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Feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could “have it all.” It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman. No husband or day care can adequately substitute for a mother’s attention. My feminist heroes are the boldly independent and childless Amelia Earhart and Katherine Hepburn, who has been outspoken in her opposition to the delusion of “having it all.”
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p. 89

 

Camille Paglia

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I think it was my grandmother who gave me my ease in being a woman. She was unquestionably feminine - small and dainty and pretty and wholly without masculine protest or feminist aggrievement. She had gone to college when this was a very unusual thing for a girl to do, she had a very firm grasp of anything she paid attention to, she had married and had a child, and she a career of her own. All this was true of my mother as well. But my mother was filled with passionate resentment about the condition of women, as perhaps my grandmother might have been had my grandfather lived and had she borne five children and had little opportunity to use her special gifts and training. As it was, the two women 1 knew best were mothers and had professional training. So I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind— which was also his mother's — I learned that the mind is not sex - typed.

 

Margaret Mead

 

I'm absolutely a feminist. The reason other feminists don't like me is that I criticize the movement, explaining that it needs a correction. Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness. PC feminism has boxed women in. The idea that feminism — that liberation from domestic prison — is going to bring happiness is just wrong. Women have advanced a great deal, but they are no happier. The happiest women I know are not those who are balancing their careers and families, like a lot of my friends are. The happiest people I know are the women — like my cousins — who have a high school education, got married immediately graduating and never went to college. They are very religious and they never question their Catholicism. They do not regard the house as a prison. … I look at my friends who are on the fast track. They are desperate, frenzied and frazzled, the most unhappy women who have ever existed. They work nights and weekends and have no lives. Some of them have children who are raised by nannies. … The entire feminist culture says that the most important woman is the woman with an attache case. I want to empower the woman who wants to say, "I'm tired of this and I want to go home." The far right is correct when it says the price of women's liberation is being paid by the children.

 

Camille Paglia

 

Now Miss Lucy, you will hear what Mother thinks about your Public Speaking. Mother said she had rather you would marry and have a pair [of] twin babies every year. She did not say how many years. Mother cannot bear to think of your Preaching or Lecturing. She thinks it is a wrong course for you to take, says if you go to Lecturing you will fix it so you can’t keep school. Mother wants you should Teach, she thinks you would do the most good that way. You will want to know [my] mind. I don’t know what to tell you. You know it will make much talk in our quarter of the World. You will do that which seems right in your own eyes. I suppose, to be honest, I like mother’s plan better than yours. You are of age to [do] that which you think is your duty. Mother says she cannot find no place where Christ ever sent Women to Preach. We shall want to hear from you as soon as you get this, you will write what you think about Mother’s plan.

 

Lucy Stone

 

He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

 

J. M. Coetzee