During the fifties, for example, the American character appeared with some consistency that became a model of manhood adopted by m...any men: the Fifties male. He got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children and admired discipline. Reagan is a sort of mummified version of this dogged type. This sort of man didn't see women's souls well, but he appreciated their bodies; and his view of culture and America's part in it was boyish and optimistic. Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity. Unless he has an enemy, he isn't sure that he is alive. The Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.... During the sixties, another sort of man appeared. The waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was. If manhood meant Vietnam, did they want any part of it? Meanwhile, the feminist movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become conscious of concerns and sufferings that the Fifties male labored to avoid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When children dress like adults they are more likely to behave as adults do, to imitate adult actions. It is hard to walk like an ...adult male wearing corduroy knickers that make an awful noise. But boys in long pants can walk like men, and little girls in tight jeans can walk like women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rearing a family is probably the most difficult job in the world. It resembles two business firms merging their respective resourc...es to make a single product. All the potential headaches of that operation are present when an adult male and an adult female join to steer a child from infancy to adulthood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The suffering of either sex--of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating o...r patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult--this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . .... I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When in the enfranchisement of the black men [women] saw another ignorant class of voters placed about their heads, and beheld the... danger of a distinctively "male" government, forever involving the nations of the earth in war and violence; and demanded for the protection of themselves and children, that woman's voice should be heard and her opinions in public affairs be expressed by the ballot, they were coolly told that the black man had earned the right to vote, that he had fought and bled and died for his country. It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth, "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have often been asked why I am so fond of playing male parts.... As a matter of fact, it is not male parts, but male brains that... I prefer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remark...ably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »