Lillian B. Rubin Quotes

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

In fact, the family as an institution is both oppressive and protective and, depending on the issue, is experienced sometimes one way, sometimes the other - often in some mix of the two - by most people who live in families.

Society and personality live in a continuing reciprocal relation with each other. The search for personal change without efforts to change the institutions within which we live and grow will, therefore, be met with only limited reward.

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.

For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.

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.

The ideal visions of one age eventually are seen as its excesses by the next.

The depth of a friendship - how much it means to us ... depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares and validates.

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.

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

The structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.

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

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

That myth
that image of the madonna-mother
has disabled us from knowing that, just as men are more than fathers, women are morethan mothers. It has kept us from hearing their voices when they try to tell us their aspirations ... kept us from believing that they share with men the desire for achievement, mastery, competence
the desire to do something for themselves.

Personal change, growth, development, identity formation
these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events
a job, a mate, a child
through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.

Children crawl before they walk, walk before they run
each generally a precondition for the other. And with each step they take toward more independence, more mastery of the environment, their mothers take a step away
each a small separation, a small distancing.

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.

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?