Lillian B. Rubin Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

Women find ways to give sense and meaning to daily life--ways to be useful in the community, to keep mind active and soul growingeven while they change diapers and cook vegetables.

Lillian B. Rubin
From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.

Lillian B. Rubin
Whatever else we may say about sex, it is at least as much a social and psychological phenomenon as it is a biological one.

Lillian B. Rubin
We are a society that values a man for what he does in the world, a woman for how she looks.

Lillian B. Rubin
No revolution creates a wholly new universe. Rather, it reflects the history and culture that spawned it.

Lillian B. Rubin
For sex to be wholly satisfying, we must have at least as much concern for a partner as for self - a requirement that doesn't live comfortably alongside the exhortation to 'do your own thing.' In the end, we are left with an extraordinarily heightened set of expectations about the possibilities in human relationships that lives side by side with disillusion that, for many, borders on despair.

Lillian B. Rubin
In our minds lives the madonna image--the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model--the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers.

Lillian B. Rubin
Contrary to all we hear about women and their empty-nest problem, it may be fathers more often than mothers who are pained by thechildren's imminent or actual departure--fathers who want to hold back the clock, to keep the children in the home for just a little longer. Repeatedly women compare their own relief to their husband's distress

Lillian B. Rubin
The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see aroundthem so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children's future--fear that they'll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.

Lillian B. Rubin
How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

Lillian B. Rubin