“The typical active feminist is neither a fiery demonstrator nor a brilliant public speaker: like most successful social activists, she makes innumerable telephone calls, writes innumerable memos, waits for hours in the antechambers of those in power, attends committee meetings night after night, and is always behind with her correspondence.”
Source: Feminism in the Mid-1970s: The Non-establishment, the Establishment & the Future
“One of the purposes of ‘culture’, after all, is to make seem ‘natural’ claims that are not naturally at all; the flimsier the argument, the more noisily it is supported.”
“[...] for, I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.”
“If women can birth the world,
Women can run the world.”
Source: Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo
“I would feel [my son's] wants at such a moment fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as myself. My anger would rise”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“My husband spoke eagerly of the children we would have; my parents-in-law awaited the birth of their grandchild. I had no idea of what I wanted, what I could or could not choose. I only knew that to have a child was to assume adult womanhood to the full, to prove myself, to be 'like other women.”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant, I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty.”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“The body has been made so problematic for women that is has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“Miller identifies the 'hidden cruelty' in child-rearing as the repetition of 'poisonous pedagogy' inflicted by the parents of the generation before and as providing the soil in which obedience to authoritarianism and fascism take root”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal 'instinct' rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self. Motherhood is 'sacred' so long as its offspring are 'legitimate' -- that is, as long as the child bears the name of a father who legally controls the mothe.r”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution