Jean Baker Miller famous quotes

03-28-2025

Conflict begins at the moment of birth.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Birth #Conflict #Moments
Conflict is inevitable, the source of all growth, and an absolute necessity if one is to be alive.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Growth #Alive #Conflict
as a society emphasizes and values some aspects of the total range of human potentials more than others, the valued aspects are associated closely with, and limited to, the dominant group's domain.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Groups #Discrimination #Range
psychological growth is the great gift and inexorable fact of human life.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Psychology #Growth #Facts
Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Men #Community #Identity
In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Development #Able #Individual
The question is still asked of women: 'How do you propose to answer the need for child care?' That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: 'If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?'.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Children #Community #Doe
Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others--first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Mother #Children #Women
They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women[they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not "need" the power to limit the development of others.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Women #Power #Effectiveness
Women will not advance except by joining together in cooperative action.... Unlike other groups, women do not need to set affiliation and strength in opposition one against the other. We can readily integrate the two, search for more and better ways to use affiliation to enhance strength--and strength to enhance affiliation.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Strength #Two #Together
Most so-called women's work is not recognized as real activity. One reason for this attitude may be that such work is usually associated with helping others' development, rather than with self-enhancement or self-employment.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Attitude #Real #Helping Others
As other perceptions arise...the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Perception #Vision #Possibility
The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.
-- Jean Baker Miller

#Girl #Women #Boys

You may also like:

Albert Bandura
Psychologist
Carol Gilligan
Psychologist
Catharine MacKinnon
Lawyer
Donald Woods Winnicott
Psychoanalyst
Erik Erikson
Psychologist
George H. Mead
Philosopher
Harriet Lerner
Poet
Jean Kilbourne
Author
Jean Piaget
Psychologist
Judith Butler
Philosopher
Judith Lewis Herman
Author
Karen Horney
Psychoanalyst
Luce Irigaray
Philosopher
Nancy Chodorow
Sociologist
Nel Noddings
Philosopher
Patricia Hill Collins
Professor
Peggy McIntosh
Activist
Samuel Shem
Doctor
Shulamith Firestone
Author
Sigmund Freud
Neurologist