Jean Baker Miller Quotes

As other perceptions arise ... the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.

In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.

The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.

Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others
first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.

Conflict begins at the moment of birth.

As a society emphasizes and values some aspects of the total range of human potentials more than others, the valued aspects are associated closely with, and limited to, the dominant group's domain.

Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.

They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power ... Women do not need to diminish other women[they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not "need" the power to limit the development of others.

Psychological growth is the great gift and inexorable fact of human life.

Women will not advance except by joining together in cooperative action ... Unlike other groups, women do not need to set affiliation and strength in opposition one against the other. We can readily integrate the two, search for more and better ways to use affiliation to enhance strength
and strength to enhance affiliation.

The question is still asked of women: 'How do you propose to answer the need for child care?' That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: 'If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?'.