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Quote by Hiroko Oyamada

“It's just, families are strange things, aren't they? You have this couple: one man, one woman. A male and a female, if you will. They mate, and why? To leave children behind. And what are the children supposed to do? Turn around and do the whole thing over again? Well, what do you do when what you've got isn't worth carrying on? The things people do for family.”

Quote by Hiroko Oyamada

Work

The Hole

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Author

Hiroko Oyamada

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“In some ways it is the ultimate alienation in our society that the ability to give birth has been transformed into a liability. The reason is not simply that, since women bear children, they are more limited in their movements and activities. As the foregoing discussion indicates, this was not a handicap even under the limited technology of hunting-gathering life; it certainly has no relevance today. ... The subjugation of the female sex was based on the transformation of their socially necessary labor into a private service through the separation of the family from the clan. ... The separation of the family from the clan and the institution of monogamous marriage were the social expressions of developing private property; so-called monogamy afforded the means through which property could be individually inherited.”

“Our very word ‘family’ shares a root with the Latin famulus, meaning ‘house slave’, via familia which originally referred to everyone under the domestic authority of a single paterfamilias or male head of household. Domus, the Latin word for ‘household’, in turn gives us not only ‘domestic’ and ‘domesticated’ but dominium, which was the technical term for the emperor’s sovereignty as well as a citizen’s power over private property. Through that we arrive at (literally, ‘familiar’) notions of what it means to be ‘dominant’, to possess ‘dominion’ and to ‘dominate’.”