Lois Frankel Quotes

This was what you did in the '50s: You get married, get a job, put your husband through graduate school, and have two kids - a girl and a boy.

The whole 1950s notion was find the right girl, get married, move to the suburbs and then hang out with the guys while she stayed home with the babies. I felt that was sort of sad.

What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.

There is something revolting about the way girls' minds often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means.

The common man thinks that the marriage is like appointing one to do his work. The husband thinks so! The husband’s family thinks so. Every one thinks that a girl is coming to the family to do work. Even the girl’s family trains the girl to do the household work

There's always an assumption that when the girls get married they don't want to work.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

Why don't we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.

The worst mistake a woman can make is to emulate a man.

A huge part of keeping women in their place has to do with creating a really limited definition of what a 'real' woman is like. And a ton of that what-makes-a-woman nonsense is attached to motherhood. Apparently, by virtue of having ovaries and a uterus, women are automatic mommies or mommies-to-be.

I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.

When I hear the words 'Women should be barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen,' I think, 'What. A. Dream.' There are no negative connotations to it.

But, alas! what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?

In the '50s, a lot of girls never saw beyond the wedding day.

Tradition has made women cowardly.

I believe in large families: every woman should have at least three husbands.

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.

Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man..

The GOP will not be satisfied until women are barefoot, pregnant and back home by 5 o'clock P.M. to cook dinner.

Women shouldn't be expected to only play nurturing, kind caretakers.

Many years ago, when I was born in the '50s - '50s and '60s didn't belong to girls in India. They belonged to boys. They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married.

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.

It's not very hip to consider the plight of single women who yearn for something so old-fashioned as men.

If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'