Nancy Gibbs Quotes

My grandmother used to cook for eight every day - sitting down lunches and dinner, the way you do it in Italy, you sit down. And when my parents could afford their own place, I went with them but still my mother used to work but used to come back from work to cook lunch for my father, come back from work, cook dinner for my father and me.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

I believe the preservation of the home in the future lies almost entirely in the hands of men.

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

Men and women have defined roles, and it's the responsibility of a parent to make sure they know which way to go; otherwise, a child would feed themselves with their feet without the correct guidance.

Hinde Esther Singer was born in Poland on March 31, 1881, the daughter of Bathsheva and Pinchos Mendel Singer. Bathsheva was an intellectual, but both Bathsheva's father and her husband disapproved of erudite women.

Women eat while they are talking; men talk while they are eating.

I think it's important to show a husband and a wife together, in a room, raising children, because you don't see that anymore.

My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion.

For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.

It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.

I'm a country boy, and we're the product of our upbringing. As a boy, I was told that men don't cry.

I'm one of nine sisters. My parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin. My father didn't believe in girls doing farm work. Girls did housework, and he hired young men to do farm work. I would have preferred to be outside.

I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.

That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.

That problem has been going on since men and women and their children moved from the plains and into caves. How many times have you heard Howard Cunningham talking to Marian about shopping? Too many.

My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.

Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.

There are houses where they don't any longer have dining tables. They will sit in front of the telly and eat.

When I grew up, I realised what an amazing thing my parents did. It was such a big deal for my mom, a middle class woman, to decide to leave her children and husband to go and do her Ph.D. for three years. And my dad, who is even more middle class, a traditional South Indian, to let his wife do that.

My family was, I think, a bit more radical than most Mormons, especially on the question of gender. So in my mind, growing up, there wasn't ever any question of what my future would look like. I would get married when I was 17 or 18. And I would be given some corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it, and we would have kids.

Obviously, over the history of certainly the last 300 years, it was that men went out and worked, and women stayed home. Yes okay, that's the way it was. But certainly it isn't that women weren't able to do it.

I remember so clearly from when I was five years old, my mom and dad arguing over - not over whether it was better, but whether it was proper or whether it was correct to eat with a fork or to eat with your hands, like we do in Sri Lanka. Proper. Like, what is the correct way to eat?

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.

The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.