Restrictive Norms Quotes

I hate the word 'ought' - it always implies something dull, cold, and commonplace. The 'ought nots' of life are its pleasantest things.

Sexual behavior was also generally considered off limits.

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

'Men don't cry!' 'Women can't handle money!' What limiting ideas to live with.

My husband didn't want me to wear any black hairstyles. Nicole Kidman was his standard of beauty.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

All human rules are more or less idiotic.

Where is the society that does not struggle along under the dead weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfathers.

I think there are a lot of rules for women. We have a lot of expectations and a lot of rules for women. So we're expected to march in a straight line, and when we don't, all hell breaks loose.

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.

Especially with girls, people always want to put them in little brackets.

It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.

It's a man's jobno place for women's plans here!what lies outside. Stay home and cause no trouble.

[My mother] was the oldest of two sisters and two brothers, and she grew up with her brothers, who were about her age. She grew up, to the age of ten, like a wild colt, and then all of a sudden that was over. They had forced on her her 'woman's destiny' by saying, 'This isn't done, this isn't good, this isn't worthy of a lady.'

A culture that holds people back should and can be changed.

It seems like women are always told, 'It is not your time.'

I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.

I don't want to do music in a box, like everybody say what I can't do, 'he can't say this.'

There's a great deal of tension between so many kind of distinctive and restrictive female archetypes and images in the world. When you play with the archetypes, you get free.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting.

The pedestal that women were placed upon often turned out to be a cage.