Some things haven't changed that much as far as being a woman is concerned. How very often, to make yourself lovable, gentle, graceful, sweet, dependable (and dependent), etc., in other people's eyes - both men and women - you feel compelled to camouflage your professional ambitions, desires, not to mention your brain. As if all these things were exclusive, incompatible.
My clinical experience and reading convince me that the repressed is gendered in the sense that women in our culture tend to repress distinctive aspects of the self which are bound up with autonomy and aggression. One dimension of what is repressed is women's non-object related ambition and interest in exerting various sorts of mastery: interpersonal, intellectual, or creative. Both men's and women's sense of gender and the self partially grow out of and are dependent upon the repression of women's desire and ambition. Both genders maintain an active interest in forestalling or prohibiting the return of this repressed material.
Jane Flax, "Re-membering the Selves: Is the Repressed Gendered?" Michigan Quarterly Review (1987): 92.
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