... 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.
ATTRIBUTION:
Alice S. Rossi (b. 1922), U.S. sociologist. Dissent, p. 535 (November-December 1970).
