gender roles Quotes

“For the rest of the day our mother withdrew into her rooms to make lace and embroidery and filet, because in truth the generalessa was able to attend only to this traditional women’s work, and only here could she vent her warrior passion.”

“Sometimes I wish that I had been born to the Men’s side; sometimes I grow weary of the spinning and the weaving and the grinding corn.”

″‘I can think a little bit, too,’ said Kat. ‘Can’t I go?’ ‘No,’ said Vrouw Vedder. ‘Girls shouldn’t think much. It isn’t good for them. Leave thinking to the men.‘”

“For in a caliphate where a woman’s actions were always in danger of being turned against her, there was nothing easy about pretending to be a man.”

“If there was one thing she feared more than losing herself within the Arz, it was being caught unaware by a man who could prove she was no hunter but a huntress, a girl of seventeen concealed beneath the weight of her father’s hooded cloak every time she hunted.”

“I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. It amazes me, I confess;⁠—for certainly, there can be nothing so advantageous to them as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin.”

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

“And when he stays in Australia fifteen years, as Mr. Mark says, and as I know for myself for five years, he has his reasons. And a respectably brought-up girl doesn’t ask what reasons.”

Perhaps an old maid doesn’t know much about bringing up a child, but I guess she knows more than an old bachelor.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde was a red-hot politician and couldn’t have believed that the political rally could be carried through without her, although she was on the opposite side of politics. So she went to town and took her husband—Thomas would be useful in looking after the horse—and Marilla Cuthbert with her.

When Matthew came to think the matter over he decided that a woman was required to cope with the situation.

“is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the hardest word yet!

He liked Jo, for her odd, blunt ways suited him, and she seemed to understand the boy almost as well as if she had been one herself.

To be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman, and I sincerely hope my girls may know this beautiful experience.

“If I was a boy, we’d run away together, and have a capital time, but as I’m a miserable girl, I must be proper and stop at home.

Very likely some Mrs. Grundy will observe, “I don’t believe it, boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles.” I dare say you don’t, Mrs. Grundy, but it’s true nevertheless. Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood by refusing to echo such sayings.

“I may be strong-minded, but no one can say I’m out of my sphere now, for woman’s special mission is supposed to be drying tears and bearing burdens. I’m to carry my share, Friedrich, and help to earn the home.”

“The two favorite studies of my youth were botany and mineralogy, and subsequently, when I learned that the use of simples frequently explained the whole history of a people, and the entire life of individuals in the East, as flowers betoken and symbolize a love affair, I have regretted that I was not a man, that I might have been a Flamel, a Fontana, or a Cabanis.”

The inequality in marriage, in his opinion, lay in the fact that the infidelity of the wife and the infidelity of the husband are punished unequally, both by the law and by public opinion.