Quotes About Gender Roles

“In the time we spend reeling in confusion, grasping at straws trying to piece our egos together, we forget to acknowledge some things. Society created gender roles and categorizations and lifestyles and names and titles because we fear the unknown, especially when the unknown is us.
It's as though we're stranded in the middle of an ocean, but we were promised the current would bring us back ashore. We're given all we need on the life raft. As far as we can see, we're being led back, slowly. We don't know when we'll approach the shore, but all evidence points to the fact that we will. But we don't spend our time looking around, enjoying the view, seeing who came with us, and riding out the waves. We sit and panic about what we're doing and why we came here.
It doesn't matter where we started because we may never know. It matters where we're going, because that, we do. We begin and we end. We've seen one, so there's only one other option.”

— Brianna Wiest

“If reconciling your feminist values with your sexual preferences is something you're struggling with, don't panic. But try to believe what I'm about to tell you, because it's true: It's healthy to want and seek pleasure. It's generous and kind to want to make your sexual partner(s) feel good. You should do stuff with someone because you want to, not because they expect or feel entitled to it, and the same should be true for them. Whatever you do during sexytimes is between you and your partner-not you, your partner, and feminism, and not you, your partner, and the Gender Roles Police Force. Everything doesn't always have to be equal-unless you want it to be. The only things that matter are that everyone's having fun, and everyone's feeling respected by and respectful of their partners the whole time you're doing whatever it is that you get up to. Because in the end, that's all that sex is: Two people who want to have sex, alone in a room. No judgy voices allowed.”

— Krista Burton

“Dads. It's time to show our sons how to properly treat a woman. It's time to show our daughters how a girl should expect be treated. It's time to show forgiveness and compassion. It's time to show our children empathy. It's time to break social norms and teach a healthier way of life! It's time to teach good gender roles and to ditch the unnecessary ones. Does it really matter if your son likes the color pink? Is it going to hurt anybody? Do you not see the damage it inflicts to tell a boy that there is something wrong with him because he likes a certain color? Do we not see the damage we do in labeling our girls "tom boys" or our boys "feminine" just because they have their own likes and opinions on things? Things that really don't matter?”

— Dan Pearce

“I love you," he said.
She looked up at him, her eyes shiny and black, then looked away. "I know," she said.
He pulled one of his arms out from under her and traced her outline against the couch. He could spend all day like this, running his hand down her ribs, into her waist, out to her hips and back again ... If he had all day, he would. If she weren't made of so many other miracles.
"You know?" he repeated. She smiled, so he kissed her. "You're not the Han Solo in this relationship, you know."
"I'm totally the Han Solo," she whispered. It was good to hear her. It was good to remember it was Eleanor under all this new flesh.
"Well, I'm not the Princess Leia," he said.
"Don't get so hung up on gender roles," Eleanor said.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“One significant development with regards to these muses of modern-day art is that the gender roles that were used in the past are no longer valid. The days where the women were the ones who solely inspired the men are no longer as both men and women alike are able to make efforts to create music and other forms of art.”

— Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

“Switzerland is undeniably a modern country, but gender roles make occasional appearances. In some cantons women didn't get the right to vote until the 1970s. Anna knew she'd been in Switzerland too long when this stopped appalling her.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

“We have enough proof that, at least my generation does, that patriarchy and matriarchy are gender-less roles.”

— Darnell Lamont Walker

“You should have seen the costumes for the last few prom themes: Pimps and their srteet ho's; CEOs and their office ho's; GI Joes and their combat ho's; Gardeners and their garden hose;Firemen and their fire hose ... If you ask me, a 'masquerade' theme isn't flattering for anyones features, nor does it define the apppropriate gender roles very clearly.”

— The Harvard Lampoon

“By playing these games about "arbitrary" gender roles, we have not succeeded in outlawing masculinity, but we have robbed it of much of its vocabulary. There are not very many acceptable ways to speak "masculine" anymore. We are all in denial, and the results are not pretty.”

— Douglas Wilson

“It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women - that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture or love.”

— Bell Hooks

“Feminism is an attack on social practices and habits of thought that keep women and men boxed into gender roles that are harmful.”

— Robert Webb

“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

“American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial.”

— Thomm Quackenbush

“Also, somehow, there doesn't seem to be any old-fashioned gender roles in place, or any gender roles at all. The priest who condemned me to the mob was a woman. I'll cheer for equality later.”

— Claudia Gray

“My gender has never been an issue or a limitation. I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by strong women growing up, and with them as my role models, I was never limited by the traditional roles women find themselves in.”

— Brenda Brathwaite

“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

“Dismissing socialization and gender roles as piddling compared to this amorphous idea of 'maternal imperative' is part of the reason progress is stalled for family-friendly policies.”

— Jessica Valenti

“The 1950s felt so safe and smug, the '60s so raw and raucous, the revolutions stacked one on top of another, in race relations, gender roles, generational conflict, the clash of church and state - so many values and vanities tossed on the bonfire, and no one had a concordance to explain why it was all happening at once.”

— Nancy Gibbs

“Race and gender definitely came up, occasionally, in my life at work. But the bigger challenge that I had was age. I took roles earlier in my career than people expected, and so a lot of what I got was, 'Do you actually know enough to do this?'”

— Ursula Burns

“I do believe that it's something that we don't talk about, but when there are clearly defined gender roles, it is much simpler. Because you don't have to think, which people apparently don't like to do.”

— Judy Gold

“What I do know is that traditional gender roles are very real and flipping the norm is difficult for even the strongest, funniest, smartest men.”

— Patti Stanger

“Wonder Woman completely eschewed a damsel in distress role by instead being a superhero of unparalleled skill, and the inversion of the typical gender roles didn't stop there. Like her superhero peers, Wonder Woman had her own damsel in distress, a fawning love interest who always got captured and had to be rescued. "Her" name was Steve Trevor. A major in the US Air Force, Steve was a highly decorated pilot who was often called on to perform important secret missions. He appeared to be the quintessential American hero and was drawn that way by H. G. Peter, with a strong jaw, muscular build, and handsome face. However, the man was entirely inept.”

— Anonymous.

“I think feminism's a bit misinterpreted. It was about casting off all gender roles. There's nothing wrong with a man holding a door open for a girl. But we sort of threw away all the rules, so everybody's confused. And dating becomes a sloppy, uncomfortable, unpleasant thing.”

— Zosia Mamet

“Gender roles suck, says Swift Fox.
Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.”

— Margaret Atwood

“In so much SF, either gender roles are the ones we're used to in the here and now, only transported to the future, or else they're supposedly different, but characters still are slotting into various stereotypes.”

— Ann Leckie

“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

“Most critics of gender division are women, and they're worried about girls and the roles presented for them by gendered entertainments. They are quite right to be. Telling girls that the cars and the guns are beyond their domain of expertise, and that they should content themselves with clothes and friendships, is limiting.”

— Russell Smith

“She'd never trusted her own natural impulses and instincts Among her greatest fears was the possibility that she might never discover and develop her deepest talents and intuitions. Her special gifts. Her life would be wasted in pursuing the goals set for her by other people. Instead, she wanted to reclaim a power and authority - a primitive, irresistible force - that transcended gender roles. She dreamed of wielding a raw magic that predated civilization itself.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“We don't put gender roles on our marriage and our relationship. If I'm working a lot and Cory's home, he will put Cree to bed, and if dishes need to be washed, he will wash them. So it's not like, 'Oh, I'm going to wait until my wife gets home, and she's going to be doing all that.'”

— Tia Mowry

“People share a common nature but are trained in gender roles.”

— Lillie Devereux Blake

“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

“Try not to get caught up in antiquated gender roles.”

— Stephenie Meyer

“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

“Goldilocks
[There] lived a family of bearstogether anthropomorphically in a little cottage as a nuclear family. They were very sorry about this, of course, since the nuclear family has traditionally served to enslave womyn, instill a self-righteous moralism in its members, and imprint rigid notions of heterosexualist roles onto the next generation. [They named] their offspring the non-gender-specific Baby.”

— James Finn Garner

“Many heterosexual marriages are childless; many with children break up: they are no guarantee that children will be raised in a house with two parents of two genders. The courts have scoffed at the reproduction and child-raising argument against marriage equality. And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection; that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.”

— Bryant McGill

“I do a lot with characters' sense of identity. I also like challenging stereotypes, gender roles, things like that. Give me a stereotype or a genre expectation and the first thing I want to do is stand it on its head. In the Nightrunner books I wanted to see if I could create a believable gay hero, one who wasn't someone's sidekick or a victim.”

— Lynn Flewelling

“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

“I'm interested in the female dom/male sub dynamic, and how superficially it can seem like a total reverse of gender roles and maybe even subversive or something.”

— Marie Calloway

“I can't tell you how many couples I know where the husband and the wife are both in the military and have deployed together, and they've got kids, and so I think times have changed and gender roles have blurred when it comes to the military.”

— Tanya Biank

“Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the one battle we feminists won fair and square was to convince at least those left of centre that gender roles are made up. They are not real. We play at them. We develop traditional masculine or feminine traits by being indoctrinated, not because we are biologically programmed to behave in those ways.”

— Julie Bindel

“The scene at a certain time was definitely boys; those huge warehouses were kind of violent parties, even. I think people in your immediate community made a nightlife scene that actually did break down gender roles and were along different lines of identity that had to do with race and experience in the '90s, rather than gender.”

— Le1f

“So much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their employment patters and through their influence in the political arena, recognition of defined ethnic groups, seeking to link them to specific allocated roles in the labor-force, with different levels of real remuneration for their work. Ethnicity created a cultural crust which consolidated the patterns of semi-proletarian household structures.”

— Immanuel Wallerstein

“This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word "patriarchy." Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionaliz ed gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?”

— Bell Hooks

“Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about "acting like men" and "acting like women," and more time acting like Jesus.”

— Rachel Held Evans

“For a man to say, "I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids," it's sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn't have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions.”

— Gloria Steinem

“If you consider that the gender roles are just political, then what you come to see is that the full circle of human qualities is divided up so that two-thirds are masculine and one-third is feminine. Women are missing more of their human qualities, so you'll find us on the fore-front of trying to change this.”

— Gloria Steinem

“I would put all the efforts to humanize the "masculine" and "feminine" gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.”

— Gloria Steinem

“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

“In many parts of the world, women and girls are especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS because they lack control over most aspects of their life. Cultural expectations and gender roles expose women and girls to violence, sexual exploitation and far greater risk for infection.”

— Hillary Clinton