288 Quotes About Gender-roles

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.

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.

I wanted to be a woman, but that seemed to me to be a world to which I was to be eternally refused entrance.What I needed was a boyfriend. A boyfriend would clarify my position to the world and, even more important, to myself. A boyfriend's acceptance of me would guide me into that strange and exotic land of frills and femininity.

One strong idea being put forth these days (...) is that women should above all be given choice. (...) But this "right to choose" whether or not we provide for ourselves has contributed mightily to the female achievement gap. Because they have the social option to stay home, women can - and often do - back off from assuming responsibility for themselves. (...) There is something wrong with this. (...) We want so desperately to believe that we do not have to be responsible for our own welfare.

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.

The feeling that I've done something wrong, that I really don't know what it is, that there's something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of anyone's love as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else--someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.

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.

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.