Best 238 quotes in «gender roles quotes» category

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.

When we got to the house he opened the trash-can lid and tossed the baseball mitts inside. "Bye, Andrew," I said softly. "Bye, son," Dad agreed, as we went inside.

When we take Iggy to the doctor together now, the nurse always says how happy it makes her to see a father helping out with a baby. 'I’m certainly doing their team a lot of favors', you mutter.

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.

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.)

Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb...and said to his mother, "Can you tidy it up a bit back there?

Women retain their dependence needs long past the developmental point at which those needs are normal and healthy. Unbeknownst to others - and worse, unbeknownst to ourselves - we carry dependency within us like some autoimmune disease. We carry it with us from kindergarten through college and graduate school, into our careers, and into the convenient "arrangement" of our marriages. (...) Much of the time - for many of us, all of the time - our unwillingness to stand on our own two feet goes unnoticed because it's expected. Women are relational creatures. They nurture and need. This, we have been told for many, many years, is nature. And although it cripples us, we have to let it go unquestioned.

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.

Women (...) have been encouraged since they were children to be dependent to an unhealthy degree. Any woman who looks within knows that she was never trained to be comfortable with the idea of taking care of herself, standing up for herself, asserting herself. At best she may have played the game of independence, inwardly envying the boys (and later the men) because they seemed so naturally self-sufficient. It is not nature that bestows this self-sufficiency on men; it's training. Males are educated for independence from the day they are born. Just as systematically, women are taught that they have an out - that someday, in some way, they are going to be saved. That is the fairy tale, the life-message (...) We may venture out on our own for a while. We may go away to school, work, travel; we may even make good money, but underneath it all there is a finite quality to our feelings about independence. Only hang on long enough, the childhood story goes, and someday someone will come along to rescue you from the anxiety of authentic living. (The only savior the boy learns about is himself.)

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.

Yet sacrifice of the self is everywhere viewed as the highest calling, and the more so for a woman, who must give every element of her life to others. Kindness is at all times counseled to women, who are called unnatural if not kind. Yet how can a kindness that blights the life of even one--though it benefit others--be called good? Is it in face kindness to sever oneself from one's own desires? Mustn't the imperative to protect all life encompass--even for a woman--her own? Then we must abandon our accustomed notion of a woman's kindness, and forge a new own.

Yes,” he said. “I never had a mother, as I told you. Now I find that everyone else has had something that I missed.” He smiled at her. “I am entirely selfish,” he said ruefully, “and always hoping that someone will tell me to behave, someone will make herself responsible for me and make me be grown-up." He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting. "Why don’t you grow up by yourself?” she asked him, and wondered how many people—how many women—had already asked him that.

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.

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.

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.

You don't have to be a mother to experience mother-shame. Society views womanhood and motherhood as inextricably bound, therefore our value as women is often determined by where we are in relation to our roles as mothers or potential mothers.

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.

You were caught off guard. You never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen. Mom was the kitchen and the kitchen was Mom. You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?

Yeshua’s (Jesus’) very life and ministry demonstrate the mutual and respectful existence of divinity and humanity within each person.

You sound like a Renaissance man,” I said. “I am,” Derek said. “I don’t care about how I’m supposed to act because I’m a guy. I do what I do because it’s the right thing to do as a human, not by gender.” - Saving You Saving Me by Kailin Gow

A female who spoke her mind and called it like it was, was considered trouble. When a male did it, he was considered a leader and desirable.

All surgery and no makeup make Jack a dull girl.

Also, somehow, there doesn't seem to be any old-fashioned gender roles in place, or any gender roles at all. The priest who condemned me to the mob was a woman. I'll cheer for equality later.

a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.

American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial.

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.

All the backpedaling and backstepping that goes on with powerful women today, with Hillary Clinton saying she could have stayed home and baked cookies and blah blah blah, and then offending everybody so that she had to say that she does, in fact, *love* to make cookies, loves it almost as much as she likes to trade agricultural futures. I mean, what is that about? All this I'm really a lady, I'm really a nice girl crap- who needs it? It really is nothing more than surrender.

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.

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.

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.

As a girl, it had been firmly set down that one ought never speak until one was spoken to, and when one did, one ought not speak of anything that might provoke or worry. One referred to the limb of the table, not the leg, the white meat on the chicken, not the breast. Good manners were the foundations of civilization. One knew precisely with whom one sat in a room based entirely on how well they behaved, and in what manner. Forks and knives were placed at the ten-twenty on one's plate when one was finished eating, One ought to walk straight and keep one's hands to oneself when one s poke, least one be taken for an Italian or Jew. A woman was meant to tend a child, a garden, or a conversation. A woman ought to know how to mind the temperature in a room, adding a little heat in a well-timed question, or cool a warm temper with the suggestion of another drink, a bowl of nuts, and a smile. What Kitty had learned at Miss Porter's School---handed down from Sarah Porter through the spinsters teaching there, themselves the sisters of Yale men who handed down the great words, Truth. Verity. Honor--was that your brothers and your husbands and your sons will lead, and you will tend., You will watch and suggest, guide and protect. You will carry the torch forward, and all to the good. There was the world. And one fixed an eye keenly on it. One learned its history; one understood the causes of its wars. One debated and, gradually, a picture emerged of mankind over the centuries; on understood the difference between what was good and what was right. On understood that men could be led to evil, against the judgment of their better selves. Debauchery. Poverty of spirit. This was the explanation for so many unfortunate ills--slavery, for instance. The was the reason. Men, individual men, were not at fault. They had to be taught. Led. Shown by example what was best. Unfairness, unkindness could be addressed. Queitly. Patiently.. Without a lot of noisy attention. Noise was for the poorly bred. If one worried, if one were afraid, if one doubted--one kept it to oneself. One looked for the good, and one found it. The woman found it, the woman pointed it out, and the man tucked it in his pocket, heartened. These were the rules.

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.

Auf dem allerersten Foto, das von mir geschossen wurde, liege ich auf der Säuglingsstation, eingewickelt in eine gelbe Decke. Nicht blau, wie all die anderen Jungen, und auch nicht rosa wie die Mädchen. Es war eine gelbe Decke, und ich habe sie mein Leben lang aufgehoben. Ich schlief jede Nacht damit. Selbst als es mir peinlich wurde, weil ich zu alt dafür war, liebte ich diese Decke. Aber ich habe eben immer Sachen geliebt, die meine Liebe nicht erwiderten. Ich habe mich immer gefragt, ob die Leute, die mich und meine gelbe Decke zwischen den anderen Babys sahen, mich für einen Jungen oder ein Mädchen hielten. Ob es überhaupt eine Rolle spielte. Ob ich an meinem ersten Tag auf dieser Erde vielleicht keins von beidem war. Ich war einfach nur schön.

A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safe pastures. I cannot fault any such man as takes what ease the world offers him.

An underlying question for many people is "what kind of person do you want to be" in their new expression of gender. There is a need for more diverse expressions of "manhood" and "womanhood," "girlhood" and "boyhood" for everyone in culture. Right now there is a story that to become a man or a woman you must act, talk, walk, and dress a certain way. The belief that people of certain genders have to behave in specific ways invalidates people as a whole, trans and non-trans alike. This becomes a call for healthy gender expressions to be modeled for all children. Parents as well as other adults need to model and encourage everyone to be their best, healthiest, self. We get to move beyond our current culture that belittles girls for pursuing intellectual passions, or boys for expressing emotions; a culture that conflates masculinity with abusive behavior, and femininity with victimhood. Examining these issues creates an opportunity to craft a world where people of any gender expression to explore everything they are passionate about, engage with their emotions, and express themselves fully; a world transformed for our children to live without abuse, regardless of our path in life.

As a culture, we perceive men not as sacred or sensitive, but as things to be hurt, repeatedly and violently, in order to test their mettle. Manhood is a prize awarded to the most scarred.

As we get older, the consequences of being tough and independent, when you're supposed to be tender and helpless increase in severity. For young girls the penalties range from a stern look to descriptions like "tomboy" or "headstrong". But as we get older, the consequence of being too assertive or too independent take on a darker nature: shame, ridicule, blame, and judgement. Most of us were too young and having too much fun to notice when we crossed the fine line into behavior not becoming of a lady: actions that call for a painful penalty. Now, as a woman and a mother of both a daughter and a son, I can tell you exactly when it happens. It happens on the day girls start spitting farther, shooting better, and completing more passes than boys. When that day comes, we start to get the message in subtle and not so subtle ways that its best if we focus on staying thin, minding our manners, and not being so smart or speaking out so much in class that we call attention to our intellect. This is a pivital day for boys too. This is the moment when they're introduced to the white horse. Emotional stoicism and self control are rewarded. Displays of emotion are punished. Vulnerability is weakness. Anger becomes an acceptable substitute for fear, which is forbidden.

Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la societé la femelle humain; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin.

A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything.

Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival; the physically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men in general are physically stronger. (There are of course many exceptions.) Today, we live in a vastly diʃerent world. The person more qualiɹed 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.

Because most infants spend more time looking at female faces—because there are more women than men taking care of babies—they comprehend them better: babies, at least those raised primarily by women, tend to see female faces as individuals and male faces as a category. (Women have identities; men are just men.)

Because of a profound, deep-seated doubt in their own competence, which begins in early childhood, girls become convinced that they must have protection if they are going to survive. This belief is bred into women by misguided social expectations (...) Girls are trained very differently than boys. The training leads to their becoming adults who stay stuck in jobs beneath their capabilities. It leads them to feel intimidated by the men they marry, and to defer to them in the hope of being protected. It even leads (...) to the crippling of women's intellectual abilities. Long praised by teachers for being diligent and dutiful in school, we who rely on dutifulness to get us by in the professional world son find ourselves being treated as if we were not quite grown up. (...) Not to be taken seriously. And (...) easily exploitable. (...) The way girls are socialized continues to predetermine an agonizing conflict over the psychological independence that's necessary if women are ever to spring free and take their place in the sun.

Biological, phenotypic, and chromosomal sex differences of 'male' and 'female' are considered as having a biological (organic) basis, in contrast to the role meanings afforded to these sexes in the form of 'masculine' and 'feminine' genders, which may be considered as social constructs.

Edda Marty: – No, voi non mi avete mai, neanche tu Momi, presa per il mio verso. Non m’avete capita. Io volli essere semplicemente un vostro compagno, e voi m’avete sempre respinto e ricacciato nel mio sesso, mi avete costretto a restar donna perché vi facessi male.

Biology is only the best hint as to what was functional in the past but not necessarily about what will be in the future. The most empowering question we can ask about the future is not “What is the future and how do we adapt?” but “How do we want our future to be and how do we adapt?

But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.

Camouflage your soul! Hide!Hide!Hide! The gender police are here. The gender police are everywhere.

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 women.

Because of the way society sets them up, women never again experience the need to develop independence - until some crisis in later life explodes their complacency, showing them how sadly helpless and undeveloped they've allowed themselves to be.

Hally: – […] See, a smart woman tends to act on your typical eighteen-year-old male like instant kryptonite. But, not to worry – mother tells me something mystical happens at graduation and suddenly male people who never pulled a grade above a C in their lives automatically become smarter than anything that wears a skirt. Maybe after that happens, we can date who we want.