We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the persistent belief that women should primarily occupy domestic roles.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow's quote addresses the outdated perspective that women are inherently suited for, and desire to be confined to, domestic life. This belief underestimates women's aspirations and contributions beyond the home, emphasizing the need for societal change to recognize and support women's roles in all spheres of life.
In practice
During a women's empowerment event, this quote can be used to challenge traditional gender roles.
The only difference between men and women in science is that the women have the babies. This makes it more difficult for women in science but should not be seen as a barrier, for it is merely another challenge to be overcome.
We bequeath to you, the next generation, our knowledge but also our problems. While we still live, let us join hands, hearts and minds to work together for their solution so that your world will be better than ours and the world of your children even better.
The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination.
I feel it is now my duty to speak to young women, to encourage them to have careers and, particularly, careers in science.
I wasn't handed college or graduate school or anything else on a silver platter. I had to work very hard, but I did it because I wanted to. That's the real key to happiness. I think unhappy people are those who feel that circumstances are forcing them into a pattern. Happy people are not slaves to the system.
They told me that, as a woman, I'd never get into graduate school in physics, so they got me a job as a secretary at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and promised that, if I were a good girl, I would take courses there.
Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.
Gender-dominated environments are not good... particularly in the financial sector where there are too few women. In gender-dominated environments, men have a tendency to... show how hairy chested they are, compared with the man who's sitting next to them. I honestly think that there should never be too much testosterone in one room.
I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I'm jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they're trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence.
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
All too often, girls are ignored because their challenges aren't thought to be as serious as those faced by boys.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.