are also poor risk takers. (...) We avoid new situations, job changes, moves to different parts of the country. Women are afraid that if they should make a mistake, or do "the wrong thing", they'll be pun
Tamora Pierce - The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
You ride as a man, fight as a man, and you think as a man-""I think as a human being," she retorted hotly. "Men don't think any differently from women- they just make more noise about being able to.
Maggie Georgiana Young -
We long for an intimate connection, but that longing makes us feel vulnerable. Therefore, we guard our hearts for self-preservation, which barricades that intimacy we are longing for. Casual sex is a very sad cat and mouse game. The man is entrapped in his role as the sex-driven predator constantly on the hunt for new conquests, while the woman is the prey that must find her perfect combination of sexual allure and virtue, with the sexual allure being what attracts him and virtue what keeps him.
Stephen Lewis -
One is that if women’s sexuality in Africa wasn’t under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren’t subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn’t have a pandemic.
Camille Paglia -
Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Martha Stout - The Sociopath Next Door
A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.
Julie Ann Dawson -
I don’t think male gamers are more or less sexist than non-gamers. Sexism is unfortunately still a large problem in our culture overall. It is not unique to gaming. Have a pretty girl walk by a construction site in a mini-skirt and you’ll see that. For anyone to imply that male gamers are somehow inherently more sexist than the rest of society smacks of insincerity or naiveté.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.
Jason Porath - and Heretics
What's 'suitable for kids' defines what sort of kids we as a society want. And right now, the girls society wants are the ones who can fit on a short list—while the list for boys is without borders or end.
Louise Doughty - Apple Tree Yard
We are taught we can redeem them, she said to me once. We are taught it as soon as we can read. We can turn the beast into a prince, if only we love him enough.
Ivy Compton-Burnett - Mother and Son
There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
Robert Louis Stevenson - Virginibus Puerisque
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
Ralph Nader -
Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value
Colette Dowling - The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
Once established, the young girl's dependency is systematically supported as she proceeds through childhood. For being "nice" - nonchallenging, nonconfronting, noncomplaining - she's rewarded with good grades, the approval of her parents and teachers, and the affection of her peers. What reason is there for her to turn deviant or nonconformist? The going is good, so she conforms. Increasingly, she patterns herself after what's expected of her.
Colette Dowling - The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confid
Kameron Hurley - The Geek Feminist Revolution
We can pretend all we like that women are equal, ut as long as men and women are continually encouraged to supress the broad aspects of their humanity that we decry as "feminine", we're all screwed. Because it's those things qe celebrate as "other" that make us truly human. It's what we label "soft" or "feminune" that makes civilization possible, It's our empathy, our ability to care and nurtureand connect. It's our ability to come together. To buld. To remake. Asking men to cut away their "femi
William Shakespeare -
O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.
Lorin Morgan-Richards -
One day stores will no longer have gender classifications. Instead the consumer decides how and what they want, rather than the social engineering of corporations. The concept of gender will be extinct.
Rebecca West -
People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.
Peggy Orenstein -
...What's more, I live in Berkeley, California. If princesses had infiltrated OUR little retro hippie hamlet, imagine what was going on places where women actually shaved their legs!
Alice von Hildebrand - The Privilege of Being a Woman
Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men.
Denise Domning - Winter's Heat
I know nothing of being a wife, but I have learned much about the running and maintenance of an estate. It may be that you will find my manner too straightforward for your tastes, but, my lord, it is just that - my manner. Would that I die before I give up that part of me.
Aristophanes - Lysistrata
Chorus of old men: If we give them the least hold over us, 'tis all up! their audacity will know no bounds! We shall see them building ships, and fighting sea-fights like Artemisia; nay if they want to mount and ride as cavalry, we had best cashier the knights, for indeed women excel in riding, and have a fine, firm seat for the gallop. Just think of all those squadrons of Amazons Micon has painted for us engaged in hand-to-hand combat with men.
Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.
Julie Zeilinger - A Little F'd Up: Why Feminism Is Not a Dirty Word
But somehow things took a sinister turn, and the division of labor came to be understood as the demarcation of a social hierarchy. Women kept busy with numerous domestic responsibilities while their male counterparts' sole duty was tending to the flocks. Men had time to think critically, form political infrastructures, and ultimately, network with other men. Meanwhile, women were kept too busy to notice that somewhere along the line, they had become inferior. This is approximately when shit hit
Aristophanes - Lysistrata
Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business.
Jessica Valenti - Full Frontal Feminism
What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now. You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank. Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.” Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.
bell hooks -
Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
Annastacia Dickerson -
For me, the times that I dressed provocatively had been empowering. It felt good. It's those times that I felt comfortable in my own skin. Like really, really comfortable. And let's face it, body self-esteem issues are a hurdle many women struggle to overcome.So when a person tears a woman down for how's she's dressed, they are tearing her down at a moment she feels at the top of her game. That's where the real shame is—not in how a woman is dressed, but in the desire to minimise her self-worth
Terry Pratchett - Feet of Clay
You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads.
Amy Engel - The Book of Ivy
I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.
Amy Engel - The Book of Ivy
My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side.
Sam Killermann - The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook: A Guide to Gender
Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make a connection between a person’s biological makeup and their eventual role in society.
Shahla Khan - Dating & Violence
Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus instead we are all people. Deal with it.
Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you - or else I pretended to. I am really not quite sure which - I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other.
Miya Yamanouchi - Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
Guys, you don't have to act "manly" to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. You don't have to prove your masculinity to anyone.
Miya Yamanouchi - Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
Guys, you don't have to act "manly" to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. Don't let society make you believe you have to prove your masculinity to anyone because you don't. You are you and you are worthy, full stop.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.
Jon Krakauer - Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town
Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, "No thanks," "Not interested," or even "Fuck off, creep.
Bryant McGill - Voice of Reason
Males have been groomed since birth, according to the specifications of a sick and perverse society, to become instruments of war.
Joan Smith - Misogynies
One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.
Martha Stout - The Sociopath Next Door
We raise our children, especially girls, to ignore their spontaneious reactions-we teach them not to rock the societal boat...By the time she is thirty, the valient little girl's "Ick!"-her tendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's actions are really mean, may have been exciese from her behavior, and perhaps from her very mind.
Martha Stout - The Sociopath Next Door
As for the boys..."vulnerable fathers turn to time-honored defensive responses to maintain the function that father knows best' Parents, especially fathers, teach their sons to obey authority no matter what.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
If we don't place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential.
Philippa Gregory - The Red Queen
Men die in battle women die in childbirth.
Jennifer Donnelly - A Northern Light
And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choo
M.E. Thomas - Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight
When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood.
Shannon Mullen - See What Flowers
Despite all of the social advances in women’s rights and the push for gender equality in the workplace, it seems like modern men still want a woman that they can take care of at home.
Portia de Rossi - Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain
Playing roles in any relationship is false and will inevitably lead to the relationship's collapse. Noone can be any one thing all the time.
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King
All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Erol and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.
Shashi Deshpande -
A wife should always be few feet behind her husband. If he is an MA you should be a BA.If he is 5'4'tall you shouldn't be more than 5'3'tall. If he is earning five hundred rupees you should never earn more than four hundred and ninety nine rupees.That's the only rule to follow if you want a happy marriage...No partnership can ever be equal.It will always be unequal, but take care it is unequal in favor of the husband. If the scales tilt in your favor, God help you, both of you.
Germaine Greer - The Female Eunuch
Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer - The Female Eunuch
The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.
Germaine Greer - The Female Eunuch
Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a women's world and a man's emotions are different from a women's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly.
Kay Redfield Jamison - An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Depression, somehow, is much more in line with society's notions of what women are all about: passive, sensitive, hopeless, helpless, stricken, dependent, confused, rather tiresome, and with limited aspirations. Manic states, on the other hand, seem to be more the provenance of men: restless, fiery, aggressive, volatile, energetic, risk taking, grandiose and visionary, and impatient with the status quo. Anger or irritability in men, under such circumstances, is more tolerated and understandable;
Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam
Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.
Lori Duron - Gender Creative Son
How come when girls play with gender it's a sign of strength and when boys play with gender it's a sign of weakness?
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl––pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!––who did not
Naomi Alderman - The Power
Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not, Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.
Megan Erickson - Fast Connection
Like me wanting to get nailed made me less of a man than him? That was bullshit. He seemed kind of sexist. I bet he was a fucking Republican.
Kate Bornstein - or Something Else Entirely
From the moment we take our first breath (and sometimes even before that, what with sonic imaging technology), the cry “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” ushers us into this world. As we grow into adulthood, everything about us grows and matures as we grow and mature. Everything except gender, that is. We’re supposed to believe that our gender stays exactly the same as the day we were born. Our genders never shift, we’re told. The genders we’re assigned at birth lock us onto a course through which we
Julia Serano -
We make assumptions every day about other people's genders without ever seeing their birth certificates, their chromosomes, their genitals, their reproductive systems, their childhood socialization, or their legal sex. There is no such thing as a "real" gender - there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive other to be.
Brian Spellman -
All surgery and no makeup make Jack a dull girl.
Sheila Jeffreys - Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.
Bryant McGill - Voice of Reason
It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.
Aporva Kala - Life... Love... Kumbh...
Why love has to intense? Women's love isn't. It is a male contribution to a relationship. What does a woman contribute? Children continuity- intentional immortality.
Kay Redfield Jamison - An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essental.As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, she was also supposed to feel responsible if his plane crashed. Anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself. The military, even more so than the rest of society, clearly put a premium on well-behaved, genteel, and even-tempered wom
Katharine Hepburn -
I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I've just done what I damn well wanted to, and I've made enough money to support myself, and ain't afraid of being alone.
Margaret Atwood -
He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face.She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid mal
Toni Morrison - A Mercy
What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men.Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms.
Omar El Akkad - American War
She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.