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Rosalyn Sussman Yalow's quote addresses the outdated perspective that women are inherently suited for, and desire to be confined to, domestic life.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.
We know in our society, women are valued for their sexual desirability and not necessarily for what they have to say.
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'
Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.
All too often, girls are ignored because their challenges aren't thought to be as serious as those faced by boys.
There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.
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