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Lillian B. Rubin Biography

Lillian Breslow Rubin (January 13, 1924- June 17, 2014) was an American writer, professor, psychotherapist and sociologist. She was a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College and also worked as a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley. Rubin was a feminist.

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Lillian B. Rubin Quotes

Children crawl before they walk, walk before they run--each generally a precondition for the other. And with each step they take toward more independence, more mastery of the environment, their mothers take a step away--each a small separation, a small distancing.

Children, Distancing, Mother, Mothers, Running, Separation

Intimacy. We hunger for it, but we also fear it.

Fear, Hunger, Intimacy

Contrary to all we hear about women and their empty-nest problem, it may be fathers more often than mothers who are pained by thechildren's imminent or actual departure--fathers who want to hold back the clock, to keep the children in the home for just a little longer. Repeatedly women compare their own relief to their husband's distress

Children, Fathers, Husband, Mother, Problem, Relief

In our minds lives the madonna image--the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model--the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers.

Against, Asks, Children, Feet, Mother, Nothing

Interesting, isn't it, that even though more than two and a half decades have passed since the sexual revolution brought women a new measure of sexual freedom, there's still no word in the language that doesn't reek with pejorative connotation to describe a woman who has sex freely. Since language frames thought and sets its limits, this is not a trivial matter. For without a word that describes without condemning, it's hard to think about it neutrally as well. When we say the words 'promiscuous woman,' therefore, it's a statement about her character, not just her sexual behavior.

Character, Measure, Promiscuous, Sex, Think, Women

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.

Children, Jobs, Marker, Mate, Pain, Tasks

The depth of a friendship - how much it means to us. . . depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares and validates.

Depends, Depth, Friendship, Mean, Part, Shares

Sexual freedom is about choice. It's the freedom to say no as well as yes.

Choice, Choices, Say, Sex, Sexual, Wells

Whatever else we may say about sex, it is at least as much a social and psychological phenomenon as it is a biological one.

Biological, May, Phenomenon, Psychological, Say, Sex

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?

Children, Difficult, Freud, Make, Often Is, Self

For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.

Insulting, Lives, Poverty, Rich, Semblance

By identifying with the powerful, the disempowered achieve a measure of safety, at least for a moment. By doing the bidding of those in power, they become a necessary part of the system, useful so long as they serve to contain the stirrings and strivings of the oppressed. By making the rules and values of their oppressor their own, they separate themselves from the rest of their group and, temporarily at least, assuage the pain of their stigmatized status.

Long, Pain, Part, Powerful, Stirrings, Values

Women find ways to give sense and meaning to daily life--ways to be useful in the community, to keep mind active and soul growingeven while they change diapers and cook vegetables.

Community, Give, Giving, Growingeven, Vegetables, Ways

Society and personality live in a continuing reciprocal relation with each other. The search for personal change without efforts to change the institutions within which we live and grow will, therefore, be met with only limited reward.

Change, Effort, Grow, Met, Personality

Sometimes we choose a friend who mirrors our fantasies, dreams of a self we wish we could be.

Dream, Dreams, Fantasies, Friends, Mirrors, Wish

For sex to be wholly satisfying, we must have at least as much concern for a partner as for self - a requirement that doesn't live comfortably alongside the exhortation to 'do your own thing. ' In the end, we are left with an extraordinarily heightened set of expectations about the possibilities in human relationships that lives side by side with disillusion that, for many, borders on despair.

Despair, Exhortation, Expectations, Human, Self, Sex

From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.

Has Beens, Obsessed, Sex, Time, Violate

In fact, the family as an institution is both oppressive and protective and, depending on the issue, is experienced sometimes one way, sometimes the other - often in some mix of the two - by most people who live in families.

Families, Family, Institution, Issues, People, Two