Colette Dowling said this quote

“ The psychological need to avoid independence - the wish to be saved - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down. ”

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While we avoid taking credit for success, women leap at the opportunity to take responsibility for failure. Men tend to externalize the reasons for their failure, putting it off on something or someone else. Not so women, who absorb blame as if they were born to be societys doormats. (Some women like to speak of their willingness to take blame as if it were a form of altruism. It isn't. Women take the blame because they find it scary to confront those who are actually culpable of wrongdoing.)

~ Colette Dowling

Colette Dowling Cinderella Complex Double Standards Gender Roles Male Privilege Patriarchy Psychological Trauma Societal Constructs Women

(...) psychiatrists today recognize the contortionist's act that was required of women in an age when they were expected to stifle their own healthiest impulses. (...) To be able to renounce your own achievements without feeling that you were sacrificing requires constant effort. To be lovely and unaggressive, a woman spends a lifetime keeping hostile or resentful impulses down. Even healthy self-assertion is often sacrificed since it may be mistaken by hostility. Therefore, [women] often repress their initiative, give up their aspirations, and unfortunately end up excessively dependent with a deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty about their abilities and their worth.

~ Colette Dowling

Colette Dowling Cinderella Complex Double Standards Emotional Dependency Feminism Gender Roles Insecurity Male Privilege Oppression Patriarchy Psychological Trauma Women

Women will not become free until they stop being afraid. We will not begin to experience real change in our lives, real emancipation, until we begin the process -almost a de-brainwashing- of working through the anxieties that prevent us from feeling competent and whole.

~ Colette Dowling

Colette Dowling Feminism Self Help

Once established, the young girl's dependency is systematically supported as she proceeds through childhood. For being nice - nonchallenging, nonconfronting, noncomplaining - she's rewarded with good grades, the approval of her parents and teachers, and the affection of her peers. What reason is there for her to turn deviant or nonconformist? The going is good, so she conforms. Increasingly, she patterns herself after what's expected of her.

~ Colette Dowling

Colette Dowling Cinderella Complex Feminism Gender Roles Male Privilege Patriarchy Societal Constructs