My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot... of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Colonel "Bat" Guano: Okay, I'm going to get your money for you. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that ph...one, you know what's going to happen to you? Group Captain Lionel Mandrake: What? Colonel "Bat" Guano: You're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The primary imperative for women who intend to assume a meaningful and decisive role in today's social change is to begin to perce...ive themselves as having an identity and personal integrity that has as strong a claim for being preserved intact as that of any other individual or group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing in medieval dress distinguished the child from the adult. In the seventeenth century, however, the child, or at least the ...child of quality, whether noble or middle-class, ceased to be dressed like the grown-up. This is the essential point: henceforth he had an outfit reserved for his age group, which set him apart from the adults. These can be seen from the first glance at any of the numerous child portraits painted at the beginning of the seventeenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anestheti...c: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mental health data from the 1950's on middle-aged women showed them to be a particularly distressed group, vulnerable to depressio...n and feelings of uselessness. This isn't surprising. If society tells you that your main role is to be attractive to men and you are getting crow's feet, and to be a mother to children and yours are leaving home, no wonder you are distressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[University students] hated the hypocrisy of adult society, the rigidity of its political institutions, the impersonality of its b...ureaucracies. They sought to create a society that places human values before materialistic ones, that has a little less head and a little more heart, that is dominated by self-interest and loves its neighbor more. And they were persuaded that group protest of a militant nature would advance those goals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a ...direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. A cult differs from a formal religion in many significant ways. It is in the nature of a cult to claim some esoteric knowledge which has been submerged (or repressed by orthodoxy) for a long time but has now suddenly been illuminated. There is often some heterodox figure, mocked or scorned by the orthodox, who presents these new teachings. There are communal rites which often permit or spur an individual to act out impulses that had hitherto been repressed. In the cult, one feels as though one were exploring novel or hitherto taboo modes of conduct. What defines a cult, therefore, is its implicit emphasis on magic rather than theology, on the personal tie to a guru or to the group, rather than to an institution or a creed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »