Women are indeed taught to be seen and not heard.

“…sometimes when we talk about “breaking the silence,” people conceptualize “the silence” as being superficial – there is talk – chatter, really – and laid over the talk there is a superficial level of silence that has to do with manners or politeness. Women are indeed taught to be seen and not heard. But I am talking about a deep silence: a silence that goes to the heart of tyranny, its nature. There is a tyranny that preordains not only who can say what but what women especially can say. There is a tyranny that determines who cannot say anything, a tyranny in which people are kept from being able to say the most important things about what life is like for them. That is the kind of tyranny I mean. The political systems that we live in are based on this deep silence. They are based on what we have not said. In particular, they are built on what women – women in every racial group, in every class, including the most privileged – have not said. The assumptions underlying our political systems are also based on what women have not said. Our ideas of democracy and equality – ideas that men have had, ideas that express what men think equality and democracy are – evolved absent the voices, the experiences, the lives, the realities of women. The principles of freedom that we hear enunciated as truisms are principles that were arrived at despite this deep silence: without our participation. We are all supposed to share and take for granted the commonplace ideas that are based on our silence. What passes as normal in life is based on this same silence. Gender itself – what men are, what women are – is based on the forced silence of women; and beliefs about community – what a community is, what a community should be – are based on this silence. Societies have been organized to maintain the silence of women – which suggests that we cannot break this deep silence without changing the ways in which societies are organized.”

(Dworkin, “Remember, Resist, Do Not Comply,” 1995, pp. 169-170, in Dworkin, 1997)