A requirement of femininity is that a woman devote her life to love--to mother love, to romantic love, to religious love, to amorp...hous, undifferentiated caring. The territory of the heart is admittedly a province that is open to all, but women alone are expected to make an obsessional career of its exploration, to find whatever adventure, power, fulfillment or tragedy life has to offer within its bounds. There is no question that a woman is apt to feel more feminine, more confident of her interior gender makeup, when she is reliably within some stage of love--even the girlish crush or the stage of unrequited love or a broken heart. Men have suffered for love, and men have accomplished great feats in the name of love, but what man has ever felt at the top of his masculine form when he is lovesick or suffering from heartache?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children are intensely invested in getting their way. They will devote more emotional and intellectual energy to winning arguments... than parents ever will, and are almost always better rested.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devo...te more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether t...hey are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on, to become a journalist, because that's what I want!... I can't imagine that I woul...d have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy ... and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten. I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man ... begins and also largely ends with the ef...fect of one all-embracing force. That is organization--the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the ...advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The] attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that... suffers for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time to both housework and... child care. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a "leisure gap" between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a "second shift" at home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »