Contrary to all we hear about women and their empty-nest problem, it may be fathers more often than mothers who are pained by thechildren's imminent or actual departure--fathers who want to hold back the clock, to keep the children in the home for just a little longer. Repeatedly women compare their own relief to their husband's distress
Lillian B. RubinThe structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.
Lillian B. RubinHow then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?
Lillian B. RubinFrom our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.
Lillian B. Rubin