Quotes by Lillian B. Rubin

Lillian B. Rubin

By identifying with the powerful, the disempowered achieve a measure of safety, at least for a moment. By doing the bidding of those in power, they become a necessary part of the system, useful so long as they serve to contain the stirrings and strivings of the oppressed. By making the rules and values of their oppressor their own, they separate themselves from the rest of their group and, temporarily at least, assuage the pain of their stigmatized status.

Long

Pain

Powerful

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.

Children

Mother

Running

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

Children

Husband

Mother

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.

Expectations

Self

Sex

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.

Insulting

Poverty

Rich

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.

Has Beens

Obsessed

Sex

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?

Children

Pain

Persistence

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.

Family

Issues

Two

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.

Children

Feet

Mother

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

Ambiguity

Often Is

Women

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Age

Ambiguity

Believe

Change

Character

Children

Choices

Community

Culture

Depth

Design

Doe

Dream

Effort

Expectations

Family

Father

Feet

Friends

Friendship

Generations

Giving

Has Beens

History And Culture

Hunger

Husband

Insulting

Intimacy

Issues

Jobs

Long

Looks

May

Mean

Men

Mirrors

Mother

Obsessed

Often Is

Pain

Persistence

Personality

Poverty

Powerful

Psychological

Revolution

Rich

Running

Self

Sex

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Quotes by Lillian B. Rubin

Lillian B. Rubin

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

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Topics by Lillian B. Rubin

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

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