“Within the institution of patriarchal marriage, the following is true: A woman may be challenged with "unfitness" as a mother if she works outside the home and is thereby able to support her children (a threat to the economic basis of father-right). A woman who wishes to divorce her husband to marry another man is tolerated more readily than a woman who leaves a marriage in order to be separate and self-sufficient, or because she finds marriage itself an oppresive institution. (...) Motherhood is identified with nurture, fatherhood with the moment of conception and with economic power. (...) "Father -right" is seen as one specific form of the rights men are presumed to enjoy simply because of their gender: the "right to the priority of male over female needs, to sexual and emotional services from women (...) The husband's "rights" over his wife are, in social terms, all inclusive; they can be whatever the man defines them to be at any given moment: all inclusive "rights" of men to the bodies, emotions, and services of women.”
Quote by Adrienne Rich
Work
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978
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