Gender Roles In Fiction Quotes

Stories teach us empathy, and limiting the expression of humanity in our heroes entirely based on sex or gender does us all a disservice. It placess restrictions on what we consider human, which dehumanizes the people we see who do not express traits that fit our narow definition of what's acceptable. ~ Kameron Hurley

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I've thought a lot about this one, as a feminist, and as an author. How should traditional roles be portrayed? In fantasy literature there is a school of thought that holds that women must be treated precisely like men. Only the traditional male sphere of power and means of wielding power count. If a woman is shown in a traditionally female role, then she must be being shown as inferior.
After a lot of thought, and some real-life stabs at those traditional roles, I've come to firmly disagree with this idea. For an author to show that only traditional male power and place matter is to discount and belittle the hard and complex lives of our peers and our ancestresses. ~ Sarah Zettel

Fear (...) that has no relation to capabilities or even to reality is epidemic among women today. Fear of being independent (that could mean we'd end up alone and uncared for); fear of being dependent (that could mean we'd be swallowed by some dominating "other"); fear of being competent and good at what we do (that could mean we'd have to keep on being good at what we do); fear of being incompetent (that could mean we'd have to keep on feeling shlumpy, depressed, and second class).
(...)
Phobia has so thoroughly infiltrated the feminine experience it is like a secret plague. It has been built up over long years by social conditioning and is all the more insidious for being so thoroughly acculturated we do not even recognize what has happened to us.
Women will not become free until they stop being afraid. We will not begin to experience real change in our lives, real emancipation, until we begin the process - almost a de-brainwashing - of working through the anxieties that prevent us from feeling competent and whole. ~ Colette Dowling

Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as close and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles. ~ David Blankenhorn

My roles in the '80s were, like, gender dysphoric. I wasn't pretty, I wasn't this, I wasn't that. And I am kind of butchy, you know. That's just my thing. ~ Pamela Adlon

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou. ~ Ben Shapiro

For Archie was an expert in dividing the affairs of life into men's business and women's business. An empty cupboard and a full plate were the man's business, a full cupboard and an empty plate the concern of the woman. ~ Annie Proulx

Beyond the obvious demands - an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap - feminism must be class-conscious, and aware of the limiting culture of the gender binary. It needs to recognise that disabled people aren't inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

College women are typically given to declaring for one or the other (in my day, for marriage; now, generally, for careers), and only later finding to their surprise that they must cope with both
while their men may be trying to figure out how to get out of doing both. ~ Judith Martin

Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children. ~ Colette Dowling

As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward. ~ Lydia Sigourney

I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles. ~ Fred Ward

He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did. ~ Virginia Woolf

What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men.
Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms. ~ Toni Morrison

The summer dresses are unpacked and hanging in the closet, two of them, pure cotton, which is better than synthetics like the cheaper ones, though even so, when it's muggy, in July and August, you sweat inside them. No worry about sunburn though, said Aunt Lydia. The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen. [...] And not good for the complexion, not at all, wrinkle you up like a dried apple. But we weren't supposed to care about our complexions any more, she'd forgotten that. ~ Margaret Atwood

A man is NOT a financial plan.
A woman is NOT a domestic plan.

Money is an essential necessity-
You must have and make your own money. Cooking and house chores are basic life skills- you must be able to make your own meals and put your house in order..... ~ Ian Ochieng

Like it or not, today we are all pioneers, picking our way through uncharted and unstable territory. The old rules are no longer reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure foundation for marriage. Wherever it is that people want to end up in their family relations today, even if they are totally committed to creating a so-called traditional marrige, they have to get there by a different route from the past. ~ Stephanie Coontz

Don't we see that men's rightful task is to go out to work and wear themselves out trying to accumulate wealth, as though they were our factors or stewards, so that we can remain at home like the lady of the house directing their work and enjoying the profit of their labors? That, if you like, is the reason why men are naturally stronger and more robust than us - they need to be, so they can put up with the hard labor they must endure in our service. ~ Moderata Fonte

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. ~ Mary Wilkins Freeman

Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confidence.
They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks - whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before - they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general underestimate their actual performance as well. One study even showed that the brighter the girl, the less expectations she has of being successful at intellectual tasks. (...)
Low self-confidence is the plague of many girls, and it leads to a host of related problems. Girls are highly suggestible and tend to change their minds about perceptual judgments if someone disagrees with them. They set lower standards for themselves. While boys are challenged by difficult tasks, girls try to avoid them. (...) Given her felt incompetence, it's not surprising that the little girl would hotfoot it to the nearest Other and cling for dear life. (...) As we can see, the problems of excessive dependence follow female children right into adulthood. ~ Colette Dowling

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. ~ Rachel Kadish

The Christian versions of the household codes were clearly progressive for their time, but does that mean they have the last word, that Christians in changing places and times cannot progress further? ~ Rachel Held Evans

Today ... major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies
Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few
and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that. ~ J. Randy Taraborrelli

When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood. ~ M.E. Thomas

Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'.
Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy. ~ Amy Engel

For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman's love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman's advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman's love he takes a load of guild upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off! ~ Stefan Zweig

And that is the ultimate goal, to elect politicians who strive to implement laws that are blind to gender differences and whose ultimate goal is to create fair and just societies, that is how it works. ~ Aysha Taryam

Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women - with babies to protect from harm - have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places. ~ Naomi Alderman

The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. ~ Judith Butler

I think it's just different to get married for a woman than it is for a man. The amount of work to overcome certain gender roles in the partnership - just the expectation of housework, kid-work, whatever it is. ~ Alison Pill

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

A brilliant scientist once said that the people we interact with in life play different roles depending on what splinter of reality we exist upon. ~ Susan Frances

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile. ~ Jerry B. Jenkins

I don't believe in being lazy, but I do think that this "big kid" thing may just be misinterpreting people who are taking advantage of all their opportunities and not tying themselves down to traditional gender roles or traditional life roles. ~ Desiree Akhavan