In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events--marriage, children..., the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman's life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One hand stiff--heaviness of forties & menopause reduced by one heart stroke, lame now--wrinkles--a scar on... her head, the lobotomy--ruin, the hand dipping downwards to death--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We found ourselves always torn between the mothers in our heads and the women we needed to become simply to stay alive.With one fo...ot in the past and another in the future, we hobbled through first love, motherhood, marriage, divorce, careers, menopause, widowhood--never knowing what or who we were supposed to be, staking out new emotional territory at every turn--like pioneers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are bla...meless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant...; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics ...to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The misery of the middle-aged woman is a grey and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resent...ment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high- heeled s...hoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why not walk in the aura of magic that gives to the small things of life their uniqueness and importance? Why not befriend a toad ...today?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »