Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What makes a man manly or a woman womanly-or vice versa? Many homosexuals are living proof that physical organs alone are not decisive. Freud and his followers argued that the sexual personality was often determined by seemingly trivial incidents in childhood. When the so-called "sexual hormones" (testosterone in men, estradiol in women) were discovered, many physicians decided that hormones must be the agents which determine sexual behavior. In recent years, tens of thousands of effeminate males and masculine females have been given shots of one or the other...
...than she actually needs it is because of insecurity-worry about her health, her child's health, her husband's fidelity, or fear that pregnancy will leave her less attractive. At such times, "a big chocolate fudge sundae carries her back to the carefree days of her childhood...
...vast Victorian lifetime is like the story of a civilization in Toynbee: the whole age is embodied in it. Born in 1809, he was descended from the yeomanry and the county families that together bred England's great middle class. The north-country parsonage of his childhood tumbled with ten brothers & sisters; at seven he had to be able to chirp from memory the four books of Horace's Odes...
Strindberg was the son of a shipping agent and a servant girl; his dominant childhood memories were the sound of nearby church bells and a gnawing fear of practically everything. He violently loved his mother, described his feelings as "incest of the soul." Yet, as with almost all the women in his life, his love for her was tinged with jealousy and hate. When she died and his father married the family housekeeper, he cast himself in the role of Hamlet...
...every human quality can become a vice instead of a virtue. So that, for example, humor becomes cynicism, endurance becomes exhaustion, arrogance blindness and the Patriot a Blimp. In other words Ireland is learning, as Americans say, the hard way . . . Ireland has clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe, resisting Change, Alteration, Reconstruction to the very last...