“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
“My 'temper' was a dark, wicked blotch in me, not a response to events in the outer world.”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“If he is to know 'his' children, he must have control over their reproduction, which means he musut possess their mother exclusively...it cuts back to the male need to say: 'I, too, have the power of procreation--these are my seed, my own begotten children, my proof of elemental power.' In addition, of course, the children are the future receivers of the patrimony.”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“The command of Yahweh: 'Be fruitful and multiply,' is an entirely patriarchal one; he is not invoking the Great Mother but bidding his sons beget still more sons.”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“At the onset of labor, the woman was placed in the lithotomy (supine) position, chloroformed, and turned into the completely passive body on which the obstetrician could perform as on a mannequin. The labor room became an operating theatre, and childbirth a medical drama with the physician as its hero.”
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution