Carol Gilligan Quotes

If I were to appear in a programme like 'Sex and the City,' I'm sure I'd be cast as the downtrodden one staying at home and having seven children while the others jet-setted around the world.

There's only one thing in life for a woman; it's to be a mother... A woman artist must be... capable of making primary sacrifices.

For men, the answer was always the same and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

claims about what's 'natural' have long been used to reinforce traditional gender roles and values. ... Even the notion that women should have children at all is based on the idea that a woman's inherent and most important role is that of mother. Shockingly, men's 'innate' roles are a lot more fun than the ones bestowed on women.

In the '50s you had to wear pink ribbons if you were a girl, and you were supposed to become a hairdresser or a secretary. I couldn't stomach it. Later on, when I fell in love with my husband and had children, that's when my mother's earthiness or sense of femaleness kicked in.

If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

I'm definitely more attracted to chaos than to order. The point is, I find the female roles out there very cliche. If we are limited to being only lovers or mothers, we are limiting ourselves.

A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.

As societies continue to loosen their standards regarding what is appropriate female and male behavior, I think we are going to realize we have not only underestimated women, but also men.

No matter what else they're doing, women are also always nurturing.

No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.

The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools.

I did want a boy child because I had this romantic idea that a boy child when he's 16 takes his mother out for dinner.

Woman has her battlefield. With each child that she brings to the nation, she fights her fight for the nation

The instinct of humanity revolts against the employment of woman as a soldier on the battlefield. No civilized man would wish to lay this duty upon her; no civilized woman would wish to assume it.

Unfortunately, some of the best fathers are mothers.

In fact, my mom would have gone to the Persian Gulf War had she not been pregnant with me.

My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.

As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness.

The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult - this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.

In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else - or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon - find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.