To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Interpretation
Raising children is more important than any technical or powerful profession.
Marilyn French emphasizes the immense value of nurturing children regardless of the challenges faced, suggesting that the act of parenting holds greater significance than any professional endeavor, particularly those that are technologically advanced or militaristic. This quote highlights the essential and transformative role of caregivers in shaping future generations, underlining their impact on society as a whole.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of family values.
S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.
Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.
In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.
Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor - age, dress, or color - distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.
When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?
'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.
My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero.
Once you're a mom, you've been split into two people. It's like Peter Pan and his shadow.
I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
I still vividly remember the moment I let go of an embrace with my daughter on her college campus - that, in her opinion, probably lasted far too long. I left the most precious thing in my life in the care of an institution, and that's a very hard thing to do.
Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father.
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