Patriarchal Norms Quotes

I'm tired of saying, "How wonderful you are!" to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.

Every father was his own man. He did what he wanted. If your mother went shopping, your father never went with her.

Good women are obedient. If they are not, send them to separate beds … and beat them.

My husband didn't want me to wear any black hairstyles. Nicole Kidman was his standard of beauty.

Too often, when Muslim women speak out, some in our 'community' accuse us of 'making our men look bad' and of giving ammunition to right-wing Islamophobes.

Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. When it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child - an ostracism and obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father does not share.

Absolutely father knows best, always do what your fathers say, and if you can't find one then just ask me, I am a father and I know best.

Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.

Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me.

I get angry about the way women are forced and bullied into what the male ideal is.

Women’s power will be better tolerated when it’s wielded in service of patriarchal interests.

To me all men are boy-men. I don't know any man that's actually mature.

In our world marriage was the best option for any woman. No girl ever chose to have a career unless she couldn't get a man. It was very much a tertiary life.

By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces Immanuel Kant's nineteenth-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.

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

She thought about how marvelous is would be to have a wife keeping the house in order, the meals on the table. At the same time it seemed ridiculously unfair that she could never have a wife. In fact, if she married, she would be expected to be the wife.

For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.

Only when a woman decides not to have children, can a woman live like a man. That's what I've done.

People are uncomfortable with sexuality that’s not for male consumption.

But by no manner of means are women to be allotted to uncover and exhibit any part of their person, lest both fall,-the men by being excited to look, they by drawing on themselves the eyes of the men.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

To exist as an advertisement of her husband's income, or her father's generosity, has become a second nature to many a woman who must have undergone, one would say, some long and subtle process of degradation before she sunk [sic] so low, or grovelled so serenely.

Among the emasculation men fear most is subordination to women.

My grandma actually put me in girdles when I was around nine or ten because I had hips even then, and she didn't want boys to be attracted to me. Having hips meant you were a full-grown woman, and I was too young for that.

For all of higher civilization's recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.