A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of education for women, suggesting that societal limitations hinder their intellectual development.
Germaine Greer's quote points to the idea that women have untapped potential that has historically been suppressed through a lack of encouragement and formal education. She argues that when women are not provided with the tools and methods to think critically, they may remain in a state of ignorance, which must be challenged. Greer advocates for women to take charge of their learning and use their intellect proactively, highlighting that the current educational systems may favor traditional forms of knowledge over innovative thinking.
In practice
In a speech about women's rights and education, this quote can be used to highlight the need for empowering women through learning.
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.
The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.
When girls are educated and free to pursue their passions, they contribute more to a thriving society. When women have a voice, they raise it to demand a life that is greater than what they've been told they have a right to expect. And these demands change the future for everyone.
The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the character.
I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.
Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.
Even though I only have a high-school degree, I'm a professional student.
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