Alice S. Rossi Quotations

Nothing is so threatening to conventional values as a man who does not want to work or does not want to work at a challenging job,and most people are disturbed if a man in a well- paying job indicates ambivalence or dislike toward it.

... social roles vary in the extent to which it is culturally permissible to express ambivalence or negative feelings toward them.Ambivalence can be admitted most readily toward those roles that are optional, least where they are considered primary. Thus men repress negative feelings toward work and feel freer to express negative feelings toward leisure, sex and marriage, while women are free to express negative feelings toward work but tend to repress them toward family roles.

Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and political rights have limited meaning for women. If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives ...

Demands for equality for women are threats to men's self-esteem and sense of sexual turf.

Equal pay for equal work continues to be seen as applying to equal pay for men and women in the same occupation, while the larger point of continuing relevance in our day is that some occupations have depressed wages because women are the chief employee. The former is a pattern of sex discrimination, the latter of institutionalized sexism.

The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took.

... a supportive husband is an absolute requirement for professional women.... He is something she looks for, and when she finds him, she marries him.

As far as male and female are concerned, difference is a biological fact, whereas equality is a political, ethical and social concept. No rule of nature or of social organization says that the sexes have to be the same or do the same things in order to be social, political and economic equals.