Lillian Breslow Rubin

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    ... 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)

    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)

    It’s true, as Marya Mannes says: “No one believes [a woman’s] time to be sacred. A man at his desk in a room with a closed door is a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available.”
    Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)

    I had heard so much about how hard it was supposed to be that, when they were little, I thought it would be horrible when they got married and left. But that’s silly you know. . . . By the time they grow up, they change and you change. Eventually, they’re not the same little kids and you’re not the same mother. It’s as if everything just falls into a pattern and you’re ready.
    —Anonymous Mother. As quoted in Women of a Certain Age, by Lillian B. Rubin, ch. 2 (1979)

    The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.
    —Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)

    Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.
    —Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)