The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the complex nature of love that exists under constraint, suggesting that love does not validate the circumstances that necessitate it.
Germaine Greer uses the metaphor of a caged bird to illustrate a mother's love for her child that is born out of necessity or obligation, similar to how a bird might sing in captivity. The quote suggests that while the love is genuine, it is not ideal and does not excuse the conditions under which it arises, representing a tension between affection and the limitations imposed by circumstance.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on parenting challenges.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
Now, revealing that you're a keeper is no guarantee that this guy won't just walk away. Some men really are just sport fishing and have no intention of doing anything more than throwing back the women they bed. If this is the cae with this man, then let him walk-what do you care? He's not the guy you're looking for.
The world, in truth, is a wedding.
But, in this separation I associate you only with the good and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you have done far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.
Never Hesitate to hold out your hand; never hesitate to accept the outstretched hand of another.
The most important value I've taught my children is respect for every creed, colour or race. When we bleed, we bleed the same blood. I've always taught my kids never to look down on anyone or to not have anyone look down on them.
I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.
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