Lillian Breslow Rubin

Famous quotes containing the words lillian breslow rubin, breslow rubin, lillian breslow, lillian, breslow and/or rubin:

    Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women—the quality of shifting from child to woman, the seeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, “What does a woman want?”
    Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)

    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?
    —Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)

    ... in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individuals in it “costs worlds of pain.”
    Lillian Breslow Rubin (b. 1924)

    For me, it’s enough! They’ve been here long enough—maybe too long. It’s a funny thing, though. All these years Fred was too busy to have much time for the kids, now he’s the one who’s depressed because they’re leaving. He’s really having trouble letting go. He wants to gather them around and keep them right here in this house.
    —Anonymous Parent. As quoted in Women of a Certain Age, by Lillian B. Rubin, ch. 2 (1979)

    That myth—that image of the madonna-mother—has disabled us from knowing that, just as men are more than fathers, women are more than 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.
    —Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)

    Whereas children can learn from their interactions with their parents how to get along in one sort of social hierarchy—that of the family—it is from their interactions with peers that they can best learn how to survive among equals in a wide range of social situations.
    —Zick Rubin (20th century)