Rearing a family is probably the most difficult job in the world. It resembles two business firms merging their respective resourc...es to make a single product. All the potential headaches of that operation are present when an adult male and an adult female join to steer a child from infancy to adulthood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The suffering of either sex--of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating o...r patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult--this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even bellig...erence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . .... I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the... feminine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Maybe I couldn't make it. Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe ...I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body ra...ther than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »