Lillian B. Rubin

Contrary to all we hear about women and their empty-nest problem, it may be fathers more often than mothers who are pained…

— Lillian B. Rubin

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

— Lillian B. Rubin

The ideal visions of one age eventually are seen as its excesses by the next.

— Lillian B. Rubin

Society and personality live in a continuing reciprocal relation with each other. The search for personal change without efforts to change the…

— Lillian B. Rubin

Women find ways to give sense and meaning to daily life--ways to be useful in the community, to keep mind active and…

— Lillian B. Rubin

The depth of a friendship - how much it means to us ... depends, at least in part, upon how many parts…

— Lillian B. Rubin

The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see aroundthem so many…

— Lillian B. Rubin

We are a society that values a man for what he does in the world, a woman for how she looks.

— Lillian B. Rubin

How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell…

— Lillian B. Rubin

For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is…

— Lillian B. Rubin

For sex to be wholly satisfying, we must have at least as much concern for a partner as for self - a…

— Lillian B. Rubin

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming…

— Lillian B. Rubin

By identifying with the powerful, the disempowered achieve a measure of safety, at least for a moment. By doing the bidding of…

— Lillian B. Rubin

Interesting, isn't it, that even though more than two and a half decades have passed since the sexual revolution brought women a…

— Lillian B. Rubin

That myth--that image of the madonna-mother--has disabled us from knowing that, just as men are more than fathers, women are morethan mothers.…

— Lillian B. Rubin

No revolution creates a wholly new universe. Rather, it reflects the history and culture that spawned it.

— Lillian B. Rubin

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

— Lillian B. Rubin

From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear…

— Lillian B. Rubin

In fact, the family as an institution is both oppressive and protective and, depending on the issue, is experienced sometimes one way,…

— Lillian B. Rubin

Children crawl before they walk, walk before they run--each generally a precondition for the other. And with each step they take toward…

— Lillian B. Rubin

The structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.

— Lillian B. Rubin

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

— Lillian B. Rubin

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

— Lillian B. Rubin

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

— Lillian B. Rubin

In our minds lives the madonna image--the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another…

— Lillian B. Rubin