Traditional Gender Roles Quotes

I think feminism is the worst thing that ever happened to women. Our job used to be no job. We had it so good!

The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.

I would be content being a housewife if I could find the kind of man who wouldn't treat me like one.

I have never been the mousy, stand-two-paces-behind, obedient 'little woman' type.

I got married very young and put my career on the back burner for the most part because that's what you did in those days. I've never been a pushy, ambitious type of person anyway.

I don't think I'll ever be a housewife.

I have been married twice, but both of my wives have been too bright to be sucked in by women's lib.

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.

Feminism or the family? Carried to excess maybe. I have insisted that women cannot be defined solely in those terms. But for a great many women - not all, because we are only beginning to realize and affirm the diversity of women themselves - choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice.

I absolutely do prefer a dominant guy. I play a very dominant role in my life, in every other aspect of it. And I like to feel like a lady still, at some point. I feel like that's the time when a guy really gets to be a man, and I get to be a woman. And if I'm being a man in the bedroom too, there's nothing really in it for me.

What we're doing is we're chipping away at what it is to be a woman and to be feminine. And what it is to be a man and be masculine. We're chipping away at that. I wish we could go back to 'Mad Men' days. I love those days. Men were men. And I love them.

I'm just glad that the whole John Wayne persona of a man is sort of old school now, because I'd never be able to do that. If that was the going rate today, I wouldn't be working.

If you're walking with your lady on the sidewalk, I still like to see a man walking street-side, to protect the lady from traffic. I grew up with that, and I hate to see something like that get lost. I still like to see that a man opens the door. I like those touches of chivalry that are fast disappearing.

I'm very traditional. I want to have kids. I want to be - not a stay-at-home mom, but to be able to take care of my kids and have a family and cook. A white picket fence and a dog.

I do not go so far as the extreme male 'sexists' who contend that women should confine themselves to the home and children and that any search for alternative careers is unnatural. On the other hand, I do not see much more support for the opposite contention that domestic-type women are violating their natures.

When I had a baby, I didn't leave the second floor for six months. I nursed my babies. I was a full-time homemaker. I taught them all how to read before I let them go to school. So I gave them that care in the early life that somehow feminists have been led to believe is demeaning and is not worth the time of an educated woman.

I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking — it's a valuable thing my mom created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armor. I'm sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That's why relationships work.

Remember 'The Brady Bunch' TV show? That 1970s family had a full-time live-in housekeeper called Alice. Mrs. Brady worked at the PTA and did community work. She didn't clean her own house. That was middle class. Now you have to be very rich to employ a housekeeper. Everything it meant to be middle class has changed dramatically.

In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.

I'm not the kind of woman who would love to make soup or knit sweaters. I never cherished that so much.

When I was 21 I stopped and got married. I tried for a while to be the perfect wife, society this, society that but it wasn't working, so after about a year I went back to work.

I didn't want to be equal to him. I didn't have to be equal to him and do what he did. That, I never considered. I don't think like that. And whatever in the women's liberation - that's what they want. I didn't want to be equal to him. I wanted to be a wife.

Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.