[Women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
karl marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
. . . it is not simply that there is a disjunction between what people say they do and what they in fact do. The more cogent point is that the meaning people attach to action. . . is an integral component of that action and cannot be divorced from it in our analysis.
JANE COLLIER, MICHELLE 2. ROSALDO, AND SYLVIA YANAGISAKO,
"Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views,"
in Rethinking the Family